Over 300 artists, arts organisations, academics, think tanks and campaigners have signed an open letter urging new MSPs to prioritise the development and delivery of a Scottish basic income for artists pilot.
A basic income for artists is an unconditional, regular payment that gives creative workers the financial stability to focus on their practice. It is not a grant, not means-tested, and not tied to any specific project or output, it is an income floor that intends to help artists balance their creative and paid work.
Ireland piloted exactly this from 2022 to 2026, providing 2,000 artists with €325 a week. The results were clear: artists spent more time making work, reported improved wellbeing, and independent economic analysis showed that the scheme returned €1.39 for every €1 invested. The Irish Government has since made it permanent, a new cohort of 2000 artists will be selected to receive a basic income for 3 years on a rolling basis from autumn this year.
The SNP made a manifesto commitment to delivering an Irish style basic income for artists pilot, calling it a Scottish Artists Minimum Income. Scottish Labour committed to a pilot of a Creative Enterprise Allowance, a weekly payment to support living costs for up to 1000 creatives and artists with a business plan and personal investment for a creative enterprise. The Scottish Greens manifesto reiterated their commitment to a universal basic income (UBI) for all, saying they would negotiate with the UK Government to secure powers for a UBI pilot and short of that implement a basic income for care leavers pilot like in Wales.
To make a Scottish pilot successful, artists are calling for:
- Close involvement of artists and creative workers in designing the scheme
- Support from all political parties to ensure long-term stability
- Collaboration with unions, cultural organisations, and funders
- A focus on accessibility, especially for those most affected by financial insecurity
Co-Founder of Basic Income for Artists Scotland, Cleo Goodman says,
“We welcome our new MSPs and ask them, as they enter Parliament, to remember the artists, musicians, writers and makers in their constituencies who are carrying our cultural industries yet struggling to make a decent living. A basic income for artists pilot was promised. We are here to make sure that promise is kept and that when the pilot is designed, it is designed with artists’ input and cross party support.”
Kirstin Innes is the award-winning author of the novels Fishnet, Scabby Queen and the forthcoming The Book of Risk, and the non-fiction book Brickwork: A Biography Of The Arches. She’s written extensively for radio and is now also writing for theatre. Kirstin has worked in the arts in Scotland for over two decades, as a journalist, a publicist, and arts administrator and a practitioner. She has put her name to this open letter,
“Life as a professional writer – or artist, or musician – is precarious for all but a very few. Most of us – those without family money or steadily professional spouses – are living deep in our overdrafts: even when the books are on the tables in the shops and we’re asked to give quotes in press releases or go on the radio.
The stress about paying the bills is constant; there are so many layers of unpaid admin around supporting a patchwork existence as a writer out of teaching or running workshops, often involving chasing salaried people in finance departments over invoices processed weeks or months late. Income is never guaranteed, even after the work’s been done; we don’t always know how our next months’ bills will be paid or how the kids will be fed. This all eats away at the time and headspace required to actually create the work!
If a country values the stories it tells about itself and the way it thinks about itself, ensuring that those stories aren’t only told by those who can afford to do it in their leisure time is vital. Ireland, where this scheme was successfully piloted and is now running, has always shown that they value their writers and artists at a civic level; it’s a potentially momentous shift for national culture that Scotland might be going the same way.”
Folksinger Iona Fyfe has also signed the open letter,
“A Basic Income for Artists provides advantageous benefits to all of society – not just the artists who are directly financially supported. To nurture happy, healthy, arts practitioners who are less stressed about their financial circumstances undoubtedly allows the creative to focus on producing meaningful art. Creative practitioners’ contributions to society goes well beyond immediate financial impact, but will nurture the entire wellbeing economy. To nurture artists is to nurture basic human needs.“
Glasgow Culture Conditions is a collective that has formed in the last month to resist the closure of creative spaces in Glasgow and to restore the city’s cultural places and infrastructure. Their spokesperson said,
“Culture Conditions backs a universal basic income for artists as a necessary intervention to address the deepening economic inequalities that shape the cultural sector. Though this cannot be delivered without real consultation with creative trade unions or without tackling the financial pressures crushing venues and hospitality.
Our culture in Glasgow is not “declining”; the conditions for it to flourish still exist: artists with ambitious ideas, communities that need space, and a shared belief that work can happen without unnecessary barriers. Instead its infrastructure has been dismantled by long-term underfunding (still a meagre 0.6% of Holyrood’s budget), the erosion of arts education in schools, and a widening inequality gap that locks out working-class voices. In Glasgow, this is happening in plain sight: a pattern of organised dispossession where vital cultural spaces are priced out, shut down, or repurposed as commercial assets.
A basic income for artists must be unconditional, universal and non-competitive, not another capped bureaucratic scheme as an extension of universal credit, but it must be secured as part of a wider shift for long-term stability, equity and permanence for culture.”
Andy Arnold is a theatre director, former director of Tron Theatre and the founding director of The Arches, Glasgow.
“The Scottish Government boasts constantly about its artistic and cultural activities and yet the vast majority of artists living and working here struggle to make any sort of living from their work.
In Ireland a new scheme exists whereby 2000 artists are given a basic wage of €325 per week and the payback to the country is already looking impressive in terms of artistic output and economic benefit. Scotland can do better rather than follow suit!”
The open letter, which continues to gather signatures, calls on all of Scotland’s political parties and cultural institutions to engage constructively with the proposal and commit to a pilot that is co-designed with artists, evidence-led, and built to last.
Add your name. Tell Scotland’s political parties and cultural institutions to deliver a basic income for artists.
At time of writing the campaign has been reported in The Herald and The Scotsman.
Basic Income for Artists Scotland was founded by Cleo Goodman, former Director of BINS, and Anna Selwood, BINS Trustee.
