Economy: Creative Sector

Lord Clement-Jones Excerpts

Thursday 20th March 2014 Grand Committee

[Lord Clement-Jones (LD)]

My Lords, I want to say a big thank you to the noble Baroness, Lady Andrews, for giving us all the chance to talk about our favourite subject this afternoon. After the recession and 2012, it is even clearer that our future in Britain lies with our imagination, creativity and invention. Enders Analysis’s Creative UK report, published only this week, demonstrates that the UK is experiencing a wave of business creation in the creative economy, higher than any other major OECD country.

So many of the creative industries are interconnected and have a wide economic impact. The CEBR report for the Arts Council last year demonstrated that arts and culture play an important role in supporting commercial creative industries. I am delighted that yesterday the Chancellor confirmed that 20% tax relief would be given to all qualifying theatre productions, rising to 25% for regional theatre. But the CMS Select Committee and, we have heard, the CBI and NESTA have all concluded that the creative and cultural industries face a number of pressing skills shortages, exacerbated by the growing inability to recruit talent from abroad. Skills deficiencies have been exposed by digitisation. Investment in training has historically been difficult to implement largely because of the prevalence of small and micro-businesses.

The creative industries—I absolutely share my noble friend’s concern about this—need also to be much more accessible to young people from diverse backgrounds if they are to attract the talent that they need, as a recent IPPR report, March of the Modern Makers, makes clear.

I have some brief comments, given the time available. In line with the Henley review, we need students going into the creative industries to be multidisciplinary. There has been a danger that EBacc poses a significant threat to the UK’s creative economy. Will the Minister reassure us that the new “floor standards”, which contain five EBacc and three other GCSE subjects, introduced last October, are becoming widely known and will ensure that progress is measured across a range of subjects including the arts? Will this arrest the slide in take-up of arts subjects?

Then we have apprenticeships. Traditionally, this has been a sector that has been very difficult for school leavers without connections to penetrate, and where unpaid internships have favoured the children of the better-off. The sector is improving. I looked at the Apprenticeships website and there is now a large number of apprenticeships, for example, in the creative and digital media. The All-Party Music Group recently heard about the launch of UK Music’s programme to deliver 200 new paid apprenticeship opportunities across the music industry. Under the noble Lord, Lord Hall, the BBC is making great progress. BSkyB, Channel 4, Channel 5, ITV, Sony and many others launched Creative Access in 2012 to provide opportunities to young people from the BME community. The Arts Council, of course, has its major creative employment scheme.

In higher education, we have some fantastic institutions, but the Creative Industries Council’s Skillset Skills Group, in its excellent report in 2012, made the point that too many courses lack industry-relevant skills. Creative Skillset’s Tick accreditation scheme for those courses, which arose from its recommendations, is therefore much to be welcomed. Post graduation, students need to learn business and entrepreneurial skills, and that is why I so strongly welcome initiatives such as those of the British Fashion Council’s NEWGEN programme. There is therefore considerable progress in the sector. There are clearly myriad different schemes at all levels, but we now need to do much more. In particular, we need to make sure that all the pathways to qualifications and careers in the creative sector are clearer than ever, with far better information to those at whom they are aimed.