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This has been an excellent discussion. I took out of our previous round-table discussion the phrase “the perfect storm” and the challenge of keeping the doors open and the lights on. Today, I have heard that culture and heritage are in our DNA but that we need to avoid the culture of doom.

Given the cuts that you have talked about from the start of our discussion today, is there a need to have rescue plans to keep organisations viable? I give the closure of Filmhouse as an example. Nobody saw that coming. It came as a total shock. The organisation went into administration and there was no space for a potential rescue plan. There are still discussions, but the moment an organisation is in administration, there is a very different trajectory.

Given that it is much easier to save a project than to deal with the wider negative impacts of loss, and given that everybody has talked about the benefits of culture, is there something that we need to do, such as creating crisis plans, in order to get wider cross-Government support? In the case of Filmhouse, we will potentially lose two cinemas, with a massive impact on the Edinburgh international film festival, and there are impacts on jobs, the economy, culture and education.

Is there something that we need to do now to avoid walking into further crises? Should we be asking Government to provide support and stop the cuts? From what you have said, particularly in your opening contributions, it seems that many organisations across Scotland are moving into a very difficult position. I am looking at Iain Munro, because we started with him and he has the big cuts coming up.

That the budget cut will have real impact is a really powerful warning to us. Many of those venues have already started to dive into their reserves, so there will be no spare cash left for organisations to keep going, never mind invest in buildings. That is really powerful evidence.

I will follow that up with Moira Jeffrey. In your submission, you gave us powerful case studies, which cover the matters of wider community benefits, impact on the economy and loss of jobs—if we lose people from arts and culture, we do not get them back. Do you want to say a bit more about that?

It is good to be able to follow up the discussions that we had last year. I want to pick up on the opening comments of Iain Munro from Creative Scotland. You mentioned a number of organisations that you fund and the potential impact on budgets, because they have had cuts and significantly rocketing costs.

We need to look at the opportunities. We have raised things such as the per cent for art scheme and the tourist visitor levy, but they seem a long way off, as does social prescribing. What do you think the solutions are now? In the organisations that you mention—this was also mentioned in the SCAN submission—there has been a hollowing out, and a lot of artists and cultural workers have already gone. What is your advice on what we should say in our budget report?

I wonder whether Donald Smith wants to come in. You mentioned visitor hesitancy after Covid in relation to festivals, but there is also the cost of living crisis. What do we need to do more of to enable festivals to be more successful? We have already lost the Edinburgh Filmhouse and the Belmont Filmhouse, which is impacting on the film festival.

That is very helpful, because I do not think that that issue has been raised in the committee before. I know that there are issues about changing ticket prices as the date of an event gets nearer. You mentioned a ticket price of £60, and I have seen much bigger prices than that, and there is a question about where all that money goes. That has been really helpful in our thinking about the stark issue that there is not enough money. There has not been enough funding for a long time, but there will be a crisis this year and going forward—I appreciate that.

Is it possible to get a sense from Chris Sherrington of what kind of money we are talking about in terms of business rates? I think that he said that only 10 organisations got support but I presume that it is not a massive amount of money. The challenge is that, to go back to Donald Smith’s point, local authorities then have less income.

We would need a weekly update, but what I was thinking—

It is very rare that I agree with the cabinet secretary on a huge number of issues. The bill is unprecedented; it feels dangerous as well as ill thought out. The evidence that we have heard, which Jenni Minto has already mentioned, was on public health, food safety, animal safety, business, the environment and workers’ rights. Another issue that was striking is the legal impact, which will lead to massive uncertainty. It cuts right across everything. You have made points about devolution and the Sewel convention that I very much agree with. I was struck by the evidence that we had from the head of the Northern Ireland civil service, who said that there was potential for an untenable legislative burden as well as a diversion of resources to ensure a functioning statute book. This Tory Government is acting without any thought as to the range of dangerous impacts of the bill.

My question follows up on questions that my colleagues have asked. Have you or other Scottish Government ministers had parallel discussions with UK Government ministers? You have already mentioned DEFRA, which is clearly a massive issue for us. There is also the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, which will be important in terms of regulations and businesses in the future.

One of the things that I found disturbing in what we have heard is that there is evidence that the impact is already happening. It is not a theoretical issue about what happens next December. Part of the evidence that we heard was about how local government regulates safety and the sense that some businesses are already shifting because of the uncertainty.

There is the issue of what will happen in the future. How do you build that piece of work in the Scottish Government, which will be a huge legislative and civil service burden, and manage the risk assessment to continue to highlight the dangers of the bill and get in place measures for the dangerous worst-case scenario that you have talked about? It could happen this time next year. Can I take you to the January issue? Do you think that the UK civil service will identify all these areas of legislation by January?

Seriously, what I was thinking is that it goes to the issue of stakeholders. We need to have transparency and to be able to highlight things on the web in the same way as you do, so that we are up to date. It is partly about scrutiny by us, but it is as much about other parliamentary committees and stakeholders.

What is your expectation of our capacity to scrutinise that as a Parliament—not just this committee, obviously, because most of the other Scottish Parliament committees should scrutinise it—if the process goes through as you currently expect it to?