Economy: Creative Sector

Baroness Jones of Whitchurch Excerpts

Thursday 20th March 2014 Grand Committee

[Baroness Jones of Whitchurch (Lab)]

My Lords, I am extremely grateful to my noble friend Lady Andrews for tabling this debate and for her excellent contribution. I also thank all noble Lords who have spoken. There was so much I wanted to say in the debate but in the short time I have I will limit myself to three quick points.

First, it is clear that the creative industries are already a success story but, sadly, they are an untapped source of considerable potential economic growth for the future. We have heard that there have recently been some piecemeal but welcome initiatives to boost skills in this area. For example, we hope that the creative employment programme, launched by the Arts Council and overseen by the National Skills Academy, will support thousands of new apprenticeships and paid internships. That is to be welcomed, as is the £16 million of funding to Creative Skillset to develop skills in film, TV, animation and games. A number of noble Lords have mentioned other initiatives. However, these initiatives are small-scale and disparate and serve to highlight the Government’s failure, across departments, to grasp and nurture our global economic potential and the human potential which lies behind it.

Secondly, as a number of noble Lords have said, nowhere is this inconsistency more stark than in the Government’s own education programme. Michael Gove has undoubtedly been allowed to sideline the teaching of creative subjects in the curriculum and the new league tables still put pressure on schools to drop drama, art, music, design and the other creative subjects. This is taking its toll: GCSE applications are falling across these subjects. I hope that the noble Lord will respond to that criticism.

At the same time, in education, we have seen the decimation of the careers service, so that young people have no concept of the wide range of work opportunities that exist in the modern creative sector. A recent report showed that teachers were so out of touch with what the job opportunities are in this sector that they just gave young people the same careers advice that they had been given at school. Noble Lords do not need me to tell them how far the world has moved on since then. Meanwhile, the government squeeze on the funding of undergraduate arts courses has seen creative and digital courses lose most of their teaching grant. Again, combined with the rising tuition fees, that risks damaging the supply of young qualified performers, writers and designers for the future.

Thirdly, much of the current government spending on arts and culture is badly skewed towards London and is failing to play its part in rebalancing our regional economic recovery. That has been compounded by the starving of funds to local government. As we all know, that has cut funding to community arts organisations, which in the past would have been the place where the next generation of artists had their first experience of participation. It is not clear how that vacuum is to be filled. Where will young people go to put their first foot before the footlights?

It is interesting that the recent IPPR report made a very imaginative suggestion, which is the idea of creative clusters around the regions, building on a local specialism; for example, Manchester could concentrate on fashion and games, Cardiff on TV and film, and Bristol on software and design. That is a very imaginative idea. With support from BIS and DCLG, such initiatives could play a vital role in wider regional regeneration. However, it needs the political will to drive an agenda such as this.

As the noble Baroness, Lady Bonham-Carter, made clear, the whole situation is made worse because non-white people and those from poorer backgrounds do not find any places in the limited training and careers opportunities on offer. There is a danger that we are sliding into dominance by a white, south-east urban elite in this sector, and nobody wants that.

It is a frequent mantra in these debates that we need more joined-up government, and I do not pretend that that is easy. However, I also know that DCMS does not have the funding or the clout to deliver radical change alone. I hope that the noble Lord will address those concerns in his response.