Arts and Culture: Economic Regeneration

Lord Wigley Excerpts

Tuesday 29th January 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Wigley]

My Lords, we are all very grateful to the noble Baroness, Lady Quin, for facilitating this debate. At the very outset I should declare several interests, in that my wife, daughter, son and daughter-in-law are all involved professionally in the creative arts, mainly in the music-related sector.

I realise that this debate has been projected by other speakers, largely in the English context, as addressing cuts in arts funding in England. Ministerial responsibility in this Chamber for the arts is primarily geared to England, though responsibility for the tools which encourage economic regeneration are not fully devolved. In any case, I believe that the nations of these islands can learn one from another in such matters. I hope that our experience in Wales with regard to the role of the creative industries in regional economic regeneration may be of assistance to others.

A debate was held in the National Assembly in Cardiff last Wednesday by my party. The Motion for the debate called on the Assembly to recognise and celebrate,

“the enormous contribution that the arts and creative industries make to the economy and culture of Wales”.

In his comments, our former Minister for Culture, Alun Ffred Jones, said:

“It is worth remembering that our culture is also an industry. It employs some 30,000 people in Wales, with an economic output worth around £0.5 billion”.

However, he emphasised that,

“we do not have to and should not justify expenditure on the arts by listing economic statistics. The arts have a value in their own right. It is an activity that develops confidence and creates interesting and imaginative people—the kind of people that employers want to employ”.

I wholly concur with that sentiment. Indeed, while the global companies of the past were largely concerned with manufacturing—that still has its place—key corporations of the future will increasingly be in the fields of communication, information, entertainment, bio-medical science and technology. These require high levels of creative imagination, a feature the arts are ideally placed to nurture.

The creative industries and the arts in Wales are supported through the complementary roles of the Arts Council of Wales and the activities of the business and enterprise department of the Welsh Government. That reflects the essential link between culture and the economy. The arts nurture the imagination, which generates the flow of new ideas and new products, which lend themselves to economic application via the creative industries. These industries in Wales overwhelmingly comprise small businesses. Of the 1,800 businesses in the sector, 94% employ fewer than 10 people. They make a significant contribution to the GVA of Wales and of the UK.

Many aspects of the cultural industries have a significant economic consequence for other sectors. They are a vital ingredient for tourism, with a knock-on effect on transport, hotels and catering. Major cultural projects can bring benefit not only to the city or region in which they are held, but to a wider economy and, indeed, to the Treasury and the UK generally. There is a danger that some people believe that the significant cultural activities of these islands occur only in London. That is patently not the case. One has only to think of the huge international significance of the Edinburgh Festival or, indeed, of the Hay book festival in Wales.

Showcase Scotland opens tomorrow in Glasgow. It brings into Scotland 180 holiday operators from overseas—an excellent example of how Scotland has succeeded in using the arts to underpin its economy. This autumn, Cardiff will host the WOMEX world music exhibition, an event that previously has been held in Gateshead. WOMEX will bring some 2,700 delegates to Cardiff, mainly from overseas, together with some 400 journalists. This represents not only an immediate input into our economy, but the potential of much more if we succeed in projecting a positive message and image.

WOMEX would not be coming to Cardiff were it not for the excellent Millennium Centre, a £100 million facility which has functioned as a concert hall, an opera house and a theatre. It attracts visitors from all over the world. It is a metropolitan, more than a regional facility, but without such infrastructure, it would not be possible to sustain, support and project the activities which now occur.

One does not have to look only at such major cultural infrastructure facilities. I give an example which may interest others in the Chamber. In my home town of Caernarfon, we succeeded a decade ago in establishing the Galeri Creative Enterprise Centre, at a cost of just £7 million. We could have secured 15 of them across Wales for the cost of the Millennium Centre. Galeri is the home of some 20 creative arts enterprises, ranging from music to graphic arts, cinema to drama, websites, television and arts-related PR companies. It generates some 400 events and performances a year within Galeri itself, and many more in the surrounding communities.

Galeri employs directly 36 full-time-equivalent staff and supports more than 50 full-time-equivalent jobs in the surrounding community, contributing some £3 million a year to the local economy. Galeri raises 75% of its turnover, but it is supported by a modest £300,000 a year grant from the Welsh Arts Council. An economic impact assessment recently concluded that for every £1 of grant funding, it generates £9.65 in the local economy.

Incidentally, the William Mathias Music Centre, which is based at Galeri, bringing music tuition and experience to adults, including some with learning difficulties, itself gives work to 30 part-time self-employed music teachers, providing a basic income without which they almost certainly would not all be able to remain living in north-west Wales. That activity also spawned the William Mathias Schools Music Service, which has outgrown its home in Galeri and now provides 80 peripatetic music teachers to support music education in schools in three counties in north-west Wales. Galeri is also the venue for the quadrennial international harp competition, which attracts competitors from 20 or more countries. Without that facility, none of that would be occurring in Caernarfon. Galeri represents a private and voluntary sector partnership with the public sector. I suggest that it is a model worth emulating.

Another vehicle for bringing cultural enterprise to communities across Wales is our national Eisteddfod. We may not be able to replicate that in all parts of these islands, but it is held annually in different centres, alternating between north and south. It costs about £3 million a year to sustain and is supported by a grant of about £500,000 annually from the National Assembly—again representing a very good gearing of public to private funding, bringing creative arts to every corner of Wales and stimulating interest as a result.

One problem with creative activities which are peripatetic, as with events organised by different host communities at different times, is that there is perennially a need to reinvent the wheel. Experience is not rolled forward. There is the danger of repeating the same mistakes. To avoid that, there is the need in the cultural sector to ensure adequate post-facto evaluation, which should be planned from the outset and perhaps should be a condition of public funding to ensure that ongoing maximum benefit is attained.

The physical facility is one thing, but we also need people with vision and a proactive attitude, and a framework to enable the arts to be an economic driver, not just a hobby. For example, more artists are active in Pembrokeshire than, probably, in any other rural area in Britain, but very few of them succeed in making art their full-time, primary source of income. With a little help, many of them could do that and work full-time at their art—not just in Pembrokeshire; I am sure that that is applicable more generally. Often, a support framework can make all the difference.

Whether it is major events and activities, and facilities, such as in Cardiff; in micro-grassroots activities such as Galeri in Caernarfon; or in a peripatetic festival such as the Eisteddfod, they all need a public, private and voluntary partnership. They all stimulate economic activity in the areas massively greater than the sums of public money that they require to sustain their viability. Surely the Government should think carefully before cutting funds for such a worthwhile dimension.

This debate matters to avoid us going down a blind alley of being penny wise at the cost not only to our diversity of cultural activities but, in the long term, to the regional economies in these islands.