Sectoral Urges
Are we a thing?
Aug 2025
Turn right out of Edinburgh’s Waverley Station and continue along the crowded and chaotic Princes Street and once the crowds diminish under the shadow of Calton Hill, you may find yourself facing St Andrew’s House. This stern sculptural building houses many of the operations of the Scottish Government and is often the favoured meeting place for civil servants. Built in the 1940s, St Andrew’s House would make a great backdrop for a cinematic vision of Orwell’s contemporaneous 1984. As one of the policy foundries of UK governance it is full of rows of desks and meeting rooms populated by elected politicians and civil servants, often doing their best to wrangle the whimsy or dogma of their political leaders.
I was there earlier this year for a meeting. Meetings are the theatre of the bureaucrat and the codes of performance are well-rehearsed and often instinctive. You arrive to be checked on a list, given a lanyard and security pass and told to go to the waiting room to wait. In amongst the others waiting to discuss prisons, social care, or digital transformation, there is also an opportunity in one corner of the room to learn about the building. I find out that it was built on the site of the old Calton Jail and that the graves of ten murderers who were housed within the Jail remain buried beneath the car park. Auspicious.
More positive is the information on the relief sculptures that adorn the facade of the building. These represent government departments of the time: Health, Agriculture, Fisheries, and Education, with Statecraft and Architecture being added later as the building facade was extended. These images of key sectors for Scotland’s governance were created by the sculptor William Reid Dick. In a microcosm of the aspirations of cultural policy and social mobility that are formulated within St Andrew’s House, Dick was from the working class area of the Gorbals in Glasgow and graduated from the Glasgow School of Art in 1907, before having a long career creating physical manifestations of the ambitions and remembrances of British culture.
I had been invited to be there to meet with the new Chair of the independent review of Creative Scotland who had recently begun their work. It was a privileged opportunity to have a one-to-one with the person who had been appointed to determine the future of the organisation that I had been working for for the previous decade. A friendly civil servant came to fetch me and we walked together to the creaky lift on the way to find our meeting room on an upper floor. We sat down in the room, awkwardly finding positions for the three of us around a table set out for about 12. I took out my laptop and the Chair took out their notebook, while the civil servant sat, once-removed, in the slightly subservient position of an observer.
I was heavily loaded with expectations, but was well aware that I had no prior relationship with the Chair and had little understanding of their terms of reference, their manners, or their attitude towards the things that might be important to me. The theatre was therefore more improvised than I would like and I struggled to find the ground on which we might meet for our performance.
The review of Creative Scotland was initiated in September 2024 by Scotland’s Culture Secretary, Angus Robertson, and by May 2025 the first formulation of the scope for the review was publicly shared. This scope was broken down as three objectives and 17 bullet points that comprised a ‘remit’. These objectives were:
> consider Creative Scotland’s functions and remit, as set out in the Public Services Reform (Scotland) Act 2010, to ensure they continue to be relevant for the culture sector and meet Ministers’ aspirations
> evaluate how Creative Scotland delivers its functions including appropriateness of existing governance arrangements
> maximise the impact of the funding Creative Scotland provide to the culture sector by ensuring Creative Scotland use and distribute funding appropriately and effectively
Going in to this meeting I was very aware of these objectives and was hypnotised by one term that was included. This is the term ‘culture sector’.
Attempts to find the origins of this term seem a bit fruitless, but it seems to have blossomed into widespread use over the past 4-5 years. It might be just a semantic exercise to analyse a term such as this when little rides upon it (and those that work with me know that I’m not shy in undertaking such semantic exercises) - and this creative and cultural world is populated with amorphous and imprecise terms that lubricate the validation of activity (“acclaimed” anyone?). But when a term like this emerges into the full glare of a national policy programme and is explicitly linked to funding it probably needs some clarity.
We can go back to the Frankfurt School of Adorno and Horkheimer to explore the similarly-titled concept of the ‘culture industry’, as presumably a ‘sector’ is usually something that is closely associated with ‘industry’ or ‘economy’. But the academic analysis of principles is not the same as an interventionist programme that is driven by politicians and enshrined in national statute. Further to this, it seems clear that the current UK interest in the idea of the ‘culture sector’ is driven by an implicit desire to inhabit an alternative to the Frankfurt concept, albeit one that seems to be informed by an assumed notion that all culture is a product of public sector intervention. This is also allied to an instinct that the concept of the creative industries has somehow been rendered untenable due to its surrender to hyperbole. But if this is the case, what exactly is it a ‘sector’ of..?
I wasn’t going to waste time in the meeting asking these questions, but whilst determining what lies at the centre of the concept might be a useful pre-meeting consideration, it’s not as important as understanding its boundaries. It’s this line that determines who gets support and who doesn’t. We know exactly where the boundaries of the Creative Industries lie and can make interventions on that basis (including redrawing the boundaries if necessary). Looking outwith Scotland to a UK Government level the DCMS do have a definition of something they call ‘the cultural sector’ which positions it almost entirely as a subset of their definition of the ‘creative industries’, with the exception of computer games and publishing - the exclusion of which would not likely be a popular policy decision in Scotland. However, computer games and publishing do lie within the broad remit stated in Creative Scotland’s six statutory functions, as they fall within: ‘promoting and supporting industries and other commercial activity the primary focus of which is the application of creative skills’.
Perhaps forced into a definition, the DCMS define the Cultural Sector as those industries with a cultural object at the centre of the industry - and in interventionist policy terms, this largely translates into the preservation of historic ‘artforms’ operating within a rigid hierarchy of cultural value and sustained by public funding. But most sober analysis of what actually happens will uncomfortably show that most of the cultural experiences of most of the people are found outside of this (the market?). The work of Professor David Stevenson, especially his thesis on ‘The cultural non-participant’ is very important here, as is the work of Professor Eleonora Belfiore.
If we really want to consider how we can support a positive and progressive cultural life for our citizens, we need to take into account how public policy considers all the levers at its disposal to make this happen, rather than operating solely within the scope of those to whom it gives money. In other words, rather than looking to maximise the public value that can be gained from all cultural activity, the current approach works with an assumption that all publicly supported cultural activity (cultural sector) is a public good - that all publicly supported cultural activity has an implicit moral virtue and anything that sits outside of the public support landscape is lesser or ignored. This is dangerous and drives people towards market failure, rather than supporting clear public benefit where it can be identified, while helping to build markets for the rest. A review is a great opportunity to reset those principles and boundaries, but if the focus remains back towards those who sit on the supply side (rather than considering an understanding of the demand side) it confirms a form of solipsism, in which significant misunderstandings and misconceptions do little else but create opportunities for the status quo to be sustained. But in terms of the work of the Scottish Government and the review of Creative Scotland, it is not clear whether the definition of the ‘culture sector’ is intended to include those businesses operating without public sector support - and whether it does or it doesn’t include them will have a profound effect on how any resources are applied.
In St Andrew’s House I had my meeting and my opportunity to say my piece, and I am not going to betray the confidence of what was said (but perhaps the fact that I am writing this tells its own story). Like the sectoral representatives high on the facade of St Andrew’s House it seems appropriate to remain mute. Was it wise to go into a high-powered policy meeting and ask the question, “how can you undertake a task to examine whether something is relevant to the ‘culture sector’ when nobody knows what that term means?”. Probably not. But the alternative to asking the question is to accept that an undefined concept lies at the heart of a policy framework that is likely to be spending £90m a year and I’m not entirely comfortable with that.