Last Thursday, Creative Scotland published its Annual Plan for 2014-15. It’s a big year in Scottish society, and whatever the outcome of the September independence referendum there is an ongoing debate about the sort of country Scotland wants to be. While the current UK government continues to cut public funding and seek alternative resources, the Scottish arts agency’s plan seems to represent an explicit aim to build more public investment in culture. As such, it marks a major, albeit quiet, shift and divide between UK and Scottish cultural policy.
The scene was set for this ideological divergence early last summer. Maria Miller, at the time the UK’s Minister for Culture, delivered her misfiring first policy speech, setting out her belief that the arts “are fundamental to our success as a nation” and “at the centre of economic growth.” It was a message that allowed Fiona Hyslop, Scotland’s Culture Minister, to adroitly respond the following week, seizing the opportunity to speak out as a member of a government that ‘understood’ culture and didn’t just see it in economic terms.
The fact that Creative Scotland’s whole approach, since its inception in 2010, had centred on the economic growth agenda (as set by the Scottish Government) raised some eyebrows, but the SNP minister’s speech was clearly intended as an indication of what culture could be in an independent Scotland – should we decide to vote for it.
A full year later, and after Miller’s expenses scandal and subsequent firing, a new UK Minister for Culture, Sajid Javid, has arrived. Last week marked his first major speech, and the script remained pretty much unchanged. Once again, the arts were asked to do more, reach further, and do it with less public money.
The seam of private sponsorship of the arts runs through both Miller’s and Javid’s speeches, despite the intervening year’s revelations about the paucity of philanthropy in the arts and the preference of corporations for supporting large organisations in London, with all the high-profile marketing opportunities this affords.
A different direction in traffic
In Scotland, with the politicians somewhat preoccupied by the slings and arrows of the independence referendum, no such policy speech from the country’s Culture Minister has been forthcoming this year. Instead of the grandstanding, however, Creative Scotland’s 2014-15 Annual Plan marks the first real indication of what could be termed as ‘a different direction in traffic’ with regards to culture in Scotland.
Back in April, Creative Scotland launched its 10-year strategy, a document full of rhetoric and emotion – ‘We want a Scotland where everybody actively values the arts and creativity as the heartbeat for our lives and the world in which we live’ – but light on the detail that allows scrutiny. The Annual Plan, however, offers a chance to really consider how the body proposes to support culture.
So, how does Creative Scotland Mark II – post-‘#CSstooshie’ (resulting in the resignation of its first chief executive), post-Hyslop speech – actually fare? First, the headlines:
• The five priorities the agency sets out are virtually the same as before (in short: talent, quality, places, access and international), albeit using a softened, less shorthand, less-cauterized, less gung-ho language
• The overall budgets for arts organisations are more or less the same. The foundation organisations will receive the same £18m, the annual clients some £7.5m, and the programme organisations have a budget of £5m taken from the now disbanded £7m strand originally set aside for Creative Scotland’s strategic commissioning. The real interest will be over the next year as Creative Scotland determine a single tier of recipients, one ‘portfolio of regularly funded organisations’, who will from April 2015 get three-year commitments. Undoubtedly there are a few shibboleths.
• There is the welcome desire to bump up the research role, using the information there is to hand from funded organisations, projects and artists, ‘to help others to work more strategically’.
• The plan sets out the aim to review ‘our operational structure so that people with the right skills and knowledge are focused on supporting their specialist areas’, thereby effectively ending the previous regime’s managerial approach to client relationships. So, if you submit an application for a visual arts project it will be reviewed by someone from that field.
• The capital budget is being put on hold (albeit with some £14m-worth of commitment) while Creative Scotland reviews its overall approach and priorities.
• The main change, and the one of most pertinent to the individual artist and practioner, is the end of discrete grant funding, which previously included the Artist Bursaries, Quality Production, Professional Development and Touring strands, to be replaced by one pot – Open funding.
Funding available for all
The Open funding will be available to all, for projects and proposals between £1,000 and £100,000. There is an initial budget of approximately £3m for the first three months of operation (Jan – April 2015), suggesting an overall annual budget of approx £12m per year.
While it is difficult at this stage to see if this represents an uplift of opportunity or funds available to the individual practioner, the potential is certainly there. It will of course come down to what the deciding criteria is and who gets access to the funds. How, for example, will the agency differentiate between a film club on Colonsay’s desire for a projector, and a curator’s desire to travel to Istanbul Biennial? Between an artist’s request to publish a photo essay on the environmental effects of a multi-national corporation, alongside a small market town wishing to support a local amateur dramatics festival?
Of course, the fact that the funding stream is open to everyone is worth celebrating in itself, giving artists and people, including the vast raft of voluntary arts activity, the opportunity to propose the projects they want to undertake. It’s a shift that appears to support academic David Stevenson’s recent statement that “what I believe cultural policy in Scotland should be concerned with is ensuring equitable access for everyone to the cultural opportunities they value”.
The Annual Plan explicitly states the agency’s wish to ‘Position the work that we fund at the heart of creative, artistic, cultural, social and economic development, stimulating future growth in public investment in arts and culture.” (The italics are mine.) We appear in Scotland, then, to be nudging towards an understanding of culture beyond the crude binary terms of what the arts can do for us as individuals (i.e, its instrumental benefits) or art for art’s sake (its intrinsic benefits).
Instead, there are signs that we are starting to actually understand culture to be good for us, not just as individuals, but collectively as an open, diverse, pluralistic, democratic, reflective, mature society – and that therefore, culture may actually be worthy of more, rather then less, public support. Creative Scotland’s Annual Plan may just represent the first tentative, bureaucratic baby steps towards this reality.
View or download the Creative Scotland Annual Plan 2014-15 here
Also on a-n.co.uk:
A Creative Scotland in waiting – Writing in November 2013, Johnny Gailey finds Scotland’s arts funding body in a curious state of flux
Scotland’s Culture Secretary: It’s not about the economy, stupid – Fiona Hyslop responds to Maria Miller’s speech
