Creative Scotland has welcomed the Scottish Government’s decision to reverse a cut to around 10% of its budget.
The decision, taken as the Scottish Parliament considered the Scottish Government’s 2023/24 Budget, reverses the £6.6m reduction proposed in the Draft Budget, in December last year, and restores Creative Scotland’s Grant-in-Aid budget to £63m.
Creative Scotland, which is the public body that supports the nation’s arts, screen and creative industries, said it will now consider what this change means for its own budget for the forthcoming year, and its implications for the funding it provides.
Robert Wilson, chair of Creative Scotland, said: “Alongside the board and staff, I am very pleased to see this announcement about the Scottish Government’s Budget.
“It follows a great deal of work from Creative Scotland in setting out the impact and implications of the proposed budget reduction, and the enormously valuable advocacy work from people and organisations across Scotland’s culture sector and beyond. The board will now consider what this means for our budget and our funding in 2023/24 and we will announce more on this as soon as possible.”
In December 2022, Creative Scotland said it was “disappointed” at the news its funding was to be cut. At the time, the organisation said that to address the cut in funding, it would utilise a proportion of its National Lottery reserves to maintain funding for Regularly Funded Organisations (RFOs) at 2022-23 levels.
Creative Scotland receives more than a third of its income from The National Lottery as one of the 12 cultural, sport and heritage distributors for good causes.