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If I, as the MSP for Edinburgh Central, can join the MSP for Skye in talking about Skye, I will say that I am strongly in favour of the visitor levy. Such levies are the norm in parts of the world that have significant tourist numbers. As people who travel, we are used to that, and I am perfectly content to make a financial contribution to the places that I visit to ensure that the visitor experience is everything that it can be and that the quality of life and the public services of the people who live in that place are as well supported as possible.

Obviously, this issue gets to the heart of the debate about empowering localities to make appropriate decisions for their locality and the extent to which there is national guidance around what are the good things to be thinking about in that regard. No doubt, we will be talking about these issues at greater length at another time, but I think that the literally millions of people who visit places such as Edinburgh will have little to no difficulty in paying the kind of levy that they would be paying in any other capital as part of their overnight costs. I think that that revenue stream could be transformational in many ways. However, getting maximum benefit from such a funding stream will involve local decision makers having innovative ideas and focusing on the right areas.

Getting through the Covid period has been an immense challenge not only for that part of the cultural world but across the whole cultural world. It was, I think, the second-worst impacted part of the Scottish economy. For people working in the cultural and arts community, it was an extremely testing time and I am proud of the level of resource that the Scottish Government made available to individuals and cultural organisations to ensure that they could get through it.

Now, we are faced with the resources within which we will have to live in the years to come and we will have to work very closely with all parts of the cultural community to ensure that we are able to protect and foster it as best we can, given those constraints. Whether one is in a smaller, organic, community-based cultural organisation or involved in a very large project that requires a lot of funding, everybody will be looking at the bottom line and will try to work out how they can manage, given the resource constraints that exist. We will all have to be innovative within the means that are at our disposal to ensure that we are able to deliver the level of cultural provision that we all want to see.

We are going to have a referendum, are we not?

I am not saying that there is no reason to worry. I care passionately about our heritage—as do all the members of the committee, I suspect. Our built heritage, much of which is very old, is facing environmental degradation. That leads to instability and dangers, which lead to the requirement to maintain and support castles and other old buildings and all the rest of Scotland’s built heritage. That was going to be a challenge with or without a resource spending review, and would have been a challenge if we were sitting here discussing the budget line, which we are not.

I acknowledge that there is a major challenge for Historic Environment Scotland in general, because of the nature of the estate and the nature of the decline in the built infrastructure, so we will have to work very closely together to work out how we can maximise the resources that HES has, from us and from elsewhere, to make sure that we can protect our historic sites around the country. To stress a point that Kate Forbes and I have made already, I say that those issues are at the heart of discussions with cultural organisations, trade unions, trustees and so on. Those conversations are happening because of information that we now have from the resource spending review.

It behoves all of us to be as imaginative as possible in working out what we can do to protect the built heritage in Scotland, with the resources that we have in constrained circumstances. I am the first to acknowledge that it will not be a simple task; it will not be easy not just in a financial sense, but in relation to all other considerations, given the size of the estate for which HES is responsible. We could probably spend the whole evidence session just on HES and the nature of the challenge that it is facing. It is absolutely at the top of my inbox and is an area in which we in the Government need to work with our agencies and arm’s-length external organisations to ensure that they can do what they are supposed to do.

Yes. I am sorry to take issue with you, Mr Cameron, but I am not sure that it is a vexed question. We can differ honourably—as we do—on how we would vote in such a referendum but I hope that, as democrats, all of us believe in having democratic votes. When a Government is returned in an election on a platform for a vote to be held, as democrats, we should all agree that that is what should happen.

There is a cost associated with a referendum, and there are costs associated with Scottish Parliament elections and UK Parliament elections. Is somebody reasonably suggesting that having Scottish Parliament elections is a vexed question? I hope not. Is somebody reasonably suggesting that having UK Parliament elections is a vexed question? Of course they are not. Those are democratic votes and, as a democrat, I respect the results of the Scottish Parliament elections last year, in which a majority of the parliamentarians who were elected believed that there should be a vote. The people voted for that.

The Government has set out its timetable. I gently suggest to Mr Cameron that it would be helpful if his UK Government colleagues were not just as amenable but as respectful of democratic election outcomes in Scotland as the former Prime Minister David Cameron was. That would be helpful, because it is not a vexed question. The decision has been made. The electorate has asked for a referendum, and that is what should happen.

You have raised a question before about the Scottish Government playing a significant role in funding that from a public sector point of view. I would need to write to Mr Ruskell about where we are with UK Government funding in relation to that.

I would say, in general terms, that a great deal of work is going into the world cycling championships. The committee will be aware of this, but people watching the proceedings might not be: the event is the first example of a world cycling championship bringing together all the different cycling disciplines—I think that there are 13; please do not ask me to name them all—and it will take place at venues throughout Scotland. It is unprecedented in scale—I think that I am right in saying that it is of the order of the Commonwealth games. It is a huge event. A major part of the considerations around it involve how it is organised and how it is funded in these constrained times. However, an awful lot of thought is also going into what the societal benefits of such an event should be and what the event will do to make more of us use our bikes and change our attitudes to health and wellbeing. There are cash questions—absolutely—and I will write to you with the latest statistics on them. However—and this goes to the heart of the points that we have been making—there are health and wellbeing considerations that cannot be enumerated in cash terms.

I will add to that. Maurice Golden has thrown a pebble in the pond. When I talked before about the visitor numbers for the national museum of Scotland being at 1.5 million rather than 3 million, a light went on for me—I do not know whether it did for anyone else. Given that we have not seen the full return of international visitors, it seems that we are seeing that domestic visitors have more confidence. We may call it a staycation, or it may just be people not travelling very far to go to different cultural institutions.

That gives us hope that part of the small-c cultural change that there has been because of the Covid pandemic is that people are more open to exploring what is on their doorstep. Perhaps there is an opportunity in that for us all in realising that that phenomenon is happening, and that it brings societal advantages if absolutely everybody is able to make use of cultural institutions. I thank Maurice Golden for asking the question in the way that he did, because it has made me want to understand that situation a bit better. It should not just be a passing fad; there is a way of keeping that change while also attracting people to come back. We are all beginning to see more international visitors on our streets, and they are very welcome. The question is what we can do to ensure that people who have previously not visited cultural organisations and institutions close to home are indeed doing that.

Incidentally, people were queuing outside the national museum of Scotland yesterday before it opened, which I thought was a tremendous straw in the wind. Walking past, I could hear that there were international visitors, but also a lot of families and people who were clearly from here or not far from here and wanted to wait in the rain on Chambers Street to go to the museum. That is a good sign. There is something in Mr Golden’s question that is definitely worth better understanding.

Forgive me: I should probably have mentioned health boards in my reply to Sarah Boyack about the partners that are part of the process. I go back to my telescope metaphor. Regardless of which way you look through the telescope, you are going to work back from the individual, to who thinks that an individual needs intervention or support in a form that has not conventionally been prescribed. That will involve a number of organisations—national Government, local government, health boards, the culture sector and individual general practices. There are probably other links in the chain that I have not mentioned. Everybody will need to play a part. Sarah Boyack’s point on strategy was well made. For me, it is important to have confidence that all the links in the chain will play their part.

We can have as many strategies as we like, but social prescribing is relatively new, in terms of adoption of successful models that have made it happen. We are trying to introduce it as quickly as possible. However, making it work will involve a lot of organisations, institutions and—at the end of the day—individuals.

In the evidence session with Humza Yousaf, we talked about GPs in the Western Isles, for example, taking out their little contact books to tell patients the organisations that are available that they could make use of in social prescribing. We have to make sure that social prescribing is available everywhere and not just in some places. I acknowledge that a lot of links are needed in the chain to make it work and that there is a broad geographical spread. We need to make sure that it is available to all, because healthcare should be there for everybody, everywhere, at the point of need.

The point is well made that this is something that we need to get on with. However, there is also awareness that if it were simple it would have been done already. A mixture of pull and push will be required to make sure that it happens. To go back to the conversations that I was having yesterday, I note that people are very aware of that and are turning their attention to how they can play their part.

Of course, Mr Cameron left out the other option: that the UK Government respects the result of the Scottish Parliament election and the Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, acts in exactly the same way that his predecessor, David Cameron, did. As the Mr Cameron who is on this committee knows, Scottish politics is full of UK Governments saying no, no, no, yes. I invite him to work with me to persuade the UK Government to live up to its democratic undertakings. After all, the UK Government is particularly keen on going around the world saying that the UK is a democratic country that upholds the highest standards of human rights, democracy and the rule of law. It would be really nice if it did that in this case as well.

My colleague Neil Gray has been dealing with that matter, and internal communication is circulating on that. It would probably make more sense for me to write to the committee, because I am sure that Mr Golden is not the only member of the committee to want to understand the background to all that.

However, I make the general point that, over the coming years, funding constraints will impact organisations that do good work. Would I wish it to be so? No; I would far rather that we did not have the constrained circumstances that we have. I underline this point as we come towards the end of the evidence session, because it is important: we as the Government have to live within our means, because this Government does not have the normal levers at its disposal that other Governments do, such as the ability to borrow. Would I wish for us to be able to maintain our spending commitments as had been envisaged in less constrained times? Absolutely. Will issues come along where people, quite rightly, want to know whether the appropriate decision is being made? Yes; that is a perfectly legitimate approach to take, but I acknowledge the fact that difficult decisions will have to be made.

One of the challenges, which are also opportunities, on which we will have to be as good as we can be in Government is, if there is a traditional funding line that has supported a good organisation—Maurice Golden has highlighted one—how we ensure that there are other, parallel funding streams that might be able to bridge the gap. I am not necessarily saying that that is the case in the instance to which Maurice Golden referred, but we need to ensure that we get maximum value out of the resources that we have in order to maintain and support the organisations that are operating. However, I commit to writing back to the convener on the specific case so that Maurice Golden and colleagues can have better insight into it.