Creative Industries: Stoke-on-Trent

Gareth Snell Excerpts

Tuesday 8th October 2024 Westminster Hall

[Gareth Snell (Stoke-on-Trent Central) (Lab/Co-op)]

I beg to move,

That this House has considered support for the creative industries in Stoke-on-Trent.

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Dame Caroline. I thank Members for joining me in what I hope will be a much better-tempered debate than the one you have just officiated over.

Stoke-on-Trent was and is the crucible of creativity. We were at the forefront of the last industrial revolution, and we are now quietly and diligently leading our very own creative renaissance in the city and the surrounding area. The last measurement suggested that growth in our creative industries stood at about 6.3%, which is in no small part down to the determination of a number of organisations. With your indulgence, Dame Caroline, and that of Members present, I will take a short canter through the A to Z of the cultural organisations and institutions in Stoke-on-Trent that are doing so much excellent work.

Let me start with Appetite, a public arts organisation that has been demonstrating to communities across north Staffordshire not only that public art is available to everybody but the joy that can be had from interaction with and involvement in art, in a way that would not normally have been available to some communities even 10 years ago.

B arts is a wonderful participatory arts organisation that currently has its Bread in Common shop at the bottom of Hartshill Road in my constituency, where it has fused creativity with a burning passion for food justice.

We are also home to some incredibly well-placed and innovative business organisations. Carse & Waterman, a Stoke-based animation company, is doing world-leading work from a converted bank on Stoke high street.

Members will have noticed the change to some of the design work on the crockery and tableware in the Members’ Dining Room, which has all come from Duchess China 1888 in Stoke-on-Trent, where it still manufactures using high-grade bone china techniques, and does so with flair.

On the ceramics front, Emma Bailey is still active in Stoke-on-Trent. She is one of the most beautiful designers, using her talent for creativity and art to keep alive the spirit and patterns of Clarice Cliff, who was of course one of the city’s best-known residents.

Alongside the well-known names we have a growing group of freelancers—I will talk to the Minister about this later—who indulge in the opportunity to turn their creative ability into a viable income. We have a network of individuals who see creativity as a path for their own determination, success and fulfilment, and we need a bit of help to ensure that that can come to fruition.

[Jim Shannon (Strangford) (DUP)]

I commend the hon. Gentleman on securing this debate. It is a pleasure to see him back in the House, and I thank him for his contribution. He has outlined what is happening in Stoke, and we have the same things across Northern Ireland and in my constituency. In Northern Ireland, creative industries contribute some £1 billion to the economy, and the Department for Communities estimates that they account for some 5% of the entire workforce and 29,000 jobs.

In my town of Newtownards, action has been taken on controlled graffiti, as it costs the council and the Northern Ireland Housing Executive money to cover up illegal graffiti. A company has come up with a real opportunity for the creative sector in possibly employing students from local colleges to partake in action on illegal graffiti. Does the hon. Gentleman feel that is something the creative industries can do to help practically, in all communities?

[Gareth Snell]

The hon. Gentleman, who is my friend, is absolutely right. With the right structure, creativity and public art can go a long way to helping to reduce some of the structural problems we see in our communities, whether that be antisocial behaviour or derelict buildings. If he would ever like to join us for a tour around Stoke-on-Trent, I can show him some of the wonderful public art and particularly some of the murals on our buildings, which not only succinctly tell the story of the city but do so much to brighten up the place in a vibrant way.

I had reached G in my A to Z, so I shall talk about “The Great Pottery Throw Down”, which is not only a wonderful demonstration of the heritage skills we have in Stoke-on-Trent but proof that blockbuster television can be made in Stoke-on-Trent. We are privileged that it is filmed at Gladstone Pottery Museum, which was also the set for “The Colour Room”, a wonderful Sky adaptation of the life of Clarice Cliff. That demonstrates that with the right imagination anything is possible in Stoke.

That imagination is what has allowed us to take some of our heritage buildings back into use. The Spode site in the middle of Stoke town is becoming a createch hub—a place where creative industries and organisations are coming together to work together, not only to share their ideas and aspirations but to put their creative skills to use. That is producing this microcosm of energy and ideas that is having real dividends for those organisations, particularly as they now have a shared apprenticeship scheme that allows individuals from Staffordshire University to see different areas of the creative industries that could be available to them once they graduate.

One of the organisations involved is i.creation. It is run by the wonderful Andy Jackson, who does so much work in terms of community news and helping organisations to tell a better story about who they are.

Just down the road from Andy’s i.creation we have Junction 15, which is technically in the constituency of my hon. Friend the Member for Newcastle-under-Lyme (Adam Jogee), but we are one big, happy north Staffordshire family. One of Junction 15’s directors won an Emmy for the work they did at the 2008 Beijing Olympics. [Interruption.] The Minister corrects me—not for the first time—but we will hear his speech later.

We are fortunate in north Staffordshire that underpinning the creative industry are two wonderful universities. Next year, Keele University is bringing in a music production, game design and digital media course, because it realises that growing a pipeline of local talent is important for growing the local creative industry.

One of the companies looking for that pipeline is Lesniak Swann, an award-winning business-to-business marketing organisation. The company has asked me to point out that the creative industry is one of our best export markets because the work we do in the UK is highly desirable to organisations around the world. Lesniak Swann does wonderful B2B marketing work, which is incredibly creative, from its home in Stoke-on-Trent but for companies based in Norway and America. We need to think about where our creative industries can contribute to UK exports.

All this is part of Made in Stoke, a network of entrepreneurs, philanthropists and individuals who have a connection to our city and who want to come together to make it better. One of the strands they are looking at is how individuals who have gone away from Stoke-on-Trent and done wonderful things in arts, culture and creativity can come back to the city to help to inspire the next generation of new and aspiring creatives.

If people do come to Stoke, one of the best places they can visit is the New Vic Theatre, a purpose-built theatre in the round. Again, it is just over the border in the constituency of my hon. Friend the Member for Newcastle-under-Lyme, but, again, we are one big, happy north Staffordshire family. The work the theatre does is not just about award-winning stage productions that often come down to London’s west end. It also does outreach work through Borderlines, which uses creativity and culture to tackle community cohesion issues and community prejudices through art, drama and music. Both as a theatre and through outreach work, the New Vic has been able to demonstrate that, if they want to be involved, there is a role in culture and creativity even for some of the toughest communities that may not immediately have thought about it.

[Adam Jogee (Newcastle-under-Lyme) (Lab)]

I congratulate my hon. Friend both on securing this debate and for acknowledging the wonder that is north Staffordshire, and not least for acknowledging the brilliant work that takes place at the New Vic Theatre, which is in Newcastle-under-Lyme but not too far away from the Stoke-on-Trent Central border. Through my hon. Friend, I extend to the Minister an invitation to come and see for himself the wonderful New Vic and the great work it does in the community.

[Gareth Snell]

My hon. Friend has stolen my thunder, as I was going to offer the Minister an invitation at the end of my speech. The New Vic is wonderful, and with a creative boundary review it may one day be in Stoke-on-Trent Central—but that is for another debate.

The wonderful and creative heritage of Stoke-on-Trent has produced an Oscar winner. Rachel Shenton, who is currently gracing our screens in “All Creatures Great and Small”, has demonstrated that being from Stoke-on-Trent is not a barrier to creative success or something that should hold people back. I am grateful for the work she does in coming back to the city to talk to young people about the potential for creative careers, be that in acting or theatre.

The process of learning through creativity is something we could all benefit from across the country. That is why I am glad that in my constituency I have a group called the Popcorn Learning Agency, which uses digital design and animation to create high-spec training and learning videos that go around schools throughout the country. The group is also working with some big-name organisations to create in-house opportunities. That is something thousands of people will see day in, day out, and it is all made in Stoke-on-Trent from a lovely small unit with people who are incredibly dedicated to their craft.

The Minister will be wondering what more questions there are—this is the only way I could fit a Q into this alphabet soup. He will know that I will put lots of questions to him at the end.

First, though, I will tell the Minister about Restoke, a civic arts organisation that has been using art and culture to engage some of our most disengaged communities. Its recent production of “The Lotus Eaters” was done in collaboration with the National Theatre, and saw people from Stoke-on-Trent come down to London and perform theatrics and creative industry work in the National Theatre. That is something people do not often associate with Stoke-on-Trent when they think about what we are and what we do.

There is so much going on that one organisation—Stoke Creates, run by the wonderful Susan Clarke—is taking a lead in trying to pull it all together. It is a cultural compact that is basically sitting in the middle of the sector and thinking, “What can we do to bring organisations together?” One of the challenges we have in north Staffordshire is the splendid isolationism in which people operate. Stoke Creates is teasing out the different aspects of what we can achieve and how we can achieve it. It is making the case that if someone wants to do culture and creative industries well, there are few places better than Stoke-on-Trent.

That was demonstrated recently by the exhibition Stoke on Clay, run by a gentleman called Simon, which brought together new ceramic artists for a wonderful display of creativity, making people rethink the material my city is synonymous with. It was a wonderful exhibition at the old Spode museum, bringing together the old and the new and demonstrating that what was our past and heritage is also our future.

Across north Staffordshire we are blessed with some wonderful theatre companies. I want to give a nod to the work of Claybody Theatre, run by Deborah McAndrew and Conrad Nelson. Claybody Theatre has started to think about the story of who we are in Stoke-on-Trent and what makes us who we are, and then to write plays so we can tell our story better. One of our challenges has always been how we tell our story in a way that is engaging. The theatre has put together “Bright Lights Over Bentilee”, a play currently being shown at the Dipping House in Stoke-on-Trent. It talks about the bizarre array of UFO sightings that happened over one of the largest council estates in my constituency. It is a story that in any other circumstances would be unbelievable, but it has been translated into a wonderful piece of theatre, for which I am grateful.

I need to mention the University of Staffordshire, because it is leading the country on e-gaming and high-quality creative design work. It now has a campus down in London, as well as the work that it is doing up in Staffordshire. It recognises that this is a growth industry and is working incredibly hard with partners, agencies and business—crucially, all this is with business —to ensure that the e-gaming industry in north Staffordshire is vibrant, buoyant and suitable for growth. A lot of the people trained by the university go on to work for VCCP, which is another organisation that ought to be name-checked. VCCP relocated from London up to Stoke-on-Trent because it knew that the quality of the graduate work it could get in Stoke-on-Trent was equal to, if not better than, anything it could get out of the London universities, but staff would also get the quality of life that comes with living in north Staffordshire.

All of this comes together because we are a craft city. I am happy that we were recently awarded world craft city status to recognise that our ceramic work and our creative approach to industry is in our DNA. It is who we are and it is what we do. Importantly for our younger generation, it is also about how we translate the opportunities that exist now into real opportunity. That is why, having run through all the letters of the alphabet bar two, I will move on to a couple of questions for the Minister.

First, will he visit and meet some of the organisations, so that he can see first hand the excellent work that we are doing not only in pursuit of our own economic development, but in pursuit of the Government’s own agenda to ensure that creative industries and culture are available to all? Will he consider recognising north Staffordshire as a cultural cluster—something that the last Government were not able to do, but which would give us the standing we need to demonstrate that we are here for the long run?

Will the Minister speak to his colleagues at the Department for Business and Trade to ensure that any industrial strategy that comes forward to encourage growth in the UK looks seriously at creative industries? The creative industries in Stoke-on-Trent are where our growth can come from. That is where we can make a difference to all the organisations that are currently looking to take the next step to becoming vibrant, big, national groups.

Will the Minister also speak to his friends in the Department for Education to ensure that we keep art and creative subjects on the curriculum at B-tech, higher education, further education and A-level? The pipeline of talent that we need to service the expectations that the Minister has will come from young people who are already in education. I will leave him with those three points. I hope he has enjoyed the little tour around my constituency, and I thank him for listening so diligently.

--- Later in debate ---

[Chris Bryant]

Well, I am also the Minister for tourism, so I feel as if I will be going on a tourism visit. We will see what works as the best kind of visit. I am always a little worried about trying to do too many things in one visit and then nobody gets a proper insight into anything, but we will certainly look at that. My hon. Friend the Member for Stoke-on-Trent Central makes a good point about creative clusters. It is a key way of developing a real levelling-up strategy.

My hon. Friend’s third question was whether the creative industries will be a key part of an industrial strategy. The Government are working on this at pace, and I can assure him that we are making a strong case for the creative industries being an absolutely essential part of that strategy. I do not think Britain can have a successful future economically speaking—let alone sociologically, and in many other ways—unless that is the case, so I can assure him that it will be.

My hon. Friend asked a fourth question—I am answering all these questions directly; it won’t catch on—about whether we would have conversations with the Department for Education on the curriculum. I will not bother reading out what has been written for me—the answer is yes. We are already having those conversations. We have seen a shocking decline—in the region of 40% to 50%—in the number of students studying music, drama and art over the past 14 years, and we want to reverse that. It is not going to happen overnight, but we have to put all these subjects right back at the heart of the curriculum. That is an essential part of what we have to do.

[Gareth Snell]

I thank the Minister for responding directly to my points—I do not think that ever happened during the entire time I was last in Parliament, so the novelty is not lost on me. On the curriculum, can the Minister ensure that when that conversation happens, there is emphasis on the communities that should have access to that? I know the Minister will do that, but I want it on the record. While having art on the curriculum works fine, often, in working-class communities like mine, it is not seen as being for those people or for those communities. I know the Minister is a great advocate for communities like those we represent. Can he ensure that the DFE understands that it is no good just having art on the curriculum, and that it has to be actively encouraged in communities that ordinarily would not take it up?

[Chris Bryant]

My hon. Friend makes a very good point. It will be a complete failure for this country if the only place a student can study an art A-level is at Eton, because it has a good art teacher and art classroom and all the rest of it, or if the only place a student can throw a pot in a school is in a very middle-class area with lots of middle-class parents. I know this from my own experience: in the Rhondda and Ogmore, a vital part of what we do well for the nation is producing people who have excelled in the creative industries, but those people have often had to do so despite not having those opportunities locally. Artists such as Ernest Zobole and Charles Burton were involved in teaching locally, which is important to ensure there is a pipeline for young people who are thinking about art, drama and so on.

I would also argue, incidentally, that a creative education is a force multiplier for all other aspects of education. What is it that many employers want? They want somebody who will be able to confidently answer the phone. That self-confidence is as likely to come from having done a drama course and learned how to speak publicly, to project and use the voice and to be part of a team, or from having sung in a choir or played in an orchestra, as it is from being really good at maths. That is the kind of attitude that we need to adopt.

I do not want to stray too far into the subject areas of the Department for Education, but it is worth pointing out that what is in the national curriculum needs to be advanced in every school, not just some schools. The structure of education in England is obviously different from that in Wales, but I am conscious that we need to take these issues forward.

The main point of this debate, of course, is that the creative industries are an enormous part of our cultural and economic future. They represent £125 billion of value to the UK. My hon. Friend referred to video games, which are a fast-growing sector. Last week, I visited Ubisoft in Newcastle, which represents significant investment; large numbers of people will be working there. Exactly the same is true in Stoke. The video games industry is worth something like £7 billion in the UK now, which I confidently expect to grow in the years ahead—not least because it builds on things that we have been exceptionally good at in the UK, such as producing books, telling stories, creating characters and music and technological development. I played “Assassin’s Creed” last year, very briefly; I was not very good. However, what was fascinating was that its development used archaeologists and historians to make sure that everything that people see on the screen is perfect. That is a whole nexus of creativity that we want to develop.

Growth in this sector over the last 14 years has been higher than in the rest of the economy and we know that it will continue to be higher in the future, as long as we make the right investments and the right decisions. The creative industries sector is a large employer in the UK, employing some 2 million people.

There is nobody here from the previous Government to defend themselves, but I felt that over the last few years that the creative industries sector was denigrated a bit, as if going into the creative industries was not a proper job; ballerinas were told to retrain and things like that. That is not our attitude. We believe that the creative industries are an absolutely essential part of our future economic growth.

My hon. Friend made the point about levelling up, in a sense, although he did not use the term—maybe we need to ditch it. Nevertheless, it is an important point that there are 55 creative industries clusters and 700 micro- clusters around the UK, and this is an opportunity to ensure that that happens everywhere, because talent is everywhere but opportunity is not. That is what we really need to change and that is what our strategy will be devoted to. It is not a “nice to have”; it is absolutely essential to our economic future.

My hon. Friend referred to Stoke as the crucible of creativity, which I think is a reference to the burning of the pottery at the start of the process, although I now have the title of Arthur Miller’s play going through my head; that play slightly ruined my school days. However, he made a very important point about the World Crafts Council granting world craft city status to Stoke. When Clarice Cliff died in 1972 lots of people probably thought that she would be forgotten, but she has now been brought back, not least because of things such as “Antiques Roadshow”. Again, this is a cycle of creativity, whereby different creative industries feed off and enhance one another.

My hon. Friend also referred to video games; I think that it is Junction 15 Productions that won the Emmy for its work on the Beijing Olympics. He is quite right—the industry is worth £7 billion. As I saw in Leamington Spa, it is essential that there is close working with the local university, to ensure that there are people coming through. The course at the University of Staffordshire is world-renowned. That is a really important part of ensuring that people are coming through into the industry, because it has vacancies; in particular, it has vacancies five and 10 years in. That is an important part of the work that we need to do.

I commend the city on developing a cultural strategy for 2022-28. It has been a cross-party process; the strategy was originally introduced by Conservatives and was carried forward by Labour. I wish that every single local authority in the land—as well as the Mayors, many of whom are advancing such plans—had a similar kind of strategy, because in the end all of this has to be delivered at local level, and it is creating that ferment of excitement that enables these things to happen. I commend Stoke for that. As I said earlier, the combination of culture and tech is important; for example, making sure that there is full fibre roll-out across the whole of the city is an important part of making many modern creative industries flourish.

There was a reference to the New Vic Theatre in Newcastle-Under-Lyme. I note that Angela Carter’s “The Company of Wolves” is on at the moment and I also note that the Christmas show is “The Three Musketeers”. Indeed, the publicity for “The Three Musketeers” might be referring to my hon. Friend when it says:

“A spirited country boy arrives in the big city with big dreams”.

There we are; I think that is him to a tee.

I will just make some final points. First, as I have said, creative education is absolutely essential for what we want to achieve, and we also want to reform the apprenticeship levy so that it works much better for creative industries, and so that there is portability and flexibility. Thus far, the levy has not really worked in that regard, but we are working on it.

Secondly, I have an ambition that there should be no impediment for somebody from a working-class, ordinary background from whatever community in the UK, to consider going into the creative industries as a career. All too often, the creative industries have almost become a kind of hereditary industry, because someone can only afford to start in them by taking an unpaid post for a year or two, which is paid for by the bank of mum and dad, or if someone has a parent or another family member who has worked in that creative industry. We need to change that situation completely, so that the full talent of the whole of the UK is embraced.

Finally, we need to ensure that the product of the creative industries is accessible to all, which is about people being able to go to the theatre, going to live art events, see art in their streets and having architecture in their city that is beautiful, and which lifts and inspires. That is the ambition that we have as a Government, and Stoke is beautifully exemplifying it in its crucible.

Question put and agreed to.