Hansard

I thank the committee for inviting me here. This is my second time at a committee meeting, but the first time was during the Covid pandemic. Meeting online was a strange experience, so it is good to be here in person. I am the chief executive of the Federation of Scottish Theatre, or FST, as we are known. We are the membership and development body for professional dance, theatre and opera in Scotland. We have recently refreshed our vision in order to better reflect the work of the work of our members. Our vision is of a thriving performing arts sector that is integral to a vibrant, diverse and equitable Scotland. Our mission in helping to achieve that is to advocate for, connect across and lead necessary change within the performing arts in Scotland. We represent more than 200 members in the majority of local authority areas across Scotland, based on all sorts of different scales and working in all sorts of different settings. Some of our members are here giving evidence today. Our members include professional organisations and individuals from national companies, festivals, individual artists creating their own work and those independent producers who support them. We count as members all of Scotland’s professional producing companies and those who provide artist support and work in different ways to create, develop and produce live performance for audiences across Scotland, in the UK and overseas. As I said earlier, thank you for inviting me following the evidence of my colleague Liam Sinclair from Dundee Rep and Scottish Dance Theatre, who was here in September when he was our co-chair, and following our written submission to that inquiry. We are in pretty constant dialogue with our members. At our last members’ meeting, we considered the wider economic landscape for the performing arts and tried to predict the direction in which the budget might go. This week, in another session with our members, we gathered a bit more information to add to the knowledge that we currently have. I will not cover the richness of those discussions verbally today, but I will follow up with a written submission, because there was so much detail that deserves to be shared. To echo what other speakers have said already, our members acknowledge and welcome the £100 million commitment. Given the mood music, it was a surprising announcement and it brought some long-overdue hope to a particularly stark and challenging situation. Everyone acknowledges the hard work that must have been done on negotiating and achieving any increase in budget, given the budgetary pressure across the board. It feels like an excellent start, and we hope that there will be further recognition of the value of and investment in culture in Scotland. Everything points towards a real understanding of the value and benefits of culture at the heart of a progressive and fair Scotland, with sustainability being key. However, as has been said already, how we get there is still a bit grey. At the risk of introducing another phrase that will soon get worn out, the devil is in the detail. That is something that has come up time and again in our conversations, and we see it when reading the analysis from the Scottish Parliament information centre, colleagues such as Culture Counts and others. Our members, the majority of whom are included in the Creative Scotland and other culture budget, are anxious to know exactly what the budget announcement will mean for them in real terms. Having said that, there is a huge appetite for collaboration, and our members have contributed and will continue to contribute in whatever way they can to support a shared vision and actions towards all of that. Your other questions were about improving confidence and responding to challenges. I apologise for jumping to challenges quite so quickly. I guess there is a real concern that we will not see enough new funding in time for it to make the impact that is needed. I do not think that anyone will be surprised to hear that. Again, I do not need to repeat in detail the evidence from the earlier session and what we have been saying during the past three years about the deep and damaging challenges that the sector is facing. When I read our previous submission, the phrase that jumped out was “There is no space closer to the edge to move to.” One of the things that has definitely always been talked about, but has come very much to the fore now, is opportunities for self-employed and freelance artists and practitioners and how they are shrinking drastically and so quickly. People are really struggling to survive. I want to say something about poverty here but I am not sure how well I will express it. It might be a very naive thing for me to say, but I think that it is important not to think about culture as one issue over here and poverty and need as a separate issue over there. The people who work in our industry are experiencing the same economic and social challenges as everyone else. We are not talking about a few less shows here and there, we are talking about the decimation of a workforce in an industry that is at risk, and those who are around this table all understand that. Daily I hear from members and others about another failed funding bid due to extreme competition. That could be the last failed bid that a company can withstand, because it is made up of one or two people working tirelessly, often to deliver highly participative activity in vulnerable communities, when they themselves are in a precarious position. 09:15 On a more positive note, the last conversation that we had with members focused a lot on ambition and the cycle of opportunity. There are examples throughout the submissions that you have received for this meeting—from the Edinburgh Festival Fringe Society, the National Galleries of Scotland and others—of how it is a missed opportunity to limit ambition when it could be really transformative. More work being produced at different scales in Scotland would increase employment and improve skills development. It would train and retrain our employed and freelance workforce, lead to higher wages and fairer work and, crucially, secure the ability to stay relevant on the international stage. I have lots more notes, but I will finish there. We can come back on other opportunities in relation to your question about the culture strategy refresh and those kinds of things.