Creative Industries: Creating Jobs and Productivity Growth

Baroness McIntosh of Hudnall Excerpts

Thursday 6th February 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness McIntosh of Hudnall (Lab)]

I thank my noble friend Lady Thornton for introducing this important debate and, like everyone else, I look forward to the maiden speeches that are yet to come. I remind the House of my former interest, having had most of my professional career in the arts sector, and I should declare an interest that my daughter runs a company funded by the Arts Council. My noble friend Lady Thornton gave us many reasons to be cheerful. I was delighted to hear them, and I am glad to endorse them. We are rightly proud of what our creative industries have achieved. We have been blessed—a word she used several times—for many years, and still are, by the brilliance and originality of our people, the individual performers, writers, designers, producers, technicians, musicians and many others who have changed the face of the industries they work in.

This did not happen by accident. Most of them were nurtured, initially in school and subsequently through live arts organisations, large and small, sustained nowadays by armies of freelancers who make up the rich cultural ecosystem which this country has developed over decades and which, I am sorry to say, is now significantly depleted. We should not take our brilliance in the creative industries for granted. Others are already just as good or catching up fast, and we cannot rely on our historic success to keep us competitive. I ask noble Lords to notice the variety of Oscar nominations this year, just as one example, but let us also be delighted by the continuing brilliance of Aardman Animations. Who does not love Wallace and Gromit?

We are in the middle, as others have said, of the most significant technological revolution of our time: artificial intelligence. Maybe one day it will replace human creativity entirely, as we are now being warned it might. Meanwhile, the Government define creative industries as those,

“which have their origin in individual”—

I emphasise “individual”—

“creativity, skill and talent and which have a potential for wealth and job creation through the generation and exploitation of intellectual property”.

That is a very significant element in this debate, as we have already discovered and will continue to discover. I am not going to mention the Data Access Bill, but I am just saying.

We are talking about people and what they create, which is why I want to talk a bit about education, as the noble Lord, Lord Berkeley, has done already. To grow innovators in all disciplines we need an education system that actively encourages curiosity, challenge and, above all, imagination. We know that over recent years focus on the EBacc has resulted in a serious decline in arts subjects in maintained schools. I say in maintained schools because that is not the case in independent schools, and that creates its own inequalities as we go forward. I refer the Minister to the most recent figures from the Sutton Trust. I very much hope that the upcoming curriculum review will start to put that right. I mean absolutely no disrespect to teachers and school leavers when I say that our education system has been too focused on knowledge rather than on inquiry. Teachers too often feel constrained to teach to the test, and we observe too much anxiety in young people about getting things right rather than thinking independently.

Do innovation and creativity not rely substantially on brave and unexpected imaginative leaps? Arts subjects, properly taught, demand intellectual discipline and critical skill, as others have already said, but they start and end with imagination. If we are to preserve the primacy of human thought and creative originality over artificial alternatives, we must first understand, value and support them from cradle to grave and do all we can to protect the livelihoods of our creators within a thriving cultural economy fed by a healthy, diverse pipeline of new talent. If we do not, we risk losing that pre-eminence which we are so keen to celebrate today.