Arts

Lord Browne of Madingley Excerpts

Thursday 1st February 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Browne of Madingley (CB)]

My Lords, I too pay tribute to the noble Lord, Lord Bragg, for securing this debate. I refer the House to my interests as set out in the register, specifically my chairmanship of the Courtauld Institute, my co-chairmanship of the Prime Minister’s Council for Science and Technology and my membership of the board of the Royal Opera House. I will make four short points.

First, the arts do not exist in isolation. Rather, they are a prism through which everything else in our world can be viewed. That means that they must feature much more prominently in education and outreach programmes. Successful examples can be found and built on—for example, at the Royal Opera House and the Courtauld Institute, which remains faithful to its founder’s vision of art for all.

Secondly, the arts lift our eyes up, out of our day-to-day preoccupations, towards the broader human condition. For many years, I have been a patron of Paintings in Hospitals, a charity which loans artworks to health and social care organisations, where they are displayed, reducing anxiety and therapeutically benefiting patients, staff and visitors. I will never forget, when I served as chairman of the Donmar Warehouse, speaking to a group of young people who had been invited to the all-women performance of selected works by Shakespeare in a warehouse near King’s Cross. They had never experienced the power of Shakespearean verse before and they found that it spoke to them in a commanding yet fresh way about their own lives and the lives of those around them. We must do much more to open the arts to new audiences, widening access and, in the case of visual arts, expanding public display.

Thirdly, we should remember that the arts always give more than they take. The question of public funding should always be tested against the backdrop of the significant value that the arts add to the UK economy—approximately £50 billion gross, a figure similar to that of the food and beverage service sector. This must be recognised, with commensurate levels of public finance, but more philanthropy must be encouraged. For example, there must be scope for additional tax relief for smaller donations—commonly called individual giving—and for the lifetime donation of works of art, which should be incentivised and made much more tax efficient without a limit on total value. We should be recognising and encouraging generosity, not stifling it.

Fourthly, the arts are instrumental in creating our future. The research and development growth potential of the world-class creative industries is enormous. Yet they are often overlooked for investment. In the autumn, the Council for Science and Technology made a series of recommendations on how further to incentivise R&D activity that will have benefits across the arts, the creative economy and beyond. We called for increased levels of public finance, further tax relief opportunities, renewed efforts to value and digitise our cultural assets, and greater copyright protections for creative content in the face of AI deployment. We look forward to the Government’s full response.

I am a firm believer in and a supporter of the arts in this country, but those of us who play an active role know that we cannot take their continued contribution for granted. The benefits that they bring to individuals, to society and to the economy of today and of the future must not be overlooked, even in challenging economic times.