Spotlight on decisions at country’s arts agency

CREATIVE Scotland was warned two months ago about concerns over how key decisions were being handled by a small number of people in a “relatively uninformed” way, it has emerged.

The Cultural Alliance, with ties to nearly 70 arts organisations, wrote to Creative Scotland’s chairman Sir Sandy Crombie and chief executive Andrew Dixon in April raising questions about how minutes were kept in meetings.

The organisation is keeping tabs on meetings this month with nearly 50 organisations being moved to “project” funding, in a shift that has caused a furious public backlash against the agency.

Jan-Bert van den Berg said his group believed that the small senior management team at Creative Scotland was taking the lion’s share of decisions on funding.

He said: “There is concern about the transparency of the decision-making. I’ve expressed concerns directly to Creative Scotland that informed decision-making is going to be incredibly difficult to achieve if you have a very small body of people looking at decisions.”

His letter was replied to “in a constructive way”, he said.

A Creative Scotland spokesman said: “Creative Scotland has a range of specialist expertise. Criteria, guidelines and assessment process are published on our website.

“We are not in the business of starving artists of resources, just the opposite, and we want to find the right way to increase what’s available.

“Recommendations for investment are made by officers and portfolio managers with appropriate expertise and are agreed by the senor management team. In this way, a range of expertise is used to consider applications.”