Creative Industries (Communications and Digital Committee Report)

Lord Watson of Invergowrie Excerpts

Friday 7th July 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Watson of Invergowrie (Lab)]

My Lords, three weeks ago I congratulated the noble Earl, Lord Clancarty, on securing his QSD on freelancers in the arts and creative industries, but I said then that we needed a fuller debate as soon as possible. I had no expectation that such an opportunity would arrive quite so soon, but I am delighted that today we are able to have a comprehensive debate around the excellent report produced by the Communications and Digital Committee, compellingly introduced by its chair, the noble Baroness, Lady Stowell.

As I did last month, I will highlight the crisis facing grass-roots music venues, to which I was pleased to hear the noble Lord, Lord Clement-Jones, refer a moment ago—but first I want to offer some comments on the committee’s report. The title says it all, really, because our creative future genuinely is threatened unless the Government, either this one or the one who follow them, take note of the powerful messages contained in the report. Given the economic value generated by the creative industries, placing that sector at the heart of any Government’s growth plans ought to be a no-brainer—so I was pleased to hear the noble Baroness, Lady Stowell, say that the Chancellor had now added the creative sector to his growth priorities. That is to be welcomed, because hitherto Conservative Governments have not only undervalued the arts and the creative industries but have actively downplayed the role which arts and creative subjects have to play in education, both in schools and at universities.

In terms of the latter, Ministers have in recent years dismissed arts degrees as self-indulgent and virtually worthless, falsely claiming that overwhelmingly the role of higher education should be to produce the engineers, technologists, mathematicians and scientists that the economy of the future will require. Of course, the STEM subjects are important, and we need them to thrive, but that can happen while still leaving sufficient bandwidth for arts and humanities courses. To deny that is to accept the Government’s anti-intellectual view of higher education—something that I find rather ironic when I consider how many current and recent Ministers went from private schools to study PPE at Oxbridge.

That ideology has led to the closure of arts and humanities courses in universities across the country. Last month we saw perhaps the most egregious example, as admirably outlined by my noble friend Lady Rebuck and the noble Lord, Lord Berkeley. The University of East Anglia announced that more than 30 arts and humanities teaching posts were to be cut, perhaps fatally, from one of the most famous creative writing courses in the world. I make no apology to the noble Lord, Lord Vaizey, who I see is no longer in his place, for using the term “philistinism”, because many more aspiring writers will be denied the chance to follow Ian McEwan, Kazuo Ishiguro and others, were that course to close.

Equally, the Government’s marginalising of arts and creative subjects in schools is well known. On schools, we have just been treated by my noble friend Lord Griffiths—and I should say I regard all his contributions as a treat—to news of the new school in Moorgate, which I am sure he has downplayed his own role in bringing about. The ultimate success of that school will depend on a combination of factors, but I argue that the key factor in its success will be its teachers. I say in passing that this morning I spent some time in Victoria Tower Gardens, adjacent to Parliament, meeting striking teachers. I think they are being treated disgracefully, and I think it is such a shame that people who have dedicated their careers to bringing forward the next generation have been forced to take strike action to achieve fair pay.

I am a member of the Education for 11-16 Year Olds Committee, and we have heard many witnesses decry the manner in which the introduction of the EBacc in 2014 has squeezed arts and creative subjects from the core curriculum, leading, as many noble Lords have said, to far fewer people now sitting GCSEs in design and technology, music and other creative subjects. After reading this report, I was left with a distinct sense of déjà vu, given the evidence submitted to the Education for 11-16 Year Olds Committee. I will not repeat the damaging statistics on the fall-off in creative subjects, mentioned by several noble Lords.

I also recognise the report’s support for STEM to become STEAM, with the addition of arts subjects. Design and technology continues to flounder as a subject that school pupils are encouraged to take with them from key stage 3 to key stage 4 when they start preparing for their GCSEs. I echo the report’s call for careers education in schools to be developed to include guidance on routes into the creative sector. The committee also shines light on the impact of skills shortages, which are acute in the creative industries, as my noble friend Lady Rebuck highlighted.

All of this should fit like a glove with the development of the Government’s lifelong loan entitlement, which aims to provide people with the ability to upskill and reskill throughout their working lives. To undervalue the role of the arts and the creative industries within that makes no sense at all. Pathways that support more flexible ways to study are needed now more than ever. In 2020-21, the Open University had more than 50,000 students in its faculty of arts and social sciences, enabling people to develop their skills in the creative industries as they earn or juggle study with caring responsibilities. It is instructive to note that the Open College of the Arts will become part of the Open University next month.

I turn now to the crisis facing grass-roots music venues, on whose behalf the Music Venue Trust campaigns vigorously. The Minister used the debate secured by the noble Earl, Lord Clancarty, last month, to which I referred earlier, to announce an additional £5 million for Arts Council England’s supporting grass-roots live music fund. That was very much welcomed by the sector, not least because so far this year, one music venue has closed every week across the UK.

That is not because people are losing interest in music; there were 22 million audience visits to a gig in 2022. More than 30,000 people work in this sector, and grass-roots music venues are the research and development department of the UK’s £5 billion-a-year music industry. Eight new arenas are proposed to open in the UK in the next five years, and all will be reliant on the talent pipeline that starts at the small venues that I frequent, such as Ain’t Nothin’ But The Blues in Soho, The Silver Bullet in Finsbury Park and Mercato Metropolitano in Elephant and Castle. But the owners and operators of big arenas have no record of making a financial investment in that pipeline.

I am afraid that I will not be joining the noble Lord, Lord Vaizey, to see Springsteen in Hyde Park tomorrow; I prefer more intimate venues. There is no good reason why the promoters of that event, and the other major players in the music industry, should not reinvest in the talent and venues that are supporting it and supplying the next generation of performers. One means of achieving that would be for every ticket sold for each music event at an arena, stadium or major festival to contain a contribution to the grass-roots circuits that supported and developed the talent on which the success of that event depends.

The noble Baroness, Lady Stowell, mentioned the committee’s recommendations on research and development. Currently, R&D tax relief is limited to science and technology applications, but the impact of creative arts and the contemporary music industry supports a multi- billion-pound industry, and the returns are not felt at the grass-roots level. It does not recognise the work done by the creative industries to improve the UK’s economy, through the live music ecosystem, the recording industry and the tourism and hospitality sectors. Most grass-roots music venues operate at a loss when supporting the development of upcoming talent, and their role as a research and development department of the music industry should be recognised by broadening the work that qualifies as R&D to include creative industries and grass-roots music venues.

There is also a strong case for parity with other cultural industries through tax relief. For example, the concessions available to theatres fail to recognise that the inherent risk involved in creating a performance excludes musicians, who often require the greatest investment to produce their tours. If theatre tax relief was amended to performance tax relief, it could be extended to include grass-roots music venues.

I congratulate the committee on producing a report with many positive recommendations for ensuring that this country has a creative future. I very much hope that the Minister will live up to his billing from all sides of your Lordships’ House and that he has a speech that will show that the Government are now prepared to recognise the huge contribution that the creative sector makes, not just to the economy but to the quality of life of so many people.

Arts and Creative Industries: Freelancers and Self-employed Workers

Lord Watson of Invergowrie Excerpts

Thursday 15th June 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Watson of Invergowrie (Lab)]

My Lords, a two-minute speaking limit allows for not so much a speech as a comment, although the upside, I suppose, is that it is a result of so many noble Lords being passionate about the arts and creative industries. I congratulate the noble Earl, Lord Clancarty, on securing the debate but, as he said, we need a fuller one very soon.

Freelancers make a major contribution to the creative sector and the performing arts and deserve meaningful support from the Government, particularly in skills policy. A freelancer visa to allow them to work abroad would be welcome and that must surely be one of the first initiatives of a commissioner, a position that is urgently required.

I want to focus on the crisis facing grass-roots music venues, on whose behalf the Music Venue Trust campaigns vigorously. So far this year, one music venue has closed every week across the UK. That is not because people are losing interest in music; there were 22 million audience visits to a gig in 2022. Over 30,000 people work in the sector and grass-roots music venues are the research and development department of the UK’s £5 billion a year music industry. Eight new arenas are proposed to open in the UK in the next five years, but there is no record of such venues making a financial investment in the pipeline. We have to ask why that is.

Football in England demonstrates what can be done to help develop the next generation: 15% of the Premier League’s central revenue goes to supporting clubs lower down the professional ladder, as well as the women’s game and wider grass-roots and community football. There is no good reason why the top end of the live music industry cannot do the same and reinvest in the talent and venues that are supporting it and supplying the next generation of performers.

Venues are suffering extreme hardship from unaffordable energy bills and other costs. Live music generates huge returns for the Treasury, yet currently 16% of the value of every ticket sold at a grass-roots venue event is lost to VAT, removing almost £5 million from the sector in potential investment in new and emerging talent. I say to the Minister that in this post-EU environment there is no impediment to the Government zero-rating VAT on ticketing for grass-roots music venues and they should do so as a matter of urgency.

UEFA Euro 2020 Final

Lord Watson of Invergowrie Excerpts

Wednesday 30th November 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Parkinson of Whitley Bay (Con)]

I certainly echo the noble Baroness’s final comments—I see that she is sitting next to a noble Lord who might take a different view; diplomatically, I shall not intrude on that. She will be pleased to know that we continue to work with our international partners to ensure that we share the expertise that the police and other operational partners have in delivering major events. We had a good record of doing that this summer.

[Lord Watson of Invergowrie (Lab)]

My Lords, as a Scot, I had no dog in the fight last night, but I none the less congratulate England on qualifying. Further to the point about alcohol at that final in July last year, a big issue also was supporters using cocaine, of which there was photographic evidence. Has the Minister had any discussions with the Football Association about ensuring that the use of such drugs is at the very least limited among those entering the stadium?

[Lord Parkinson of Whitley Bay (Con)]

As I said, the Government have taken action to extend football banning orders to cover offences including the selling and taking of class A drugs at football games, which certainly had an effect on some of the disorder that we saw. We are taking forward action both as a Government and with policing partners.

BBC Funding

Lord Watson of Invergowrie Excerpts

Tuesday 25th January 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Parkinson of Whitley Bay (Con)]

The noble Baroness will, I hope, appreciate that decisions on other departments’ areas and how the Government can help people with the cost of living are not for me. However, I hope I infer from her comments that she welcomes the decision that the Secretary of State has taken to do our bit to help people with the rising costs of what otherwise would have been a licence fee increase to £180 by 2027.

[Lord Watson of Invergowrie (Lab)]

My Lords, the remarks of the noble Baroness, Lady Bottomley, and the noble Lord, Lord McNally, about the Secretary of State should perhaps be put in the context of the fact that she has a history of attacking the BBC, and her appointment to her current post was akin to giving a child the keys to the sweet shop.

Almost 80% of school-age children use BBC Bitesize, the UK’s only free-to-use comprehensive education resource portal as a regular part of their learning. During the Covid peaks, BBC lockdown learning attracted an average of four and a half million users to the online resources specially developed to support home schooling at a time when the Government were failing to provide enough laptops or broadband to disadvantaged families. No commercial broadcaster would provide these services gratis. Has any assessment been made of the impact of the licence fee freeze on the BBC’s education output?

[Lord Parkinson of Whitley Bay (Con)]

I agree with the noble Lord that the services provided by BBC Bitesize and more widely were a lifeline to people including those who were home schooling during lockdown, as I said to the noble Baroness, Lady Bonham-Carter. However, I point to the comments of my right honourable friend the Secretary of state in another place when she made this Statement. She was very glad to defend the BBC and to say that she wanted it to continue to thrive for another 100 years. That is why we want to have the open discussion that we need to make sure that its funding model can sustain it in a changing landscape; that is important and, as I have said, I look forward to having that debate with noble Lords.

First World War: Empire and Commonwealth Troops

Lord Watson of Invergowrie Excerpts

Monday 4th June 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord Watson of Invergowrie (Lab)]

My Lords, I pay tribute to the noble Lord, Lord Lexden, for securing this debate and for his typically erudite introduction to it. He has enabled noble Lords to focus on an aspect of the conflict a century ago that has since received much too little scrutiny.

In 1914, 350 million people were citizens of the British Empire, only 46 million of them from the UK. It is often held that without the intervention in 1917 by the USA, Britain and its allies would not have won the war. I would contend that without the contribution of troops and support in many forms from the colonies and dominions of the Empire, the war would have been lost before 1917 arrived. When I studied the war at school there was not a mention of the involvement of non-white troops, far less the importance of their endeavours, so it is gratifying that in the centenary commemorations their service is being recognised, particularly in the Government’s imaginative programme of events for schools.

Australia, Canada, Newfoundland, New Zealand and South Africa together contributed 1.3 million men. The sacrifices and bravery of those troops, particularly on the Western Front, is rightly highlighted when some of the war’s most punishing battles are recounted and their dead remembered. My noble friend Lord Desai detailed India’s huge contribution with the largest number of men from the Empire—almost 1.5 million. Yet of their sacrifices and bravery, we have traditionally heard little. Why is it that only relatively recently have we learned, as the noble Lord, Lord Lexden, said, that it was Indian troops who stopped the German advance at Ypres in the autumn of 1914 while the British Army was still recruiting and training its own forces? Hundreds of Indians died then, as was also the case the following year at Neuve Chappelle. More than a thousand of them perished at Gallipoli on the altar of Churchill’s intransigence, while in Mesopotamia Indian soldiers formed a majority of allied manpower throughout the war.

Those colonial subjects and their feats remain marginal in popular histories of the war for the same reason that their very presence as combatants, at least in Europe, was controversial—the racism on which imperialism was built and sustained, and whose consequences, in some forms, endure to this day. This connects with the contribution of African and Caribbean soldiers to the allied cause, as the noble Baroness, Lady Benjamin, mentioned. A year ago, the first memorial in the UK specifically to these men was unveiled at Windrush Square in Brixton. It remembers their service in both world wars but racism at the time of the First World War was of such depth and strength that even senior army officers were uncomfortable about their deployment. The Times History of the War described it thus in 1914:

“The instinct which made us such sticklers for propriety in all our dealings made us more reluctant than other nations would feel to employ coloured troops against a white enemy”.


As mentioned, Indian troops were in action in France in the earliest days of the war, but although the British West Indies Regiment was enacted by Army order in 1916, black soldiers from the Empire were not deployed in European theatres. That was seen as unacceptable, after a scandal erupted in May 1915 when the Daily Mail—plus ca change, some may say—printed a photograph of a British nurse standing behind a wounded Indian soldier. Army officials tried to withdraw white nurses from hospitals treating Indians and disbarred them from leaving the hospital premises without a white male companion. That did not prevent the continued deployment of Indian troops in France and Italy, but black soldiers saw action only in the Middle East and in Africa. In total, 55,000 Africans and around 15,000 from the Caribbean fought, with many receiving awards for bravery, as the noble Baroness, Lady Benjamin, said.

Although attitudes have certainly progressed, as the 70th anniversary of the arrival of MV “Empire Windrush” approaches—and given recent revelations of the appalling treatment of some of the Windrush generation—it is self-evident that the need for greater progress remains. The long-overdue exposure of the involvement of non-white members of the British Empire in the First World War has contributed to the process of re-examining what kind of people we are, and how our multicultural heritage has developed over the century that has followed.