Minimum wage for artists is a great idea - but there's one big problem |
The political theatre is in full swing with less than a month to go before the big Holyrood election day. The actors are delivering their well-rehearsed lines, trying desperately to convince us that if they land a seat in office, they can deliver real solutions in the wake of all the spectacle.
This week, the star of the show has been Scotland’s creative industries, with the SNP claiming they will pilot a Scottish Artists' Minimum Income following Ireland’s “basic income for the arts scheme”. The Scottish Greens also back the concept, while Scottish Labour has put forward a promise to pilot a Creative Enterprise Allowance that treats artists as “entrepreneurs”.
In Scotland, the concept of a basic income for artists is a sticking plaster over a gaping wound, but that doesn’t mean that I’m against it. The idea is to remove barriers and ease financial pressures – and it will do that (sort of). What it won’t do is help to solve the admin-ageddon that has been hindering the sector under the SNP’s watch.
Artists and creative workers securing around £15,000 a year under current proposals from the government to make their art, sure is a headline grabber. It’s the kind of policy that rouses the finger-waggers – there goes the SNP and their magical money tree again, they say. But it’s also the kind of initiative that sends a ripple of hope through my cold, despondent heart. Especially after such a precarious and devastating year for the sector.
Ireland’s Basic Income for the Arts (BIA) pilot launched in 2022 and was made permanent in February (a world first). It saw 2,000 cross-disciplinary participants selected by lottery from a pool of about 9,000 applicants. They were paid €325 per week with a net fiscal cost to the taxpayer of just under €72 million. Remarkably, for those who landed a coveted spot in the pilot, it helped their work and their mental health. A cost-benefit analysis found that for every €1 of public money invested, society received €1.39 in return.
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As you would expect, tensions arose between the income recipients and the unlucky artists who didn’t win the lottery. Disabled artists who received the BIA were assessed as having income and lost welfare entitlements because it complicated means-tested benefits. The BIA also did not intersect with the wider funding bureaucracy treadmill; they operated in parallel to each other.
If Scotland just pays artists a basic income and calls it a day, those on Universal Credit could lose some of their benefits. To avoid that, ministers would need to use Scotland’s devolved welfare powers carefully and hammer out a workaround with Westminster.
We don’t yet know how the Scottish Artist Minimum Income (SAMI) would interact with Creative Scotland, but it's worth pointing out how dysfunctional the country’s national arts funding agency is before tacking anything else on.
Creative Scotland rewards bureaucracy rather than artistic merit. An independent review published in November 2025 found the funding application process to be “overly complex, time-consuming, and inaccessible -particularly for smaller organisations and individual applicants”. The result is a parallel economy where applicants hire “consultants” to help write their funding applications. It’s a kick in the pants for anyone who has devoted countless unpaid hours to fill out applications. Research by Poorboy cited in the review found that 91% of respondents who were involved in the Multi-Year Funding process reported harm to their well-being as a direct result of the process.
Ideally, you would want a system where decisions are made by people who actually understand the work rather than civil servants or administrators. But Creative Scotland uses panels “usually made up of Creative Scotland staff” and the panels are not art form specific. A recurring criticism is that “funding increasingly prioritised engagement, accessibility, and sustainability over artistic or creative merit”.
We don’t want to end up with a situation where artists are competing for a basic income just so they can afford to fill out scores of paperwork in the hopes of securing Creative Scotland funding. It should be designed to cover the individual income floor, while Creative Scotland undergoes a DOGE-like reckoning. Strip it back, sack all the managers, and sort out the paperwork problems that have been plaguing the body for as far back as anyone can remember.
Instead of rewarding form-fillers over artists, we should be looking at models that allow artists to oversee decision-making. Policy should approach arts and culture as a necessary public good. As much as I like the idea of artists getting a basic income, let’s be realistic. It would take years to get off the ground, and those are years that artists teetering on a cliff edge don’t have.
In Glasgow, we witnessed the precarity of arts organisations first-hand with the Trongate 103 crisis. City Property, which is wholly owned by Glasgow City Council, terminated the leases of all seven arts and charity tenants at a culture hub in the city centre. Tenants were given four weeks to leave or sign new leases that proposed fourfold rent increases, uncapped service charges, plus repair liabilities transferred to tenants. The council committed to developing a “Cultural Protection Strategy”, but it should have cleaned house and made clear that city-owned property occupied by arts organisations should be treated as a tool of cultural policy and not a commercial asset.
Glasgow City Council is consistently toothless when it comes to City Property. The council should be formally instructing its property arm to include a cultural tenant protection clause on all leases to cultural and community tenants in designated cultural hubs that limits how much capital they can try to squeeze out of vulnerable organisations. Or just remove City Property as a landlord altogether via community asset transfer.
Now I bring this up because the council did not do that, and universal income for artists can only go so far when creative spaces are being lost at pace. The same policy document (if it ever comes out) for SAMI needs to have a cultural space protection framework. One that directs local authorities to insert these protection clauses into all leases from council-owned or managed buildings to arts organisations and allows for community asset transfer as an escalation route.
The next Scottish Government needs to crack the whip on the bureaucracy threatening the arts just as much as it needs to protect creative hubs and get funding into the hands of artists. Or else it's curtain call for Scottish arts and culture.
Marissa MacWhirter is a columnist and feature writer at The Herald, and the editor of The Glasgow Wrap. The newsletter is curated between 5-7am, bringing the best of local news to your inbox each morning without ads, clickbait, or hyperbole. Oh, and it’s free. She can be found on X @marissaamayy1