Economy: Culture and the Arts

Earl of Glasgow Excerpts

Thursday 13th June 2013 Lords Chamber

[The Earl of Glasgow]

My Lords, as my noble friend Lady Wheatcroft has implied, perhaps the Government do not always fully appreciate the important part that British culture and the arts play in our economy. According to Creative and Cultural Skills, the UK has the largest cultural economy in the world as a proportion of its GDP. Businesses engaged in Britain’s heritage and arts employ several million people and attract 14 million overseas visitors a year, and the creative industries account for 10.6% of UK exports.

In the competition for the world’s leading visitor destination, London’s museums and art galleries are challenged only by Paris for the greater number of visitors each can attract. The London theatre is now doing too well, as the noble Lord, Lord Grade, mentioned. Due largely to the huge number of foreign visitors to London it is almost impossible to get tickets for plays such as “The Audience”, “Othello” at the National, “The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time”, “Once”, or the admittedly American, “The Book of Mormon”. You have to book ahead if you want seats for the longer-running “Matilda”, “One Man, Two Guvnors”, or “War Horse”, while it seems that “Les Miserables”, “The Phantom of the Opera”, “The 39 Steps” and “The Woman in Black” will run forever. We do not talk about “The Mousetrap” any more. The downside to this success story is that there are not enough theatres available to accommodate some of the excellent productions from our provincial cities that are looking for a venue in the West End. However, with so many successes, I have never understood why ticket prices need to keep going up.

London is unique, and will continue to attract millions of foreign tourists for years to come. The Government need more seriously to consider the countryside, small towns and rural businesses. Britain’s heritage—specifically its historic buildings, stately homes, castles, gardens and designed landscapes—is the single most quoted reason for foreign visitors to come to Britain. According to VisitBritain, in 2011, 9 million foreigners visited one or more of Britain’s historic houses contributing £6,500 million to the economy.

I declare an interest, in that I own a grade A-listed castle and country park in Scotland which attracts 60,000 visitors a year. I am also a member of the Historic Houses Association, whose members still own and live in their historic piles. For many years, the Historic Houses Association has tried to impress on successive Governments the importance of historic houses and castles to the British economy, how many foreign tourists we attract, and how much our presence benefits local hotels, shops and pubs. According to its figures, total expenditure generated by inbound tourist visits to privately owned historic houses is £1.6 billion per annum. Britain has more privately owned houses open to the public than the National Trust, English Heritage and their equivalents in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland put together. Our most famous houses—Chatsworth, Longleat, Blenheim, Arundel, Castle Howard and Woburn Abbey, to name but a few—are still privately owned, in the hands of their original families, who struggle to maintain them with little or no financial help from Government bodies.

Contrary to popular belief, the majority of those living in grand historic houses—I speak from personal experience—are not particularly rich. The main reason for this is because they live in grand historic houses. They are very expensive to maintain, and to live in them is both a privilege and a burden. It is a mystery to some people why we struggle to hold on to buildings we have probably inherited and in most cases have learnt to love while continuing to lose money every year. Perhaps it is because we feel we owe it to our ancestors—I do not know.

I think I am right to say that no stately home open to the public actually makes a trading profit. The ones that survive do so because the owner has some other source of income or can resort to selling a Titian or Van Dyck every other year to fill the gap. The income derived from opening to the public only helps defray the costs of keeping the house wind and watertight. On top of that, we must pay VAT on our structural improvements or repairs, while our rich neighbours can build themselves a brand new comfortable warm house next door completely tax-free.

Now we hear that the Government intend to cap sideways loss relief, which was one of the few forms of tax relief which the beleaguered owners of historic houses could avail themselves of. In this time of austerity, many owners of historic houses are holding on to their houses by only a thread. Some are already having to face reality and are forced to close by their banks. For instance, very recently Torosay Castle in Mull has been sold to a foreign buyer. The castle is no longer open to the public and this has put many of the small local businesses in jeopardy. Every time that something like this happens, Britain is a poorer place. The contents that belonged to that house are sold and spread across the world and the value of our country as a tourist destination is diminished. I ask the Government to take the concerns of historic house owners seriously and recognise the important contribution that they collectively make to the nation’s economy.