New evidence on Edinburgh's festivals highlights need for funding rethink - Brian Ferguson

Warnings that city’s cultural events are being ‘taken for granted’

Given that Edinburgh’s festivals have long been difficult to navigate, it is not surprising that new research on their impact is hard to get your head around.

The latest analysis on the city’s major cultural events is overdue, thanks to the pandemic, which provides crucial context to the new findings. The research has emerged from what was a pretty fraught year for the summer festivals in particular.

They were finally able to emerge from the shadow of pandemic restrictions, but faced more challenges than I could recall thanks to lingering Covid anxiety, concerns over rising household bills, and the impact of strikes on rail services and rubbish collection.

Edinburgh's festivals have been running since 1947. Picture: Lisa Ferguson

At the time, I felt the festivals made a miraculous comeback, with well over 4,000 shows to choose from two years on from that first post-lockdown August where you could count the number of live experiences on one hand.

Behind the scenes, the reality was tougher, with ticket sales failing to match the expectations of many event organisers and venues. Yet the city’s festivals still managed to attract an overall audience of more than 3.2 million, just short of the attendance at the football World Cup in Qatar.

This figure underpins the latest in a series of studies commissioned by Festivals Edinburgh since the organisation was set up in 2007 in response to growing fears in the city about the risk of the Scottish capital being overtaken by overseas rivals.

The new study and the response from Festivals Edinburgh to its main findings produces a bit of a mixed picture. On first reading, the latest research highlights an increase in the economic impact of the festivals from an estimated £280 million for Edinburgh to £407m last year.

However, a crucial difference with the new analysis is, unlike previous studies, it factors in spending from local residents, taking the value of the festivals to the city to £492m.

Under the new criteria, the number of jobs supported by the festivals is now estimated at 7,150 in Edinburgh alone and more than 8,500 across Scotland. It is no great surprise these new figures are already being used to press the case for further public funding for the festivals.

The instigation of Festivals Edinburgh and the commissioning of regular research into the impact of the festivals was partly down to concerns about them suffering from a culture of complacency given that they are staged every year.

It was telling earlier this week to hear new warnings from Festivals Edinburgh director Julia Amour about the risk of the city’s major events being “taken for granted”, despite all the evidence of their huge local support base and their role as an “economic powerhouse” for the city and the country.

A key issue for the festivals is finally addressing a real-terms decline in funding across the past 15 years, an issue that affects arts organisations and companies the length and breadth of the city.

The Scottish Government is at least five years late in providing the level of support which goes some way to meeting demand, but also matches its own rhetoric about the importance of the nation’s cultural life.

Given it has more evidence than ever before about Scotland’s best-known cultural calling cards, it should be listening to and acting on what the festivals have long argued for.