Creative Industries: Creating Jobs and Productivity Growth

Baroness Warwick of Undercliffe Excerpts

Thursday 6th February 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Warwick of Undercliffe (Lab)]

I thank my noble friend Lady Thornton for her comprehensive introduction to this timely debate and I echo her paean of praise for her native city of Bradford and its programme as City of Culture. I too claim Bradford as my native city and I return as regularly as I can for a pilgrimage to Saltaire to its wonderful Hockney gallery there. With everyone else, I congratulate my three noble friends on their wonderful maiden speeches and look forward enormously to hearing more from them.

As others have mentioned, the creative industries contribute £124 billion to the UK economy and account for 2.4 million jobs across the UK. The statistics speak for themselves. Our creative industries are vital to our future prosperity and the Government’s growth mission. We are absolutely right to prioritise these industries in our industrial plan.

The Creative Industries Growth Summit last month set out £60 million of funding for projects and programmes across the UK, and that is a great start. To take just one example, the proposed new glassworks in Sunderland will create one of the few places in the UK with the specialist facilities for artists to create and produce glass. It will link Sunderland’s long glass-making heritage with its creative future, breathing new life into the city, and it has been widely welcomed by creative businesses in the area.

It is most certainly a step in the right direction, but we have a long walk ahead. Glass-making may seem rather niche in the grand scheme of things but, as we have heard, the creative industries in the UK cover a wide range, from the biggest in terms of GVA—IT, software and computer services—to the smallest subsector, which has the rather cosy-sounding title of crafts. This is a sector I am particularly interested in. It has some distinctive characteristics relevant to the wider picture. I hope the Minister will heed the concerns expressed so cogently by the noble Lord, Lord Freyberg. I declare that I am pleased to be a member of the APPG for Craft.

Crafts are a small subsector of our creative industries. They account for just 10,000 jobs in the UK and £0.4 billion in GVA. However, craft skills and businesses both service and power many other creative industries. Craft skills and services are applied in fields ranging from engineering, architecture and medicine to fashion and design. They may include textiles, furniture-making, metalworking and fabrication, ceramics, and printmaking to—as we have heard—support film, television, theatre and gaming, as well as delivering small-batch manufacturing.

Most craft businesses are micro-businesses with fewer than 10 employees. Many are sole traders or freelancers. They often operate in clusters that have grown out of traditional and heritage industries that are very localised. This is good for stimulating growth outside London, but their size also presents challenges for growth, not least in accessing training and skills development.

I raise the point about training because I know the Government are aware of a potential skills shortage within the creative economy. A report last year from Creative PEC—the Creative Industries Policy and Evidence Centre—highlighted the decline in student numbers in creative further education right across the UK. It also showed low take-up of creative industries apprenticeships. Those aligned to the creative industries accounted for just 8.7% of apprenticeships in England, with the vast majority of these being in information and communications technology, leaving those in subjects such as creative arts and design very low indeed. This is alarming. Apprenticeships are vital to ensure the future of our creative industries. Yet the inflexible apprenticeship levy and its assumption that all businesses need a steady pipeline of 12-month apprenticeships does not serve the small businesses within the creative industries.

The Government’s intention to bring in shorter apprenticeships and to reform the apprenticeship levy into a growth and skills levy is therefore really good news. The reformed levy should enable micro-businesses to offer more work-based learning for vocational and apprenticeship courses. More flexibility in the use of the levy will help creative employers identify where else the apprenticeship system can help them get the skills they need.

However, does this go far enough? What else can we do? Can the Minister tell us more about how Skills England will work with all those involved to keep in mind the distinctive nature of micro-businesses and help ensure a pipeline of skills in the creative industries?