On the point about outcomes that our colleagues from Museums Galleries Scotland raise, for us, purely and simply, benchmarks are measures that pose questions for people. We are satisfied that the financial measures are standardised and accurate. The footfall measures are taken on exactly the same basis as National Galleries of Scotland takes its measures, so if they were wrong for local government, they would be wrong for everyone else as well. On that model, a lot of the figures for attendance at galleries and museums would simply emerge as being wrong. We are satisfied that the measurement is right.
What do we see the point of the measurement as being? If some museums have managed to increase their footfall significantly—most of the change is increased use rather than decreased expenditure; as a result, the unit cost per person has come down—that is an important success story. How have they managed to do that? In some cases, it will be because a decision was taken to run free bus services for certain communities so that they could access the council’s art resources. On the basis that it would cost people on low incomes quite a lot if they had to pay to catch a bus to get there, consideration was given to what could be done on transport connections.
We see the benchmark as posing a question for people. For a small number of museums, that question is posed quite starkly, because there is a genuine issue with footfall declining quite sharply. Why is that? How can that be reversed?
On the outcomes for museums and galleries, I am involved in a separate piece of work with the directors of culture and leisure in Scotland that is entirely about how we begin to better demonstrate the value that we believe comes from participation in music, sport and the arts. I certainly believe that those activities have value, but even when we look at evaluative studies, we are still quite clunky when it comes to defining and measuring outcomes in that area. There is a lot of assertion, but if we poke a stick at it, it often dissolves fairly quickly. There is quite a lot of work to be done in such areas to arrive at a much clearer understanding of outcomes.
An issue that the committee has raised on previous occasions is who the outcomes are for. If we are running art galleries and museums in Scotland on an uncharged basis, we presumably want to make sure that the whole community benefits from that, and not just some sections of it. We need to start to find out more about the segmentation of our audience. Are museums and galleries being used disproportionately by some communities and not at all by others? If so, what are we going to do about it? That is the drill-down work that Angela Leitch mentioned.
We know that some councils are looking in some detail at who is using certain facilities and who is not, and what they could do to get the people who are not using them to use them. It is axiomatic, I assume, that art galleries and museums have value, but we need to demonstrate their value and to ask whether we are getting the footfall that we hoped that we would get from funding universal free access to them. That is the question that the benchmark poses, and we need to go on and answer it. I absolutely accept the point that Museums Galleries Scotland makes.