SAC requests doubled funding

Published Tuesday 3 January 2006 at 13:35 by Alistair Smith

Chairman of the Scottish Arts Council Richard Holloway has called on the Scottish Executive to double his organisation’s funding to £134 million a year.

The plea from Holloway, who took over the SAC chair in June, comes as Scottish arts minister Patricia Ferguson is expected to respond to the Cultural Commission report early this month. The commission reported last June after 14 months deliberations and at a cost of almost £500,000. It strongly advised giving an extra £100 million a year to the arts as one of its 124 recommendations.

Holloway claims that the 500-page report was “buried unceremoniously last summer” and has warned that unless more money is found for the arts in Scotland, some organisations could be forced to close.

He said: “Of course, the Scottish Executive put some money - our money - into the arts but never enough to equip them fully for the work of transforming Scotland for the better. Far from being empowered to make daring new contributions to Scotland’s happiness through art, many of our best enterprises are crippled by financial anxiety and obsessive bean-counting.”

Almost a quarter of the 100 organisations supported by the SAC have a collective deficit of almost £3 million and Holloway claims too much time is spent by experts helping them to negotiate this “financial quagmire”.

He added: “Many of our best and most gifted arts organisations are on life-support… the SAC will soon have to take tough decisions about which life-support systems to switch off to divert scarce resources elsewhere.”

Arts minister Patricia Ferguson has come in for criticism about her six-month delay in responding to the commission’s report and there were claims that it would be hidden away in an announcement over Christmas.

However, a Scottish Executive source said in December: “There is a feeling that if it was announced next week it would be lost in the rush to Christmas. The delay is not about burying it, it’s stressing how important this is by moving it to January once attention has shifted from Christmas.”