Kirsten Hogg reflects on the first minister’s funding announcement at this year’s Gathering
When I first started in policy more years ago than I’d care to remember, getting a minister to come along to your event was great, because they’d always try to announce something that your organisation wanted. As the years have gone by, that has been less and less often the case.
Since I joined SCVO, I’ve been part of four Gathering sessions with three different first ministers.
In 2022 I wrote in TFN that we heard only warm words from Nicola Sturgeon, and in 2023 Humza Yousaf told us to stand by for a budget announcement that a fortnight later failed to materialise. So this year’s input from First Minister John Swinney stands out for actually containing a concrete commitment.
He told us about the 45 organisations that will receive a share of £60 million annually for two years, as part of a pilot approach to multi-year funding, and he told us that the passing of the budget meant the Scottish Government had financial certainty which in turn meant that there is “no reason why we [the Scottish Government] cannot give funding certainty” to the sector.
Now, don’t get me wrong. I know that multi-year funding ideally needs to be three, five or even 10 years to make a significant difference; I know that we’ve already had multi-year pilots, and that we largely know already what the learning from these ones will be; I know that not all organisations funded by the Scottish Government have funding certainty yet; and I know that finding out in February or March what your funding will be from April still poses significant challenges. But I also know that the things that were announced last week aren’t nothing, and that they will make a difference to the organisations that will benefit from them.
The Scottish Government has committed to achieving fairer funding for the sector by 2026, concentrating their efforts on multi-year funding, timely notifications and improved reporting requirements.
Those represent just a fraction of SCVO’s Fair Funding asks, and feel to me as if they should be easy to deliver, but (thankfully) I don’t have to make them work in the context of an enormous bureaucracy and incredible financial complexity.
While I might criticise the speed and scale of the progress, I don’t envy the cabinet secretary for social justice and her officials the internal battles they are valiantly fighting. Those circumstances aren’t a get out of jail free card for the government, but I do think they make it important for us to celebrate even the smallest of steps on the way to the widespread reform that we want to see.
In the run up to the 2026 parliamentary elections, SCVO will keep up the pressure on the sector’s Fair Funding asks, and more information on how you can get involved in that will be available in coming weeks.
Kirsten Hogg is SCVO’s head of policy and research.
