Arts and Creative Industries Strategy

Baroness Whitaker Excerpts

Thursday 8th December 2022 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Whitaker (Lab)]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Bull, and I congratulate my noble friend Lord Chandos on securing this debate and introducing it so comprehensively and compellingly. I declare interests as vice-chair of the All-Party Parliamentary Groups on Opera and Arts and Heritage, and as a member of the APPGs for Classical Music and Theatre.

I recall the early days of the Arts Council, given great momentum by Harold Wilson and Jennie Lee in the 1960s. I recall, even longer ago, my mother taking me to see the Carl Rosa touring opera on its annual visit to Nottingham, where our nearest arts venue was, playing to a packed audience. North of the Wash, there has always been a great appetite for music, and the rare visits of the great performers were cherished. During the war, the Sadler’s Wells opera and ballet companies toured from Burnley, and the whole of the north-west provided enthusiastic audiences. After the realisation of the Arts Council, affordable public entertainment in my medium-sized Midlands city was transformed. We got a high-calibre theatre, financed to attract brilliant directors and more resident music, all playing to large audiences. To me, these wonderful new experiences were part of the welfare state. Culture is integral to social justice.

How could it not be? Art interprets our world. Sometimes it reconciles us with it. Sometimes it defines what we should not be reconciled with, and confers uplifting and exhilarating transformations of experience. Part of the remit of the Arts Council was always to get more culture out to the provinces—to level up, in fact. Jennie Lee was explicit about that. It is, after all, something of a Labour Party tradition. Clement Attlee, who set up the Arts Council, said that the three pillars of his manifesto were the basic human rights of health, education and culture—surely an essential gloss on eliminating want, idleness, squalor, ignorance and disease.

Why should this human need for the experience of art be confined to a select few? So-called high art is elite only because, over the centuries, it has become out of reach for many. As a consequence, many have thought it not for them. But in the time of Vivaldi, people played his tunes in the street. I have been in rickety little wooden opera houses in Italy where people sang along to the choruses of Bellini, although, admittedly, I never heard that in the Teatro di San Carlo in Naples.

The estimable chair of the Arts Council, Sir Nick Serota, steered high-quality work out of London, as well as continuing the tradition of both enabling London to broaden its “centre of excellence” role for the arts and producing offshoots of equal quality outside it. He arranged support for several initiatives in my present hometown of Newhaven but there was no dumbing down. Surely that is the secret of proper devolution of the arts outside London.

That brings me to the present settlement. There is an inherent problem in achieving nationwide the high standards that we as a nation can well produce without the seedbed power of the great established centres. We should remember that the very successful Opera North sprang from the English National Opera and that London theatres have fostered out-of-London offshoots. We need to nurture our centres of excellence, not least to send out talent to create other centres. The BBC and Channel 4 have played a pivotal role in this development.

This is not simply a philanthropic exercise. As noble Lords have said, and as the excellent Library briefing sets out, our creative industries contribute a sizeable part of our national income. Growth there has been higher than across the economy as a whole since the pandemic and the sector had a faster recovery. The UK is the fifth-biggest exporter of creative services. Their economic effect goes hand in hand with their social impact on well-being, mental health, enlightenment and simple enjoyment.

I hope that we can consider different ways of funding the vital dynamic of arts development—perhaps more that do not depend on divvying up a finite sum of money, thus creating losers and subjecting even some of the winners to short-term budgetary constraints, through fiscal measures such as increased and more widespread tax reliefs. In this way, there could be incentives for growth rather than cuts.

In short, we need to recognise that the arts and the creative sector in general should be acknowledged—unlike in the Chancellor’s Autumn Statement, as my noble friend Lord Howarth and the noble Lord, Lord Foster, who is not in his place, observed—as a unique national asset and one of the best sectors for growth, and should be seed-funded and incentivised accordingly. Our arts strategy must review its mission on and implementation of these principles. The dialogue about national venues and timescales, announced in this morning’s Select Committee hearing by Arts Council England’s CEO, Darren Henley, must continue. Does the Minister, in his lonely state as the second Conservative speaker, agree?