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If you read the Daily Express, yes.

At a practical level, though, you are looking to use the increased financial resource that you have and disperse it throughout the sector to support the funding of work. You have talked about strategic priorities such as sustainability, fair work, internationalisation and so on, but the organisations that you are funding are also dealing with their employer costs and the need to address accessibility and the new challenges around trying to regrow audiences post the past few years of chaos.

In what way can you have confidence that the allocation of funds to support more work on those strategic priorities does not get swallowed up by the increased costs that organisations face? That could mean that you do not achieve what you are seeking to do through that funding.

I will just butt in for a second and say that I get how that applies to some of the bigger organisations that know that they have an on-going relationship, but I am not sure that it cuts it for smaller organisations, for freelancers or for people who are applying for individual bits of project work through Creative Scotland. They are not in the position of being able to make those kinds of plans, but they are facing increased costs, whether that is for the staff that they are employing or for their energy costs and other costs that have risen.

Convener, is it in order for the member to misrepresent issues in that way?

I would like to follow up those points, including about the screen sector. You will be aware that some committee members have an interest in the games sector, too, with which there is a great deal of overlap with the screen sector in terms of some of the skills and infrastructure, for example. However, there is not a complete overlap, and there is a sense that the games sector has suffered a bit from a disjointed approach in terms of whether the Government supports it through enterprise or as culture and creativity—there is an element of both.

Is there a view emerging in Creative Scotland—given that it has engagement with the games sector but not at the level or degree of success that Screen Scotland has had in relation to film and TV—about what the future direction should be?

On fair work specifically, I was not quite clear when I was looking around. Is there a single document, statement or policy that Creative Scotland has adopted that defines what it thinks that it can achieve in terms of fair work practices throughout the sector or the parts of the sector that it engages with, particularly with regard to some of the challenges around casualised or freelance parts of the sector? What responsibilities does Creative Scotland have, as opposed to funding recipients, for achieving fair work in terms of the experience that people have while working in the sector?

It would be helpful to hear more about the action plan as it is developed. I do not know whether it would be possible for you to share your thinking with the committee ahead of its publication, but we should perhaps focus on that as we hear more detail.

Good morning. Obviously, it is a happy circumstance to be at a parliamentary committee meeting hearing witnesses talk about a rising budget and multiyear funding. I guarantee that there will be committee meetings happening throughout this building and throughout this month at which members will be hearing from witnesses who do not have such a positive story to tell.

You will be aware that we have heard—from the previous panel, too—about the wide range of costs and challenges faced by the culture sector, including some parts of it that are not seeing the rising budget that Creative Scotland is seeing. We have heard about workforce and employer costs. We have heard about net zero, both in an operational sense and as part of the cultural response that people want from the creative sector with regard to the climate emergency. We have heard about the transition to fair work, and we have heard some people asking for more flexibility. I hope that nobody will want the sector to go further in the wrong direction on fair work and see the kind of abusive and exploitative practices that are endemic in the private sector becoming more of a problem in the culture sector. That said, achieving fair work in a sector with lots of freelance, casual and short-term employment is a real challenge. There are also issues around accessibility, which itself has many dimensions, as well as the need to regrow audiences.

My worry is that, if Creative Scotland tries to help the sector to do a little bit of all of that, it will do most of it inadequately. The rising trajectory of budgets is a good thing, but is it enough to achieve a response to all the different challenges? If not, how do we prioritise things? What strategic approach can we take with the budget that is available?

That is connected to the work that the Government is doing to review Creative Scotland and the wider landscape. We still do not really know what direction that review will take or how long it will take. How is it possible, in the absence of answers about that process, to know what the strategic approach will be to deploying the resource that is available now in order to meet all the diverse challenges that the sector faces?

It is not accurate.

It might not surprise the witnesses that my questions follow on quite well from the points that Mr Berman just made.

You mentioned the idea of a price link between the UK and EU emissions trading schemes. You also talked about skills in relation to clean energy infrastructure, and about multiregion loose volume coupling being the solution to efficient electricity trading, which sounds like a wonderfully geeky subject that I will have to read more about.

Those are current issues. I ask that you look ahead as we consider the other changes that need to happen for us to transition to a sustainable energy system. What in the current arrangements might inhibit that transition? What aspects of a review—whether that is decarbonisation of heat, where the skills and experience of other European countries are decades ahead of that of the UK, whether that is building more transmission connections between the UK and other European countries or whether that is the emergence of something such as green hydrogen, the production and export of which could play a significant role—might help to resolve the issues that we will encounter?