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I asked about the comparison with England and Wales, and you said that the figure is equivalent. Were you saying that the average for England and Wales, or for the UK and Wales, is equivalent to the European average or to what is spent in Scotland?

You mentioned the UK context, which you said is important for the sector. We have had 13 years of austerity, in which budgets have declined. There is some pretty challenging stuff in your submission, and in what you have said about the Scottish Government. Do you think that the sector is—in the words of Alexander Stewart—being attacked by the Scottish Government or seen as “expendable”? Do you think that you are being treated differently from other parts of the budget?

May I ask a final quick question? I am trying to view the situation from the point of view of a member of the public. For 13 years we have had cuts to the global budget because of austerity. As you said, we cannot take the issue in isolation; we must look at the context. Such cuts have the cumulative effect of wearing people down over time. Do you think that the public would be surprised to find out that it takes until, say, year 13—I am not sure that that is the case; you can tell me if it is not—for you to think about starting to use reserves to address such issues? I realise that reserves can be held for various purposes, including for a rainy day. Do you not think that, after 13 years of austerity, the rainy day might have arrived? How might the public perceive that?

Perhaps if anybody has any thoughts on the following, they can write back to us.

Going back to Donald Cameron’s point and the Van Gogh exhibition that I mentioned earlier, I do not know enough about it—after all, it is probably the only art exhibition that I have been to—but it seems to have raised an awful lot of money, although I do not know who it raised money for. Can we learn anything from that approach? The exhibition probably used pieces of art from public collections. I wonder whether any thought can be given to that, as I think that it made a huge amount of money in Edinburgh alone, and it has now gone on to London and Manchester.

I also mentioned that I was in Edinburgh’s central library yesterday. It is holding an exhibition on witches—indeed, it sits right next to where most of the witches were killed in Edinburgh—but there was almost nobody in the building. Even post-festival, the streets are packed with tourists from everywhere, and I think that, with a little bit of advertising, you could get folk going in. Even the library part was almost empty. I think that you could have brought in folk who might also have been going to the library, and it could have been monetised, too. That might be anathema to some people, but any entrepreneurial ideas that might help the funding situation would be worth hearing, and I think that it would help the work of the committee—and would certainly help me—if anyone who had any such ideas were to send them in.

Thanks for the contributions so far. I spent two-and-a-half hours in Edinburgh central library yesterday, which means I spent more time in the library than at a Scottish Premiership game this week—that is unusual for me. For me—I am a new member of the committee—context is quite important here. India Divers made a point about the fact that we have seen eight councils go bankrupt south of the border, and there has been a 40 per cent reduction in funding to local government. The issue of assets being sold off in Wales was also mentioned. The idea that Scotland can be immune to that is a nonsense debate, as far as I am concerned.

Much of what has been said today has been said for at least 35 years. When I first joined local government in 1988, the same discussions were taking place, with words like “cliff-edge” and “crisis” being used. I think that, as Duncan Dornan said, we have seen continued managed decline in that period. In fact, it goes back to the mid-1970s when the Government had to go to the International Monetary Fund to get funding, but we have had managed decline in public services over that time, and 13 years of austerity does not help.

It is useful to understand the context. For example, Duncan Dornan’s submission says that there has been a 36 per cent decline in public library services between 2010-11 and 2020-21 and a 22 per cent real-terms decline in museums expenditure in the same period. It would be useful to know how that compares with the rest of the UK. The comparison is valid because the same funding underlies much of it. I would like to know where the Scottish Government is doing something good—I would not expect to get too much of that—or where it is doing something that is neglectful of or impinging on the cultural sector, which it could change. Liam Sinclair has made a couple of suggestions of potential ring-fencing and other things. I think that it is part of this committee’s role to reveal the context for what is going on and a feel for where the Scottish Government could improve or where it is doing well and it should do more of it. That is probably more relevant and useful to me in trying to get a handle on some of these things.

My point was not so much about a comparison, although it is interesting to hear about the different services, and it was not so much about, as Liam Sinclair said, a global economic situation. It was simply that, in Scotland, the budget is driven by what the Government in Westminster wants to spend on its services, and we get what we get as a consequence of that. What we need is not thought about; it is just about what we get as a consequence. There is vital difference between ourselves and Ireland and Australia, which is pretty obvious.

I will raise a question, although I am not looking for an answer to this, because I am aware that we are pressed for time. I was interested in the Van Gogh exhibition that happened last year in Edinburgh and which I think is going to other places now. I know that one of the issues was the cost, as a lot of people would not have been able to pay to get in. However, I wonder whether there is anything in that kind of initiative—a bespoke exhibition that travels around—that might be helpful to museums, given the treasures that they have.

I am not looking for an answer now, because I know that we have to move on, convener.

I am new to this, but from listening to what has been said and in response to your point that we started off with a more unified situation, I suppose that the implication is that we are about to become less unified or experience more divergence. It seems a bit absurd to have started off in a single market and to now be moving to what appears, even in name, to be the more insular approach of an internal market. If it was a single market previously, surely the benefits were there in the first place. Do we need bureaucratic superstructures to regulate or monitor a situation where we previously had a single market? It seems odd that we would have to do that.

On that and in an attempt to be helpful, you have mentioned meaningful data, so one way that you could build that—whether you do that by your own hand or whether others do it—is through an examination of public bodies’ approved lists of contractors. It is probably easier to gain that information from them than from elsewhere. The purpose of that would be to say that, in a perfect market where innovation and efficiency are rewarded, we would see huge numbers of Scottish companies servicing Welsh local authorities or English companies servicing Northern Ireland authorities. That might give you a better indication, especially over time, of whether the internal market is working more efficiently. Would it be possible, either through your organisation or the Office for National Statistics, to get that kind of data and to monitor it over time to see whether it improves or otherwise?

I have one last point, which is counter to the point that I just made, but that is the way that I think of these things.

There is also a fairly developed movement—I forget the term for it; it is not quite a circular economy. The north of England area, perhaps Sheffield, does this very effectively: it tries to ensure that the money spent by public bodies is spent in the local area—it is recycled, if you like. I do not know whether that would be termed as divergence, but have you come across that or would you take it into account in the figures?

There has been a movement away from compulsory competitive tendering, decades ago, to best value and, in the past 10 years, a more liberal regime. For example, local authorities could place a contract with somebody who was not giving them the cheapest price because there would be wider benefits from placing the contract with them. I suppose that that works against the idea of an internal market, but I just wonder whether that has appeared on your radar yet.

I think that you are right—that would probably not come under divergence. However, I think that it would come under the efficient operation of an internal market.