Hansard

I apologise for being slightly late. Thank you for having V&A Dundee here this morning. As people have probably seen, V&A Dundee’s budget settlement is positive. Rather than go over what the organisation does, which most of you will be familiar with—we operate as Scotland’s design museum from Dundee, so we are outwith the central belt—I will reflect on what Lori Anderson and Anne Lyden have just said, and all I can do is agree with them. We all recognise that we are all connected, and we are all experiencing very similar things, albeit in our own contexts. For V&A Dundee, part of the reason why we look different in the report is that, in effect, we are a bit like a start-up. We have had five years of operation, and it has probably taken us those five years to work out what our public subsidy model will be. We make a lot of money from that, which is an important point that many people have made previously. We need to think through what public subsidy is. It is probably the only support that we all get that enables us to cover core activities, but it should also be a platform to enable us to do the sort of activities that Anne Lyden mentioned. At V&A Dundee, within five years we have begun to evidence quite comfortably the significant catalytic impact that we have across economic, social and cultural factors. Therefore, the increase in budget for V&A Dundee gets us into the region of something that starts to demonstrate what our organisation warrants, if that makes sense. We have already gone through three years of really intense working. An intense revision of our programme model significantly reduced what we do on major shows, and at the same time we tried to make more money and to make more free offers. However, the evidence that we demonstrated in our fifth birthday report, which some colleagues will be familiar with, starts to establish what an organisation, when it is funded to a level that gives it a fighting chance, is able to achieve. We are outwith the central belt—it is really important for us to be here giving a voice to organisations that are outwith Glasgow and Edinburgh. I know that I am surrounded by national organisations, but the increase in budget that we have had enables us to look ahead with more positivity than, if I am honest, we have had in the past few years, during which we have had year on year of mitigating measures. Those range from reducing our output to not having any confidence to plan beyond a year ahead. As all organisations will recognise, for us to achieve a show of the scale, quality, impact and local and international relevance of the show “Tartan”, we need four or five years. Overall, there are three things that I think we all want. We want enactment of some of the promises that have been made and a coming together around the powerful narrative of what culture can achieve. As Anne Lyden said, that is for everybody who lives in Scotland, but it is also for everybody who visits. We want a reduction in the gap—we all want to be part of working out how we will do that—and we want to work with Government ministers and officials to look at what can be achieved on multiyear funding, as well as enactment of an increase in the budget. As for ideas for innovation, as a young organisation we have sometimes had no choice but to be extremely entrepreneurial. As commonly happens with new capital programmes, we started with a funding model that was not enough to cover our running costs. Good things have sometimes come from that. We have had to be incredibly entrepreneurial in setting up initiatives such as city-wide cultural recovery funds during Covid, and in establishing long-term relationships with organisations such as The Dalmore. However, we also all know that sometimes the Government then works in a way that creates an impact on that, when we think that that is what we should be doing. That point has previously been rehearsed in the Parliament’s committee rooms and elsewhere. To enable us to be in spaces where our business models can be innovative and entrepreneurial, to build fundamental connections and to spark ideas, we must remember that cultural leaders and chief executives run organisations that are complex beings. We are not just cultural voices and delivering seven-days-a-week operations; we also run catering, retail and event businesses, and more. We need the intellectual space and the energy to produce more ideas. The more ideas we all create, the better is the chance that some will be genuinely transformative. At the moment, none of us has enough time to come together beyond our own organisations, because of the strain that everybody has been working under. My main point is that we are really thankful for the opportunity to work with the Scottish Government over the past few years towards getting us on a much firmer footing than we have ever been on. That work has come at a time that will enable us to look to the longer term with more positivity than we have had. However, like everybody else, we are still dealing with 40 per cent cost increases. For our fifth birthday, our approach was to supercharge the year. We deployed reserves to cover operational costs, and we considered other ways of bringing in money. That meant that we took quite a lot of risks to make V&A Dundee really work in, of and for Dundee, but also for Scotland and, of course, for the nation that Scotland wants to be within the wider European context and internationally. However, to achieve the aims that our organisation achieved last year also takes public subsidy. We are now closer to those aims with the extra £800,000 that we received. We really welcome that, because it gives us a fighting chance of being able to complete our first decade with the same level of economic, social, civic and cultural impacts and to contribute powerfully to the cultural growth of this country. Everyone needs such a fighting chance, though. At the moment we are running businesses and organisations that have been cut to the bone. We just need space to demonstrate what the cultural leadership and workforce of this country are extraordinarily capable of doing, which is to innovate as well as to protect what we already have. That is the balance that we must constantly strike when money is so tight. I am aware that I say this on behalf of a relatively new organisation, but we all want to pursue the new. However, we must also protect what 70-plus years of public investment have created. We must also think deeply about the topography of Scotland. I do not mean that in the sense of asking whether more resource needs to go elsewhere; we need to think of it being “as well as”. For Dundee to thrive, it needs Glasgow and Edinburgh to thrive. I hope that for them to thrive they need Inverness and the islands to thrive. It is not just about the cultural ecology; it is about the geographic, social and economic situation, too. There is so much for us to welcome here. As Anne Lyden and Lori Anderson did, I recognise that people are coming from a very difficult place, having experienced years and years of flat funding and soaring costs that are beyond anything that any of us had imagined. We are in a city of 150,000 people, but we will have 340,000 people through our doors this year. That is the story of what V&A Dundee can achieve, but it could also be the story of what the sector can achieve when it is given a fighting chance.