Economy: Creative Industries

Baroness Kidron Excerpts

Thursday 18th June 2015 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Kidron (CB)]

The creative economy is built on the skills, talent and imagination of the many. The notion of the exceptional is dispelled by a sector that, as we have already heard, provides 1.7 million jobs. While it is quite right to celebrate it, it is far from clear how new skills, talent and imagination are to be nurtured in order that we fulfil the promise of this vibrant sector.

My interests in this area are many. I am a working film director, I run a small production company, I am married to a playwright, I am a president of Voluntary Arts and a trustee of several organisations that have arts and education at their core. Rather than pointing out my own overcommitted schedule, I am just trying to make clear that I am embedded in the communities of which I wish to speak.

Her Majesty’s Government and the coalition before them supported the creative industries handsomely, with tax credits, loan schemes, enterprise guarantees and innovation funds, but these welcome investments do not automatically ensure exponential growth. Like any supply chain, it is only as good as its weakest link. So while the Government and the Treasury have been fair to the creative industries at this end of the chain, to make good on this investment we must look more carefully at the supply side.

For my generation of artists and creators, going to university was free, as were art school, film school and adult learning. There was a commitment to the arts as a tool of social mobility. Many of us remember commedia dell’arte and Brecht in primary school, mountains of clay and the help of the local potter, free recorders and violins—all standard interventions in perfectly unexceptional state schools. When we left our family homes, often much younger than 25, we lived in cheap flats or unwanted social housing on housing benefit. Small enterprise grants, schemes from the local council or a lowly industry job for which you were paid kept us going. We were not lazy or disaffected; we were writing, painting, imagining and making work while modestly receiving investment—I believe that is the word—from the state. It was an unintended consequence of our fervent activity that the faces that fill our screens, play our concert halls, represent us at the Venice Biennale, claim their BAFTAs, Tonys or Oscars and write our national stories are now proud contributors to the £76 billion that the creative industries contribute to the creative economy.

I do not want to misrepresent my community. There is a great deal of interest in making money and creating wealth, but there is a very indirect line between investment in the creators and the actual creation of that wealth. It is a delicate ecosystem that is not obedient to the laws of economics that one might reasonably apply to manufacturing or to more tangible services. Nevertheless, it is one that delivers very real economic results.

Our current pre-eminence on the world stage in the arts and creative industries is the result of multiple routes, many pockets of support and a fair amount of public tolerance that allowed a diverse population to develop its talent, skill and imagination. From this rosy past, we might consider the context for today’s young people. It is simply a tragedy that successive Education Ministers have devalued the arts in a structural way within the curriculum and by successive public utterances that suggest that studying science is the only way to job security and well-rewarded employment. This simply is not so. Our creative industries are burgeoning. We have an impending skills gap of at least 750,000 in digital alone—a sector that repeatedly cries out for those with maths and art, which is actively discouraged by our school system. Outside the creative industries lie another 950,000 creative jobs; that is one in 12 jobs in the UK.

What about student debt that has sucked the less privileged out of the humanities, arts and performing arts as they listen to the mood music and take a more cautious approach to their education or bypass further education altogether, or the proposal in front of us to deny housing benefit to the under-25s? These are the same under-25s who are routinely working for months on end as interns for no money in order to build their CVs, which automatically excludes the less well-off and those whose family homes are not in the few urban centres that house the creative industries. My concern is not about any single policy but a matrix of policies, of which these are but a few, creating insurmountable obstacles to the talented youngsters who might otherwise have been our next generation of creatives.

The Government may not feel that they have the resources to tackle all aspects of this environment, but they can give everyone a fair start. STEAM not STEM is what we need in our schools. STEAM not STEM is what the Commons CMS report, Supporting the Creative Economy, recommended. So do the CBI and an increasing number of mainstream employers who bemoan the lack of critical thinking and creative skills in our graduates. So too do Professor Ian Livingstone and Alex Hope, who worked on the computer curriculum, Sir Ken Robinson, teachers and head teachers and, indeed, noble Lords on all sides of this House.

I ask the Minister: when are we going to see arts, technology and science presented as an equal and interconnected whole, both in the curriculum and with the right mood music to accompany it? Without this commitment from government, I fear that the next generation will be a pale, posh shadow of the current one.

I turn from schools to our broader community. There is a tendency when talking about creativity to insist on the notion of the individual genius. I have been lucky enough to know a number of artistic geniuses. Even the more narcissistic and self-regarding of them would say that great art is made by groups of people and not by individuals, schools of thought, traditions of practice and active participation of colleagues; that their own practice is made possible by reflecting other people’s creativity, both past and present. This misconception is important, because the powerful notion that creativity is the realm of the exceptional individual casts a shadow over the creative ecosystem. People voluntarily coming together in groups is often seen as secondary to the real thing.

As president of Voluntary Arts, I recently attended the Epic Awards. One went to a music studio in Kirriemuir in Scotland that gives expression and skills to dozens of young people living in isolated villages across the valleys. Another went to two women from County Donegal who designed tiny micro-libraries, each no bigger than a bollard, open 24 hours a day, working on an honour system and situated in places of natural beauty. The local community walks or cycles to borrow a book, exercising the mind and body simultaneously. A third award went to the inspirational woman who, from her home in Birmingham, co-ordinates 170 other devoted knitters to knit prosthetics for women who cannot have, or who are waiting for, reconstructive breast surgery.

These outposts of creativity do more than simply charm. They are part of our national narrative of what it is to be an engaged citizen. From this great pool of an estimated 10 million UK citizens who pursue voluntary cultural activity emerge inventors, designers, small companies, creative services and individual artists. They are participants and wealth makers in our creative economy. I therefore ask the Minister to make a meaningful commitment to this important and much-overlooked group by protecting arts provision and the spaces to convene at local level. This is best done by ring-fencing arts budgets in the local authority settlements, or we will lose the fragile infrastructure upon which these communities depend.

I end by mentioning someone who is both an artist and a scientist. My friend of many years, Sir Antony Gormley, has an artistic practice that starts with the extraordinary task of wrapping himself in cling film and making a cast of his own body from which he then makes his sculpture, often on a monumental scale. There is no rational explanation for why this process should result in work of such meaning for populations as diverse as Gateshead, Aboriginal communities in Australia and the inhabitants of New York or St Petersburg. However, I have seen first hand how his work electrifies and moves people all over the planet. Sir Antony is a net contributor to tourism, our GVA, our soft power and our national identity. He employs artists and engineers, he works with foundries and galleries worldwide. No government policy could engineer such an endeavour as his—it is beyond reason; it is art—but government policy has the power to invite all our citizens to take their creativity seriously, and at the very least it should attempt to do no harm.

In a conversation last week, Professor Brian Cox said, “Physics has taught us that there was a beginning and that there will be an end, but it is art that will help us understand how to spend the vast time in between”. Without the next generation of creative children, without creative communities up and down the country, without the freedom to invent new artistic practice that is neither measurable nor sensible, we threaten the future growth of our creative industries and by extension its contribution to the economy. Perhaps more importantly still we may find that we have an inadequate supply of artists to imagine how we might spend the vast time that Professor Cox informs us we shall have to fill between the beginning and the end.