IF YOU FEEL the urge to start a fight in an empty room, there are worse topics than funding the arts in Scotland. It has a history of many models; some discarded, some broken, others subject to periodic re-invention. A current example of the latter is something called Screen Scotland, an internal division of Creative Scotland, which was recently in receipt of a handsome and very welcome extra cash injection of ten million pounds.
When Creative Scotland was initially set up it consisted of a merger of the Scottish Arts Council and Scottish Screen, the film industries funding body. The latter always felt more subsumed than merged, and the screen community has never ceased to bemoan its lost autonomy. Given that the three newest members of the Creative Scotland board are all people with a screen hinterland, nobody is betting against a de-merger with a separate board.
But probably more significant than the lack of a dedicated, fully autonomous screen body has been the protracted effort to acquire a properly resourced studio; the subject of inter-agency wrangling these many years with various prospects gaining initial enthusiasm only to fail for a variety of logistical and planning reasons.
But then, just before Christmas 2018, Screen Scotland announced it was looking for tenders for the Forth Ports-owned Pelamis building in Leith, suggesting that Creative Scotland now sees long term leasing as the most promising solution to inward investment opportunities. The lengthy process was not helped by the fact that Creative Scotland and Scottish Enterprise (along with the Government) were jointly charged with the search. There has been long-standing tension between these organisations as to where the creative industries budgets and the overall responsibility should lie.
But in some senses, partially underwriting screen prospects is a comparatively simple process, given the dedicated and expanding pot and bidders all coming from the same sector. Funding all the other branches of arts and the creative industries has much more potential for internecine squabbling. The very phrase ‘creative industries’ has long stuck in the collective gullets of many arts practitioners who baulk at the thought of commercial operators getting their fingers in the funding cookie jar. It doesn’t help that ‘the arts, screen and creative industries’ is an apparently immutable mantra which is emblazoned through all Creative Scotland’s myriad strategic documents like seaside rock.
Yet industries like gaming and animation have been growing in reputation and job creation with tens of thousands of employees and they make a handsome contribution to the national economy. Graduates and others who go into these industries are entitled to suppose their design skills are just as artistic as anyone else’s. They also have a high preponderance of solo or small staff operations in need of seed corn support. What is arguably more contentious is using the funding round to give money to those agencies and organisations who support creative endeavour rather than solely to practitioners.
However, the more fundamental fault lines lie elsewhere. When the consultations for the latest Scottish Government cultural strategy took place in nine locations across Scotland, one of the recurring themes was what people in more rural areas felt was an enduring bias towards central Scotland projects. And there’s a certain inevitability about that given the sheer weight of cultural organisations and enterprises that are located in the larger urban conurbations. But there’s also a basic philosophical conundrum to unpick.
At one stage in Creative Scotland’s early life it chose to try and refresh the parts of Scotland not currently housing cultural delights by a form of strategic commissioning. The motivation might have been admirable, but it profoundly altered the remit of the organisation from one which received and considered bids for funding, to one which was actively involved in determining the nature, and, most especially, the location of the successful bids. Unsurprisingly this caused unhappiness among applicants with excellent track records and credentials whose only real fault was operating in the ‘wrong’ part of Scotland. It was one of the factors in a widespread artists’ revolt of 2012.
But there is an intrinsic problem within this which is genuinely hard to resolve. If there are two very good dance companies bidding for funds in the same area it’s difficult to justify backing both, though arguably unfair to penalise either. Yet equally there is the perennially difficult, but essential task of nurturing innovative newcomers who, by definition, haven’t built a following or a major reputation.
‘Balancing The Network’ is the name given to trying to square these circles, and it happens at Stage 4 of the funding application process when the senior leadership team and lead specialism officers discuss and debate the recommendations of the staff who have done all the initial assessments over the first three stages. (There is a persuasive argument that those organisations who have failed the criteria at earlier junctures, certainly those who fall off the wagon at stage one or two, should be advised of the outcome there and then rather than waiting for months to find out the worst.)
In essence Stage 4 is about examining the list of potentially successful bidders in the light of the perceived need for overall geographical spread, a decent range of art forms in various areas, and diversity of product and organisational size. It’s arguably almost impossible at this stage to screen out all subjectivity, however aware the senior team are of the hazards of unconscious bias. The board approval is the final and fifth hurdle and, as the 2018–21 regular funding round indicated, is capable of throwing other spanners in the works.
There are other difficulties out with the control of the people taking the funding decisions. Using lottery money to underpin the financing of regular funding seemed a perfectly defensible notion when the lottery income went up inexorably year on year. Then the UK Government, wedded as ever to deregulation, opened up the lottery market with the predictable result that the core organisation found money seeping away to a plethora of imitators, some more kosher than others.
It meant that when the 2018–21 regular funding round was being discussed in 2017, Creative Scotland was staring at a six million-pound black hole. Many scenarios were worked up internally on that basis, all of them horrible – one envisaged a 30 per cent cut in the government grant in aid. But all of them were guaranteed to decimate whole swathes of Scotland’s cultural life. In the event the Scottish Government recognised nobody was crying wolf, and the budget settlement they gave not only made good the lottery shortfall but allowed the organisation itself a three-year deal rather than its annual settlement.
Bizarrely, just when a collective sigh of relief had gone up, it emerged that a handful of the most well-respected arts providers had nevertheless been taken out of regular funding. Such was the ensuing furore that most of them were re-instated at a subsequent emergency board meeting, but not before two board members – I was one of them – resigned. The Chief Executive and the then interim Head of Arts left the organisation within months. The interim chair’s term expired one week after that meeting.
In fairness, that particular funding round was subject to some special circumstances – the application deadline had been in April, yet Creative Scotland, juggling various fiscal scenarios, only found what was in actually in the pot in mid-December following the Scottish budget. The helter-skelter process from that to a January board meeting on the 18th with a pre-arranged announcement to applicants scheduled for the 25th was not a recipe for considered judgement.
While the board felt it had neither the information nor the time to try to understand the rationale behind the high profile ‘losers’, the senior team felt it was being unfairly second guessed. The bottom line was that organisations which had sent in detailed applications by a spring deadline were still none the wiser as to the outcome nine months later. Being given funds to tide them over the gap site was welcome but, small compensation for the expanded uncertainty.
Undoubtedly there are ways in which the future burden can be eased for both staff and funding clients, some of which feature in the results of the external funding review swiftly undertaken by the new Creative Scotland chair. It’s not easy in the village that is Scotland to employ external assessors with no obvious conflict of interest, but the recruitment of some more external expertise would ease the pressure on staff for whom almost every other aspect of their work has to be put on hold for months at a time while they plough through the bids. Brexit for the arty classes.
Externals are already used to assist the alternative funding stream, the Open Project fund, to which unsuccessful Request for Offer (RFO) candidates are often directed. Some of them would have been better aiming for that kitty in the first place, but it has always been seen as a poor relation to a three-year deal offering a degree of stability. And, like all arts kitties, Project Funds are always oversubscribed. The success rate runs at under a third.
The main RFO application process, whilst simplified from the early years, still relies on a one-size-fits-all approach which clearly disadvantages those small-scale applicants with slender human resources to gather and refine all the documentation demanded. And the forms themselves still need more attention from the anti-jargon police and their colleagues in the Campaign to Eradicate Unnecessary Duplication.
It might prove enlightened self-interest to be less prescriptive about the kind of business plan deemed acceptable, and to split the applications into different financial bands with the lower levels of ask subject to less protracted scrutiny as happens with the Arts Council England. (It is worth noting in passing that bureaucratic constipation is not helped by those arts organisations who somehow come to believe that appending dozens of pages of unsolicited appendices will help their cause. It won’t. But it’s a good way to cheese off the folks wading through it all.)
There are very specific criteria and guidelines deployed by all the in-house assessors, but it’s not easy to ensure that these are interpreted in a uniform way, or that different specialism teams use interchangeable yardsticks for quality. How you screen out the human factor definitively is a conundrum few funding organisations can unravel. The recommendations are later re-examined by cross fertilised sector teams to add rigour to the process, but that can also throw up differences in the methodologies employed by individual departments. It is not an easy process, but I can attest to the efforts made to make it as fair minded as assembling such a complex national jigsaw can ever be.
The perennial complaint of cultural supplicants is that funding has become too process driven; that formulae and forms have been allowed to choke inspiration and ambition; that the application journey itself is liable to sap artistic energies to an unnecessary degree; that there are altogether too many boxes to be ticked; and there is a lack of transparency as to who makes the cut and why.
There is merit in some of these complaints even though Creative Scotland, following that major league stushie with its stakeholders, cut down its funding streams from 15 to three, and attempted to streamline the application process. But there is still a tendency, as noted, towards jargon infestation, occasioned perhaps because arts funding bodies are not immune from bureaucratisation. I never did share the outgoing CEO’s attachment to having a ten-year plan against whose aims and ambitions all organisations were expected to test their bids. The concept always seemed more than a little Stalinist (though Uncle Joe only went for five-year strategies)! And the arts, of all places, need to be responsive and flexible to changing trends and demands.
The funding rounds and subsequent inevitable debates sometimes disguise the other work which Creative Scotland does in terms of sector and organisation development and brokering collaboration. During part of my spell on the board I chaired the inter-agency strategic group which produced a creative learning plan, among other things looking at the work of the creative learning networks in all 32 Scottish local authorities.
I remain an unapologetic enthusiast for the principles of the Curriculum for Excellence with its core aim of producing rounded citizens using their inherent creativity in ways which appeal to contemporary employers: lateral thought, team working, confident decision making. As the internationally renowned educator Sir Kenneth Robinson was wont to point out, creativity isn’t a special quality bestowed on special people. ‘If you’re human it comes with the kit’. And that applies equally to teachers utilising creative ways of imparting knowledge across the curriculum.
So many other aspects of the operation are often obscured by questions over funding decisions, and staffers are often frustrated at being lambasted in public for these decisions without being able to respond in any detail given the need for commercial confidentiality. If you think there’s potential for a bun fight when the ‘winners and losers’ are announced, imagine that amplified to the power of ten if everyone was privy to each other’s bids.
Creative Scotland began life with an executive duo appointed by an interim board. For a variety of reasons, which a well-developed antipathy to litigation discourages me from detailing, the inaugural team of Andrew Dixon and deputy Venu Dhupa ran into a major standoff with Scotland’s cultural community. The successor CEO, Janet Archer, joined from the Arts Council England, one of many escapees from that body after a brutal round of cuts. She too ‘lost the dressing room’ and her deputy, the long serving Iain Munro, is now looking after the shop.
The same period has seen no fewer than three chairs. (Three and half if you count the six somewhat turbulent months Ben Thomson was interim chair following the untimely death of Richard Findlay.) Banker Sandy Crombie was the inaugural choice and served during the first firestorm surrounding the cultural community. Following Sandy, Richard and Ben, Jupiter Artland owner Robert Wilson now holds a chalice he will hope is less poisoned. His board will hope he is more consensual and less prescriptive than his immediate predecessor. Wilson’s decision to instigate an independent root and branch review of the way regular funding is decided allowed many people inside and outside to vent their concerns; time will tell how many of the resulting recommendations are followed through.
The relationships between the chair and CEO of Creative Scotland and the Cabinet Secretary for Culture are clearly crucial. There is a balance to be struck between the Government respecting the supposed arm’s length nature of their involvement with the agency, and the agency recognising that funding wheels need to be oiled by mutual co-operation. There have been occasions in recent years when the Government has leant on the organisation, perhaps because it lacked the necessary confidence in elements of its leadership. The letter of ‘guidance’ sometimes stretched the definition of that term. The departmental civil servants became overly prone to dispatching serial emails to senior staff demanding information.
It should also be noted, however, that when Creative Scotland has been most embattled it’s been useful to have continuity at the Government end of the equation. After years of culture secretaries being changed with embarrassing regularity, the current incumbent has been around long enough to understand both the needs and the frustrations of the cultural community. It didn’t hurt that she made it clear in one major speech that she didn’t consider economic impact to be the overriding principle by which artistic endeavour should be measured.
What tends to achieve a fruitful relationship is having a chair who commands respect and knows the difference between pragmatic acquiescence and inappropriate subservience. And a CEO who appreciates and deploys his or her existing in-house expertise, and also gains the respect of his or her stakeholders. Funding chiefs will never win popularity contests, but they do need to speak human, and know how to delegate.
The Government leaves a footprint in other ways. It ring-fences funding for specific projects reducing the scope for flexibility within the agency. Nobody would argue against the merits of a Youth Music Initiative at a time when school music tuition is withering on the vine, but it means ten million pounds out of the core budget.
The sorry state of music tuition in schools was flagged up by many when the Government agreed to fund Sistema projects in Scotland; first in the Raploch, Stirling, now in Torry, Aberdeen, Govanhill, Glasgow and Douglas, Dundee. Based on the Venezuelan model which led to the world-renowned Simon Bolivar Orchestra, it aims to give disadvantaged children new skills and confidence through learning and playing musical instruments. The results have been startling and heart-warming, but in an ideal world these would be projects building on a healthy bedrock of tuition throughout the state school system.
Having said which standalone initiatives, properly targeted, can give a country a significant bang for limited bucks, The Expo Fund gives indigenous companies and artists funding to appear at the Edinburgh International Festival and raise their international profile. Similarly, a touring fund for the five national performing arts companies – whose core support comes directly from government – has underwritten a number of important tours.
And there are other routes through which money for cultural enterprises can be levered. Cashback for Creativity – a subsection of the Cashback for Communities programme – uses the proceeds of crime to fund artistic endeavour sometimes in the most unlikely places. You can detect a delicious irony in the fact that it was the genesis of what became an arts strategy within Barlinnie Prison.
But all of these initiatives require to be carefully thought through. The late Sam Galbraith finding two million pounds down the back of his sofa having been lobbied directly by Scottish Opera, or Alex Salmond producing a cash rabbit from his hat for the Scottish Youth Theatre can only undermine the confidence of the sectors in the funding process being as neutral and rigorous as possible.
Arts funders are always keen on encouraging self-sufficiency and creative partnerships, and anxious that regular funding does not come to be regarded as investment in perpetuity. Yet here too there is the imperative of discouraging inappropriate dependency while recognising that some parts of the arts simply couldn’t function properly without subsidy. Having listened to these debates up close and personal I can attest to the headaches they engender.
On the matter of leadership, the venerable Alasdair Gray once caused more than a flurry in the doocots when he suggested that Scotland had developed what he considered a self-harming habit of appointing people to top arts jobs from out with Scotland. That argument would only hold good if all the top jobs had gone to people of inferior quality.
When the inaugural board of the National Theatre of Scotland appointed Vicky Featherstone, it was regarded as a high-risk strategy. In the event, operating in tandem with John Clifford, she proved an inspired choice. Both she and Clifford have gone on to build international reputations. (On the other hand, the tenure of their immediate successor, also imported from England, is unlikely to feature in a resume of NTS’ greatest hits.)
And you might easily argue that the Belfast born John Leighton, Director General of the National Galleries of Scotland, has been a greater champion of finding the means to respect and display its Scottish collection than a predecessor whose principal enthusiasm was the Italian school.
What is fair comment though, is the still visible reluctance in some quarters to believe home grown talent can possess the qualities of an apparently glitterier ‘outsider’. ‘I kent his faither syndrome’ is no longer all-pervasive, but it is taking an unconscionable time to die off. And it’s demonstrably true that while appointments from other countries can bring a welcome objectivity, they are also unlikely to be aware of either the history of or the nuances within the patch they inherit.
A final thought. Creative Scotland may be an imperfect vehicle to oversee and underwrite so much of Scotland’s cultural activity. But to misquote Churchill on democracy: an arts funding agency is the worst way of disbursing essential funds – except for all the others.