Arts quango needs more than a tweak

Two of the parties contesting the Holyrood Election have committed to major reform of Creative Scotland. While neither are likely to form the government (Labour or Conservatives), it is encouraging to see some kind of debate about the future of quangos in Scotland – and of arts policy.

Neither party has set out detailed proposals and of what is currently know, aspects are not all persuasive. Labour appears stuck in policies of the past while the Conservatives seem unable to link excessive bureaucracy to the size and scale of bureaucratic body itself – yet both contributions are welcome.

Labour is heavy on adjectives, pledging to reform Creative Scotland to make it “more transparent and accountable” and “representative and responsive”. Quite how it will do that is less clear, but its commitment to see more of Creative Scotland's funding ending up in the hands of artists is the right priority.

The Conservatives want to get rid of a lot of quangos and while it would keep Creative Scotland as a stand-alone quango, it wants to see a slimmed down bureaucracy and less spent on its own administration.

Given the outcome of the recent Leitch Review which identified Creative Scotland as imposing “crippling bureaucracy” on arts companies, lacking transparency and being hard to navigate and lacking innovation or a willingness to take risks, radical reform is justified.

But there is much about these proposals which also needs to be questioned. The Labour position again reflects its views from the early Holyrood years where Scottish Labour Executives (as then were) saw arts funding in instrumental terms, forcing it into categories such as 'creative industries', 'entrepreneurship' and 'community education'.

The Conservative position has its own problems. The party struggles to shake of its dogma that merging things makes them more efficient – that if a number of 'cultural quangos' were merged the resultant super-quango would be leaner and less bureaucratic. The evidence for this is slim and the experience of 'super-quangos' is more like empire building and bloat.

The Conservatives also have instrumental elements to their proposal, like Labour emphasising what appears to be a 'populist' approach to arts where what is funded should have 'broad public appeal'. This mindset is a driver of the 'dumbing down' of arts policy in Scotland. The emphasis on freedom of speech has more to do with politics than arts policy.

So there are plenty reasons to be sceptical these parties have the solution, but they are correct about the problem and it remains very helpful that this issue is now being debated. Scotland's quangos are generally bloated and overly-bureaucratic and Creative Scotland is famed even among quangos for its self-serving bureaucracy.

Common Weal has set out its own arts funding strategy in Sorted. We start from some of the same concerns as raised by the parties but end up in a different place. For a start, we also want to see more arts funding in the hands of artists but we are less convinced in the need for an intermediary quango to achieve this.

We have proposed that the core of arts funding should be a Universal Basic Income for artists, funding and sustaining the individual practitioner rather than forcing them into the bureaucracy of constantly applying for project funding.

We also want to see risk aversion reduced and innovation encouraged by putting artists in charge of arts decisions. Our proposal is to abolish Creative Scotland altogether and replace it with an Arts Council elected from among artists themselves. We are unconvinced that asking arts and artists to follow political objectives is helpful.

What is becoming a consensus is that the system we have needs reform, and yet despite the start of a debate with these proposals, the smart money is probably on another quango surviving sharp criticism and calls for reform, probably with some cosmetic tweaks.

That will fail to address the problems of funding in the arts sector, but none of the proposals on the table seem likely to do that, and too often artists themselves remain absent from this debate.