Nicola Benedetti calls on Scottish government to provide promised arts sector funding

Violinist and Edinburgh International Festival director Nicola Benedetti has warned of the pitfalls of allowing government to shirk its responsibility to fund culture. Speaking to Scottish political and current affairs magazine Holyrood earlier this week, Benedetti said it is currently ‘a very trepidatious time’ for the arts.

Benedetti’s comments follow a turbulent period for arts funding in Scotland with the budget for Creative Scotland cut by £6.6m in December 2022. The funding was then reinstated in February 2023 and cut again in September in the Scottish government’s Autumn Budget Revisions, forcing Creative Scotland to use its National Lottery reserves to prevent the cut being passed on to the organisations it funds.

Benedetti said: ‘It is a responsibility for government, unless you begin to think that arts, culture – and by that I mean all the activities that fall into the general psychological, mental, emotional wellbeing and health of the nation, of society and individuals, everything that falls into that category I would relate to a civic pillar you can call culture – if as a nation we start to believe that that’s not one of the civic pillars that we hold ourselves to we are essentially changing our goal posts and our identity’.

Benedetti added: ‘We’re shifting what post-the Second World War we believed was a society that was increasing in equality and elevating civilisation. If we don’t consider it to be that then that’s a major identity shift. If we do consider it to be so then a portion of what’s raised in taxes and spent by the government should be on the fabric of the life we live and what we call culture and art. We would allow that to slip away from the responsibility of the government at our peril.’

An announcement from then-first minister Humza Yousaf that ministers would ‘more than double’ the investment to the arts and culture sector, increasing funding by more than £100m, was welcomed, but details of the increase will not be outlined until the 2024/25 budget announcement in December. Creative Scotland is expected to announce the outcome of applications to its Multi-Year Funding Programme in October, with funding in place for successful organisations from 1 April 2025. However, Creative Scotland’s chief executive Iain Munro said: ‘as we have emphasised consistently, our budgets remain extremely limited, and we anticipate being able to fund only a proportion of the organisations which have applied. Our decisions will depend on the budget made available to us by the Scottish Government in the coming financial year and beyond.’