Creative Industries: Research and Development

Lord Berkeley of Knighton Excerpts

Wednesday 8th January 2020 Lords Chamber

[Lord Duncan of Springbank]

I agree with the noble Lord. On a bizarre point, I was criticised over the Christmas period for drinking not Scottish tea but Yorkshire tea. In Scotland, even on these issues, grievances can be found. He is exactly right: there would no doubt be a problem if we treated these individuals as if they were competitive. There should be a constructive advantage to working together and seeing the collaboration that can lift all parts of the United Kingdom to the wider benefit of all.

[Lord Berkeley of Knighton (CB)]

My Lords, great creativity depends on a very wide definition of various art forms, whether it be science and technology or something else. Of course, we are extremely good at this in this country and the creative industries bring a huge amount of recognition and money into the Exchequer. The problem is that innovation tends to need public rather than private money. With private sponsorship, to take the area of expertise of the noble Baroness, Lady Bull, people love to sponsor “Romeo and Juliet”, for example, but are less interested in really innovative work.

[Lord Duncan of Springbank]

The noble Lord is correct. It is not always easy for the Government to find the right way to support this area, which is why we seek to collaborate with private enterprise and the artistic industries, for obvious reasons: they are more artistically minded than the Government perhaps are. Politics is not quite the art it used to be.