Arts and Culture

Baroness Young of Hornsey Excerpts

Monday 9th July 2012 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Young of Hornsey]

My Lords, I thank my noble friend Lord Clancarty for securing this debate, particularly since many of the arts and creative practitioners with whom I work are hard put to identify what the coalition wants from the sector, what its expectations are and how it is going to support its growth and develop its resilience. There have been some helpful initiatives, but it is not clear how they constitute the Government’s wider landscape of ambition for the arts and creative sectors.

We are fond of boasting of our creative achievements and success on the global stage. Indeed, the Cultural Olympiad, the cultural festival, is an exemplar of that ambition and that reach, taking it all to a much higher level than previously. Our achievements on the world stage are rightly lauded. We also, through our creative industries and the arts, contribute to the economy and to the social fabric of the country. However, these are somehow consistently undervalued when it comes to funding and public words of support. How else can we explain the lack of attention given to developing a sustainable, appropriately financed strategy that will ensure that the sector continues to thrive?

Our creative successes in film, theatre and so on have come about through a combination of sheer hard work and the creative talent in the sector, and public funds allocated to support those efforts. For the arts ecology to thrive, there is a need for creative diversity, scale, capacity, risk-taking and innovation, which has been described as something collective, but also something uncertain,

“with high failure rates but also high returns, with the state often undertaking the greatest degree of risk and uncertainty. And third, it is cumulative innovation today that builds on innovation yesterday”.

Working with practitioners in the north of England has made me much more aware of how London-centric policy-making in the arts is. Philanthropy is a case in point; for many smaller and regional arts organisations, the debate about tax relief and donations had rather less urgency about it than it did for the London-based national arts organisations. We need a different model to encourage and build on private patronage, and donations, when different relationships exist between benefactor and organisations.

It is vital that the Government look at ways of supporting growth in the sector, particularly in regions where there is strong potential for developing a distinctive cultural offer that taps into areas with a strong sense of regional identity and the creative talent that can articulate such a vision. If we lose the capacity and appetite to invest in risk-taking, we will not hold our place as the home of some of the most creative practitioners in the world for long.