Lammermuir Festival ‘appalled and saddened’ by Creative Scotland funding cut

Scotland’s Lammermuir Festival has this week confirmed it will not be receiving funding from Creative Scotland’s Open Fund for its 2023 edition. Currently underway, this year’s event will run until 18 September, with news of the withdrawal having been communicated to the festival’s organisers on 22 August, just 16 days before the opening of this year’s event.

In a statement released on Wednesday (13 September), the festival’s chair and trustees said they were ‘appalled and saddened’ by Creative Scotland’s decision and described being encouraged by the public body’s officials to re-apply twice for the financial support. They urged Creative Scotland to reconsider its decision and invited the public to make their voice heard via social media.

Lammermuir Festival chief executive and joint artistic director James Waters said: ‘We are both devastated and completely puzzled by Creative Scotland’s repeated decisions not to fund this year’s festival. For 13 consecutive years Creative Scotland has steadily increased its funding, enabling us to create an event of truly international quality in an area underserved for culture. We have created many performance opportunities for Scotland’s finest classical musicians, successfully delivered large scale community projects and brought economic benefit to the area. Our applications this year have been consistently supported by the Music Department. We simply do not understand what has changed and why this has happened.‘

According to this week’s statement, the reasons given for the application rejection were ‘prioritising applications with activity earlier in the year’, ‘fair work’ and ‘equality, diversity and inclusion’. Festival management are now ‘urgently seeking clarification’ as their third application was ‘refused on a criterion which [Creative Scotland’s] Music Department assessor judged to be fully met.’ The full statement can be found here.

Creative Scotland’s contribution to this year’s Lammermuir festival would have represented 23% of the Festival budget, while last year’s event generated £780,000 of economic benefit for its East Lothian community.

As well as representing a wider existential threat to the festival as a whole, this week’s funding cut puts the festival’s engagement schemes – including this year’s 700-person community opera – in jeopardy. The festival will complete this season by using its financial reserves, but confirms that ‘without Creative Scotland support the Lammermuir Festival’s future is under threat.’