THE use of £150,000 by national arts funder Creative Scotland to pay for external decision makers is to be questioned at the Scottish Parliament today.

From May last year, Creative Scotland spent the funds on 38 external assessors - including artists, writers and critics - to judge its funding for arts projects.

The arts body, currently in the midst of controversy of funding decisions, said the extra staff were required as its experts were pre-occupied with deciding long-term funding packages.

MSPs are set to ask why external staff needed to be hired by the funding body and whether such arrangements will be required in the future.

The extra staff included experts in crafts, creative learning, dance, design, digital, literature, visual arts, screen and theatre.

They judged the Open Funding decisions, which support individual artists and companies with Lottery-backed funds of up to £100,000.

The Creative Scotland spokeswoman said: “External Assessors and Panel Members, many of whom are practicing artists, were appointed to bring additional support and capacity to the assessment and decision making of Open Project Funding, whilst our specialist staff dedicated the majority of their time to assessing applications for Regular Funding, 2018-21.

"This ensured that the Open Project and Regular Funding processes continued to be robust and fair, managed by people with appropriate levels of knowledge and expertise."

The three-year regular funding (RFO) decisions, released in January, plunged the arts body into controversy: several high profile theatre, music and disabled arts organisations lost their funding including Catherine Wheels, Hebrides Ensemble, Lung Ha, Visible Fictions and Birds of Paradise.

The assessors are contracted until the end of March this year.

The funding row led to two board members, Ruth Wishart and Maggie Kinloch, to resign, and six companies were subsequently reprieved in a series of U-turns after an emergency board meeting.

Today the chief executive of Creative Scotland, Janet Archer, and its former chair, Ben Thomson, are to be quizzed by MSPs of the Culture Committee of the Scottish Parliament over the funding crisis, and the payments to external consultants is to be raised.

The acclaimed theatre director David Leddy, whose company Fire Exit lost its regular funding in the recent controversial round of spending decisions, last night that that its funding systems were "unfit for purpose" and added: "Creative Scotland urgently needs to overhaul its processes and return to using independent peer assessments of artistic quality as well as peer review panels to assess applications."

A spokeswoman for Creative Scotland said the money for the judges was "sourced from Creative Scotland’s internal operational costs and has provided valuable employment for many in the sectors we support.

"A pool of external assessors were appointed to bring additional support and expertise to Creative Scotland whilst many of our art form specialism staff dedicated their time to assessing applications for Regular Funding, 2018-21.

"This ensured that the assessment of applications to both Funds continued to be robust and fair, managed by people with appropriate levels of knowledge and expertise many of whom are practicing artists, working alongside our senior specialism staff at all times."

The culture committee has taken written submissions from the cultural world on the state of Creative Scotland's funding.

The Federation of Scottish Theatre said that the removal of funds from touring theatre groups and disabled arts "threatened the survival of not just these companies but the sector as a whole, and was viewed with disbelief around the world."

The Scottish Contemporary Art Network said that the length of time the RFO process took was "unnecessary and debilitating with final decisions coming less than three months before the financial year end, effectively undermining the operation of many organisations as a going concern."

It adds: "Many feel that the reversals of some decisions have been heavily influenced by public outcry and not by a clearly informed strategy or rationale.

"Some decisions were reversed and others were not with no clear explanation.

"New ‘strategic funds’ have now been publicly committed to but a lack of clarity, timescale or any apparent strategy behind these new funds has created confusion, anger and increased stress for many of those affected."