GAME ON FOR UBER-FEST

Scotland has a festival for just about everything, or does it?

Scotland’s festivals are a massive contributor to the economy

It may be the bleakest period of the year, but my creative juices are boiling over like frazzling cocoa in a non-stick pan and any day now I’ll be submitting a bold idea to lighten our darkest days as we wait for spring. What we need is a festival. I know we already have lots of festivals, but there are still those baleful gaps between one festival ending and the next one starting.

So my bold idea is for Scotland to host not just an ordinary festival – I’m talking a global Olympic Games of Festivals for the booming festivals industry.

Scotland is now the go-to place for a festival – and that’s why we need another one just at this lean period of the year when spirits are low.

There are already more than 25 festivals to fill Scotland’s diary each year – from the widely celebrated Edinburgh International Festival and Glasgow’s Aye Right Book Festival to the lesser known Electric Frog & Pressure Riverside Festival and the Ignition Festival of Motoring.

We just can’t get enough of them. And as if the Edinburgh International Festival and Hogmanay celebrations were not successful enough, the Scottish government has just agreed an extra £300,000 in funding.

It will take total government support for the capital’s festivals to £2.3 million. Money well spent, says Tourism Minister Fiona Hyslop. The festivals, she points out, have brought a total of 4.5 million attendances ‘providing jobs, supporting our tourism industry and contributing £313 million to the Scottish economy’.

Events, conferences, exhibitions, and above all festivals, barely a year passes without some earnest study reminding us that it’s not all guitar strummers, pavement drum bangers, pop-up street drama, stilts and craft beer exhibition vomiting.

A report last summer from BOP Consulting claimed that in 2015, the Edinburgh Festivals were reckoned to have generated ‘new output’ of £280 million in the capital and £316 million across Scotland – the higher figure here reflecting additional nights spent by visitors to other parts of the country.

And the festivals were estimated to have supported 5,660 new full-time equivalent jobs in Edinburgh and 6,021 in Scotland. Overall, t he festivals are t hought to have boosted spending since 2010 by 19 per cent. The increase is greatest across all of Scotland, with additional festival-related output estimated to be 24 per cent higher than in 2010. Festival visitors who stay elsewhere in Scotland as part of their overall trip say the festivals are overwhelmingly either their ‘sole’ (43%) or ‘ very important’ (28%) reason for visiting Scotland.

Now I confess to being a tad sceptical of such figures. How much difference has government funding really made to these out-turns? How much visitor money would still have been spent in hotels, café bars and restaurants without state-supported creative arts activity? What of the costs in terms of wear and tear on infrastructure? And what is the opportunity cost – the projects and activities that fell by the wayside for lack of funding?

Such studies have also been wont to inflate the PR effect of festivals simply by measuring column inches of press coverage, regardless of whether the commentary was favourable or critical. And it blurs the effects of price changes, for example, higher room tariffs in Edinburgh hotels that may boost the overall spending figures rather than extra spending on festival events.

And it would be a poor show if figures for 2015 are not significantly higher, due to the 10 per cent fall in sterling against the Euro and the 18 per cent fall against the dollar since the EU referendum vote last June. This devaluation of the pound works to lower the cost of holidays here for international visitors and is likely to do more for our festivals than all the extra Holyrood grants to those ever noisy arts lobbies.

However, given the pallid performance of other sectors of the economy at present, we need all the extra overseas visitors we can get. While tourism officially accounts for just three per cent of Scotland’s economic output, I suspect the real figure is larger. We are a well-developed tourist destination with many attractions. All told, our tourism economy and related industries support some 170,000 full-time equivalent jobs, mainly in the service sector.

And that tourist offer needs to be constantly updated and refreshed, which is why it’s now surely time for us to host the knock-out global festival for the industr y. And in order to bag a big promotional grant, I’ll gladly be the one on stilts outside Waverley station with the red nose, mouth organ and giant dustbin lids to greet the festivalista movers and shakers.