Give Edinburgh fringe the same status as Olympics, departing head urges

The Edinburgh festival fringe should be given the same status as major sporting events like the Olympics or the Commonwealth Games, its outgoing chief executive has said.

Shona McCarthy, who stands down this week after nine years running the fringe, said its needs were routinely ignored by public authorities, who expected it to fend for itself despite its status as the world’s largest arts festival.

It sold 2.6m tickets last year, yet its artists and crew struggled to find affordable accommodation; its millions of visitors endured mobile phone “dead zones” in the city centre; and public transport was ill-equipped to support the event’s scale.

The Olympics and the Commonwealth Games were given dedicated athletes’ villages and extra transportation, and organisers ensured working wifi.

“I still don’t understand why these things are treated so differently,” McCarthy said, in an interview with the Guardian.

She welcomed what she described as the Scottish government’s “fantastic” decision to pledge £200m over the next three years to invest in Scottish artists and culture, but said that package failed to support the fringe directly.

“You can’t just go with something of the scale of the fringe, of the global importance and brand of the fringe, you can’t say: ‘Well, we support all the artists to go to it, so therefore it’s fine.’

“You would never say that about the Commonwealth Games or the Olympics. We’re hosting an event of that scale in this city every single year without any of that central infrastructure that you would automatically get with a sporting event.”

She called on the city and government to help with “the unlocking of every single piece of capacity” in the Edinburgh area to house performers and crew. “I think if we were a major sporting event, that kind of infrastructure would have been put in place,” she added.

McCarthy also said the city desperately needed mobile phone signal boosters as festivalgoers were often unable to secure tickets on their mobiles, which cut income for the fringe as well as venues. “This is not rocket science. This is something that can absolutely be sorted,” she said.

McCarthy, one of the fringe’s longest-serving chief executives, said she was “really surprised” when she arrived in Edinburgh in 2016 to find there were no late-running train services to accommodate ticket holders from outside the city, such as those returning to Glasgow.

She had “lobbied like crazy” for ScotRail, the train operator, and Network Rail to put on later trains and allow ticket booths on stations.

One other success was the recent decision by Queen Margaret University to set up an artists’ village on its small campus just outside Edinburgh every August. That needed to be replicated, she said.

McCarthy was more optimistic that strategic planning might happen after Angus Robertson, the Scottish culture secretary and MSP for Edinburgh Central, announced a new festivals partnership group and pledged additional funding for the fringe.

Unlike the Edinburgh international festival or the book festival, the fringe is not a centrally curated event. Its shows are the responsibility of thousands of producers. The Fringe Society coordinates ticket sales and the main programme, provides strategic direction and helps facilitate events.

“I think there is an understanding from Scottish government that the Fringe Society has fallen between the cracks as the central charitable organisation that provides core services to the festival,” she said.

McCarthy said she feared that the fringe was still the object of a form of snobbery, with its events seen as mid-market or amateur, serving instead as an opportunity for the city and its businesses to make a profit.

She said the city council had massively increased costs for producers. It now charged a £1,000 licence fee for every raised platform and charged the full hourly cost for every parking space if a street was closed for festival events. “This festival is not seen as something that you invest in,” she said. “It’s seen as something that’s a money-spinner that you can extract from. And I think that’s a real problem.”

The council argues it is striving to increase funding for the festivals with a new 5% visitor levy on overnight stays, which will be levied from October this year on all stays that start after July 2026.

Part of the £50m raised each year will improve tourism infrastructure. Councillors argue the city’s housing crisis is year-round, so they plan to earmark £5m towards a new affordable housebuilding programme.

The Covid-19 crisis, which forced the Edinburgh festivals to shut down in 2020 for the first time since 1947, had helped the Fringe Society rediscover its core purpose, she added. That was “about freedom of expression; that’s about cultural democracy; that’s about the audience themselves as the curator of their own experience. That’s about inclusion and access and the right to have a voice.”