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Edinburgh’s festivals are struggling to secure enough corporate sponsorship more than one year after an activist campaign led asset manager Baillie Gifford to withdraw funding from literary festivals, despite fresh state funding bolstering this year’s events.
The Edinburgh International Festival, one of the most important events on the UK cultural calendar, will this year have a fifth fewer performances than in 2024, despite earlier this year receiving a £11.75mn three-year deal from the government culture agency Creative Scotland.
Adjusted for inflation, the settlement only matches funding levels of 2008. A record £34mn uplift for culture, including support for festivals more than doubling to £3.6mn, forms part of the Scottish government’s commitment to raise culture spending to £100mn a year by 2028.
The injection of state cash comes amid a troublesome period of fundraising for the festivals, which depend on the private sector and individuals for up to 30 per cent of their budgets.
“So, while we are grateful, it is not a great celebration,” said Francesca Hegyi, chief executive, who has to plan acts years in advance. “It enables us to continue with more confidence but doesn’t allow us to deliver on our ambitions — it’s a mixed picture.”
She said EIF’s budget remained a “country mile” away from international peers, such as festivals in Salzburg and Avignon, and called for a more “sophisticated conversation” about the UK backing the kind of soft power on show in Edinburgh every August.
The financial picture has also been complicated by the “wholesale collapse of arts sponsorship”, Hegyi added, after activists targeted various events, causing “reticence” among corporates.
Last year, UK book festivals, including Edinburgh’s, ended sponsorship deals with Baillie Gifford after pressure group Fossil Free Books urged authors to boycott the events because of the asset manager’s investments in companies accused of supplying technology for Israel’s war in Gaza, as well as the fossil fuel industry.
Julie Finch, global chief executive of Hay Festival, said the arts funding landscape remained “competitive” but this year’s edition had brought in money from the UK government and the Rothschild Foundation.
Last week, the Scottish government allocated the Edinburgh International Book Festival a three-year £300,000 grant for schools programming, on top of a £1.88mn, three-year settlement from Creative Scotland.
Fossil Free Books welcomed government funding as “a win for everyone”.
This stability of multiyear funding allows the books festival to “plan more confidently”, as opposed to the “hand to mouth, year to year”, funding allocations, said Jenny Niven, EIBF’s chief executive.
New sponsors helping to plug the gap include Edinburgh crime author Sir Ian Rankin. “We are optimistic but it’s a different environment, with corporate sponsorship budgets going down,” she said. “We are not alone in finding it difficult.”
The Fringe is also searching to replace key sponsor Johnnie Walker in a “really, really tough environment”, said Tony Lankester, chief executive.
The world’s largest arts gathering received £300,000 from the Scottish government this year, which it hopes to replicate going forward, as well as annual charitable support of £40,000 from Baillie Gifford. It is nonetheless having to reallocate staff resources to core functions such as the box office, he added.
“We just have to roll with those punches,” he said.
