The Scottish Government has underlined the difficult budget environment for the current financial year (March 2024 to April 2025) and has highlighted the need for savings in public expenditure to be made. Scottish Government Officials have confirmed that Public Bodies, including Creative Scotland (inclusive of Screen Scotland), are required to implement operating costs controls, with immediate effect (as at October 2024).
The Scottish Government has also announced a series of cuts to a range of policy areas and a freeze on spending. The impact on Creative Scotland’s 2024/25 budget is the loss of £2.25m for the PLACE and Culture Collective initiatives.
With the above in mind, Creative Scotland is implementing a range of measures aimed at making in-year operational savings. Operational costs are those costs that are not grant funding, including, for example, costs associated with recruitment, procurement contracts, and travel costs.
Together with the clear requirements of us and all public bodies to implement operating costs controls immediately, Creative Scotland is taking steps to further control operational expenditure.
One of those steps is to reduce travel costs. Creative Scotland and Screen Scotland staff travel to visit and to support funded organisations and projects across Scotland, and internationally, to promote Scotland’s creative and cultural sectors. With the need to make operational cost savings, our staff will not be able to undertake as much travel for the rest of this financial year, unless essential to the benefit of the sector as a whole.
We appreciate that people and organisations across Scotland’s culture and creative sector would prefer that representatives from their major funders travel to meet with them, to see and experience their work first hand, but in these difficult financial times, we hope that everyone understands the need to restrict operational expenditure as much as possible.
We will continue to make ourselves available for online meetings where that is helpful, and to maintain relationships with people, organisations and partners across the sectors we work with.