Creative Industries: Creating Jobs and Productivity Growth

Baroness Wheatcroft Excerpts

Thursday 6th February 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Wheatcroft (CB)]

My Lords, what an uplifting debate this is. We all agree on the importance of the creative industries, and we have heard some wonderful personal experiences. It is a pleasure to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett of Manor Castle, and her emphasis on the mental well-being that the creative industries give us. Certainly, on Sunday afternoon, I felt a lot better after a visit to the Festival Hall and a Beethoven concerto.

I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Thornton, for securing this debate and introducing it so effectively. I add my voice to the praises already heaped on those three wonderful maiden speeches. It is fitting that we should be having this discussion today, since tomorrow is the 80th anniversary of the first royal charter to be given to the Arts Council. The driving force behind the creation of that body was not just a champion of the arts but a hard-headed economist: John Maynard Keynes. Keynes recognised, as many speakers today have done, that a thriving arts scene is not an indulgence but an imperative for a thriving economy.

The arts and our creative industries are inextricably linked. One might go so far as to argue that, increasingly, every industry must be creative to flourish. It takes creative thought as well as science to produce new products, and it certainly takes creative thought to market the results. There may not be a huge amount of innovation in a breakfast cereal that consists of 95% wheat, but when the country is told that not eating enough of it is responsible for Britain’s decline, it is a creative triumph. BBH, the agency responsible for that wonderful Weetabix ad, is actually British, but it is owned entirely by a French business now. That, of course, is one of the problems for our creative industry as well as for so many other sectors: in the end, they do not belong to this country.

We all agree that the creative industries will help to reverse the decline that we have seen in the UK—if cereal alone cannot do it, of course—so I will restrict my remarks to two specific areas. The first is the wonderful attractions this country has, which do so much to draw international visitors, and their money, to the UK. I declare an interest as a past chairman of the Association of Leading Visitor Attractions. Our museums, galleries, castles and historic houses are as much a part of the creative industries as the film production companies that use them as locations. They are creative industries as well—they are hugely creative in the exhibitions and the special events they stage—but, as the noble Baroness, Lady Donaghy, pointed out, many of them are finding life tough. They are struggling with deficits accumulated during the pandemic, and local authorities cannot afford to fund them.

The chief executive of the Arts Council, Darren Henley, points out that it is a mistake to refer to such funding as subsidy; it is investment. But, even as investment in the community and the country, it is increasingly hard to find. So institutions need to be even more creative in finding means to survive and thrive. That may mean more sharing of their assets or more lending of objects, and it must mean more help from philanthropists. So will the Government look at doing more to encourage those who have a great deal of money—some of it quite recently acquired—to put more of it into these institutions? This sort of philanthropy is still not the badge of honour in the UK that it is in the US.

My second point relates to the need to grow creative businesses. Like so many other sectors, they stick at one stage and then get sold out or just stay at the same level. We need to get better at scaling up. We have talked about it for a very long time in the UK, and now we need to do it. One means of doing it—like others, I ask the Minister to take a bigger look at this—is improving the R&D structure for the creative industries. It needs to be much more imaginative, and there is certainly scope; the Royal Society has done some work on that that might help her.