Creative Industries

Lord Macdonald of Tradeston Excerpts

Thursday 3rd November 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Macdonald of Tradeston]

My Lords, as I recall, the term “creative industries” was first coined by the new Labour Government back in 1997 to define activities that deserved strong support. The subsequent growth over the years until 2010 was, I believe, among the finest achievements of Labour in power. No doubt this debate—I congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Bonham-Carter, on initiating it—will help make the measure of Labour’s success more familiar to your Lordships.

The creative industries now provide more than 2 million jobs and their growth rate over the past decade has been nearly twice that of the economy as a whole. Indeed, Labour’s legacy is that the UK now has the largest creative sector in Europe, and perhaps the largest of any country in the world relative to GDP. Yet what we see now is that success being threatened by cuts across our creative industries: witness the 20 per cent cuts imposed on the budget of the world’s most respected broadcaster, the BBC; the abolition of the UK Film Council; the failure to incentivise the video games sector; the cuts suffered by the Arts Council and the lack of progress on the protection of intellectual property in our creative industries.

Like the noble Baroness, Lady Jones, and other noble Lords, I fear that the foundations of creativity are being undermined in our schools. In schools the Conservative focus on so-called traditional subjects will be at the expense of more socially useful, creative and cultural subjects. Does the Minister recognise the transforming role of creative activities in encouraging the assimilation of many young people from disadvantaged communities into the mainstream of British life and culture? This educational process has brought great vitality, breadth and diversity to our hugely successful cultural sector, yet in higher education government reforms will hit the arts and humanities hardest. Design and media courses will suffer, especially in those universities in deprived areas which recruit from lower-income families. These are not policies that encourage our creative industries.

However, the Government deserve credit for investing in success in one sector of great significance—the digital economy. We know the astonishing success of the digital cluster in California’s Silicon Valley. Now Britain’s digital businesses are being encouraged to cluster just next door to London’s most famous existing cluster—that of financial services in the City of London, which is beleaguered at present but still of great importance to the UK economy and world markets. As befits a truly global city, London also has other creative clusters of international renown in television, journalism, publishing, advertising, marketing, performing arts, fashion, video, software and digital companies—a cluster of creative clusters.

The Government’s commitment to the capital’s digital economy is through its East London Tech City initiative, whose hub is Old Street “Silicon Roundabout” in Shoreditch. The initial signs are positive for Tech City, with 170 start-up companies attracted last year, 340 start-ups forecast for this year and a new Google headquarters planned at its heart. Oddly enough, as Chancellor of Glasgow Caledonian University, I take a particular interest in Tech City and its adjacent creative clusters. Indeed, we have our own start-up in Tech City. Yesterday, Her Royal Highness the Princess Royal launched our new London campus in Spitalfields. Glasgow Caledonian University is the first Scottish university to open a campus in London. Our postgraduate applicants told us that they liked the creative courses that we offer in fashion, marketing and finance but that they were also irresistibly attracted by the lure of London, with its unique cluster of creative opportunities. Already our overseas applications surpass all expectations. That is a small, benign example of the convergence of universities and creative companies in the digital economy promoted by my noble friend Lord Hollick.

I hope the Government come to appreciate all the complex factors that have helped make the UK’s creative industries so successful. I urge the Minister to ask the Government’s Creative Industries Council to move to repair the damage being done across so many areas of cultural activity. My concern is not just for growth and jobs but for the enrichment that has made life for ordinary people so much more stimulating and enjoyable than it once was in that rather dreary Britain in which so many of us grew up.