The Gold Plated Promise – Bella Caledonia

The Creative Scotland Open Fund for Individuals has been a huge enabler of my music making over the years. Since 2016 it has supported no less than six albums and a couple of other projects by bands and collaborations with which I’m involved.

I think it’s true for many folk, myself included, that recorded music doesn’t make money fast, if at all. More than half the records those bands released won’t have come close to covering their costs through sales and royalties, and some possibly never will.

But releasing music is essential on other fronts, not least that having a current album is increasingly essential to be able to book gigs and make cash. The fund enabled that, as well as getting the music out there, and growing the profile of those projects. Despite not being particularly profitable, it’s not like the music isn’t being heard and enjoyed – there’s a few million streams across that catalogue by now, and we’ve heard from folk all over the world who’ve connected to such an extent that they’ve taken the time to get in touch and share their experiences.

Beyond that, I couldn’t even attempt to count the number of additional projects – performing, recording, education and cross – art form that I’ve been involved in, through essentially being employed by other recipients of the fund. It is a pretty significant source in terms of how I’ve made a living over the years.

Lots of folk have made this point in recent days – that recipients of the fund spend the vast majority of it employing other individual creators of various sorts to bring their projects to life. It underpins an entire ecosystem – of collaboration, the creation of art and opportunities for people to engage with it; but also an economy, which keeps many artists and creative folk going.

So it’s a devastating loss, and from a policy point of view it’s hard to work out how we’ve ended up here.

A couple of years ago I was working in the policy side of the Scottish cultural sector, latterly as Advocacy Manager for Culture Counts. Over that time I had an amount of involvement in conversations on how policy for arts and culture is made and funded, including the campaign around the 10% cut to Creative Scotland first mooted at the end of 2022, and then subsequent work somewhat connected to the talk (but as yet no action) of a £100 million uplift to culture budgets. I’m no longer working in that world, but the experience has left me with a few burning thoughts in relation to where we find ourselves.

It’s notable that historically, Scottish Government has not been the main source of funding for the Open Fund for Individuals. It primarily distributes funds from the National Lottery – receipts from lottery tickets. In 22/23, Creative Scotland’s Open Funds for Individuals and Organisations awarded £15.7mil in funding, of which £0.6mil was funded directly by the Scottish Government.

Lottery receipts have been dwindling in recent years. In 17/18, Creative Scotland received around £30mil in lottery income to support its open funds, in 2023 it received £32 mil. That’s a fairly flat trend in cash terms, and given inflation, the amount of money available to support individual artists from this stream has decreased significantly and continues to do so. For some time there has been a need for a serious conversation about the amount of money needed to support individual artists, and whether the Government should assume greater responsibility for this.

Holyrood’s Culture Committee produced a report on this back in 2019 entitled Putting Artists In The Picture: A Sustainable Arts Funding System For Scotland, which articulated these longer standing issues and gave a series of (mostly ignored) recommendations.

All this is to say that there is not even close to enough money to go around. Arts in Scotland are truly falling off the cliff that various parts of the sector have been warning about since the latter stages of the pandemic. In addition to the ending of its support for individual artists, Creative Scotland will soon make decisions on the future of 119 cultural organisations it currently provides regular funding to, as well as 161 additional organisations who have applied for regular support. The total funding ask of those 280 organisations is £87.4mil. There has been no word of how much money will be made available by the Government to meet this demand, but this year’s organisation pot is £32.5mil. If this is not significantly increased, it’s fair to assume that theatres, festivals, venues, education projects and others will start closing their doors.

Despite many warm words, the Government’s cash allocation to Creative Scotland has followed a similar trend to National Lottery receipts. It’s fluctuated a bit, but it’s certainly not kept pace with inflation. £1 in 2017 money is worth about 77p now. It’s remarkable that that reduction in investment has not seen a corresponding fall in activity and output by Scotland’s artists and cultural organisations.

But the Government line that’s appeared in the press in recent days is laughable. They say “we continue to provide significant funding to Creative Scotland”. A tiny amount of that “significant” funding makes its way directly to individual artists as a means of plugging a hole in another dwindling income stream, and the value of that support has fallen by more than a fifth in recent years.

This particular nugget of media messaging is the latest in a long and sad litany of confusing, counterfactual and counterproductive communiques from Scottish Government. Ostensibly, they see themselves as leaders on Culture, having undertaken a huge number of policy and strategy exercises in recent years, including but not limited to a cultural strategy, a cultural strategy action plan, a cultural strategy action plan refresh, a major events strategy and an international cultural strategy.

Just some examples of the Government repeatedly acknowledging that Scottish art and artists are important to our economy and society, and central to how the Government seeks to define Scotland’s place in the world. On that latter point, many folk working right across the arts, certainly in trad music have been involved in various soft power exercises. I’ve been all over the shop at home and abroad playing at festivals and events tied in to the activities of current and former Cabinet Secretaries and First Ministers selling brand Scotland.

Yet every funding decision made in recent years runs counter to this narrative. In a longer-term context of standstill funding, take that 10%, roughly £6mil cut to Creative Scotland. Over the past two years the cut has been announced, campaigned against, cancelled, re-imposed, and despite a “gold plated” promise from Angus Robertson, the Open Fund for individuals has been closed because of £6.6mil withheld in year by the Government. That particular fish is still flipping and flopping, and individual artists, the skint, overworked engine of the Scottish cultural machine are the first to be left carrying the can.

It’s hard to imagine how the Government could have caused any more damage with this cut if they tried. Beyond the financial, the impact on people’s wellbeing, mental health, morale and confidence in the viability of arts and culture in Scotland has been profound. And all that for six million quid, which with some back-of-fag-packet maths, represents roughly 3.5 hours worth of the yearly Scottish income tax take. At this point I genuinely think we’d be in a better state if they’d just made the cut and said nothing further at all – we’d at least know where we stand. And that’s to say nothing of the fabled £100mil that’s supposedly forthcoming in the next five years. It’s been being talked about for a year now, but still the brass-tacks situation continues to worsen.

Restoring the withheld £6mil to Creative Scotland’s budget might get the open fund flowing again, but that is not nearly enough. In its current form, demand will continue to vastly outstrip supply. Creative Scotland recently indicated that they only have the money to support 25-30% of applications to the fund. And the same will soon go for cultural organisations. More cash is desperately needed, now, to keep the majority of the Scottish cultural sector – artists and the infrastructure that supports them in business beyond the end of the financial year.

These are tiny amounts of money in the grand scheme of what the Government spends. The national budget for 24/25 stands at £59.7 billion, the money budgeted to Creative Scotland is £68.5 million, 0.11% of that. Even if the fabled £100mil was brought forward entirely, that proportion would be rising to just 0.28% of total spend.

And of course this is how it should be. There’s no denying the challenges on every front across our economy and society – health, social care, education, local government and essential services face huge problems, many of them financial. But the Government’s position on culture has become untenable – it either needs to put up or shut up.

You can follow Joseph’s work and music HERE.