In a time of straitened finances, Creative Scotland must hit the mark

“There’s never going to be enough to do everything,” said Creative Scotland chief executive Iain Munro on its funding priorities. 

It’s a sentiment that would surely be music to Ivan McKee’s ears. After all, it’s one of the public service reform (PSR) secretary’s central propositions against a £5bn budget shortfall.

Still, an ongoing culture war surrounds the operation of the national arts body, which divvies up cash for screen, stage and beyond. 

Who could forget the storm that broke around the near-£85,000 devoted to “explicit” sex film Rein in the last parliament? Billed as a “magical erotic journey”, it had been considered experimental performance art but failed to cast a spell over parliament or public and with the subsequent withdrawal of funding came a review of Creative Scotland’s operations which pointed out glaring gaps in the offer for comedy, gaming and more.

The agency would like to do more for those areas and others like design, Munro told MSPs recently, but as always public money will only stretch so far. 

That’s despite an increase in Scottish Government funding for Creative Scotland. State support makes up three quarters of its resources and while the number of organisations in receipt of core funding topped 250 in 2025-26, another 250 saw their initial enquiries end without an allocation.

So yes, it’s clear that Munro and his team cannot hit all the marks here. One doubts the agency would get an easier time if it could and did. No one likes to hear ‘no’, and the culture sector can make a real noise when the buck stops. 

There has been something of a clamour over the collapse of The Skinny, an arts and culture freesheet which survived for 20 years before succumbing to market pressures. Bold of design and broad of taste, it covered everything from food to film to the Fringe. Its closure will of course come as a blow to readers, writers and the artists it covered. 

The news prompted “heartbroken” Scottish Greens MSP Q Manivannan, a poet, to write to culture secretary Mairi McAllan asking her and Creative Scotland to “arrive at a solution of alternative funding” for the magazine, which it transpired had received around £200,000 in public support. In a motion to parliament, Manivannan also stated that its closure is “not an isolated incident but part of a wider pattern of financial precarity facing independent cultural media and grassroots arts organisations across Scotland”.

There’s no doubt the media is under pressure, with shifts in consumer behaviour and the impacts of inflation playing no small part. And these are factors that impact arts and culture more generally, reducing venue spaces, limiting shows and making audiences think twice about paying for tickets. 

The need to avoid scattergun thinking and follow a robust national strategy is clear to protect public funds and deliver for audiences.

“The country doesn’t stand still in its creativity and its culture”, Munro told MSPs. Nor does the shape of public services, which are also now to bend and change in response to demand and cost pressures. 

Film agency Scottish Screen is to be hived off from Creative Scotland in a move that goes against the general trend of reducing public bodies. Isabel Davis, its executive director, told the committee her organisation has a “trajectory [of] upward growth”. “If we’re singing for our supper by way of the economic contribution that we’re making, then why would you curtail that,” she asked, pointing to an ever more competitive international market.

There is “an opportunity in public sector renewal”, she said, to look at how the “growth sectors” in arts, as elsewhere, are served by the bodies set up to steward them. Screen Scotland’s targeting an economic GVA of £1bn by 2030-31 and could be “part of the answer” the government needs on national finances, Davis suggested. 

That would be a win. But inherent in the expression and experience of culture are shifts in the popularity of genre and medium, and public appetites can be hard to predict. Culture and the arts are of course not all about blockbusters. It all calls for a tricky balance, particularly when finances are straitened.

Scotland is far from a cultural desert, but the recent loss of the Edinburgh TV Festival and the troubles of Glasgow’s CCA venue prove its susceptibility to changing winds. The government has committed to establishing a new National Performing Company focused on traditional music. If it succeeds, it will come 20 years after the National Theatre of Scotland, which has broken into international audiences, but crucially also developed these for domestic audiences, with touring productions setting up in communities otherwise bypassed. 

We’ll need to wait and see the outcome of that consultation, but it’s to be hoped that PSR will strengthen, not weaken, the arts. After all, chief medical officer Gregor Smith – a heavy metal fan – says that from a health perspective, we can’t do without it. “They foster connection...and support mental and physical wellbeing,” he wrote of arts organisations. “Making creative experiences accessible at scale requires cross-sector collaboration to embed art and culture into everyday life and Scotland’s wider public health approach.”