Arts and Creative Industries

Ian Mearns Excerpts

Wednesday 19th June 2013 Commons Chamber

[Maria Miller]

If I may, I will make a tiny bit of progress before I take further interventions, because I know that a lot of Members want to speak in this debate.

The regional support that I have outlined illustrates how important we consider regional arts to be. I reinforced that point when I spoke recently at the British Museum. That is why the funding settlement that we have achieved is so important. It means that we can continue to fund projects in the Lake district, Leicester, Newcastle and Newquay.

The Government’s achievements do not stop at public funding. We have made great strides on philanthropy. We recognise that that is a way in which many organisations can diversify their funding streams. We have developed the catalyst scheme with the Arts Council and the Heritage Lottery Fund, which has allocated £110 million to arts and heritage organisations in match funding, meaning that it will unlock at least as much again from private donors. We have simplified gift aid and introduced a reduced rate of inheritance tax for those who leave 10% or more of their estate to charity. We recently launched the cultural gifts scheme. I am sure that many hon. Members would like to join me in thanking the donors who already contribute almost £700 million to the arts and heritage sector every year. That support should not go unnoticed by this House.

We have been working closely with our colleagues in the Department for Education on cultural education plans. We have published the first ever national plan for music education, which has ring-fenced funding of £171 million up to 2015. Our national plan for cultural education will be launched next month, as the Under-Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport, my hon. Friend the Member for Wantage, said. Sadler’s Wells has already been selected to form the new national youth dance company. English Heritage is receiving £2.7 million from the Department for Education to establish heritage schools, which schoolchildren can visit to be inspired by our rich island story. Our 10 regional museums and schools partnerships have been awarded a total of £3.6 million funding until 2015 through the museums and schools programme.

[Ian Mearns (Gateshead) (Lab)]

I am grateful to the Secretary of State for being so generous with her time. Unfortunately, the Department for Education cut the creative partnerships programme for schools, which was a £30 million programme designed to get young people involved in creative and artistic activities. Was that not a great shame?

[Maria Miller]

We are now putting more funding into cultural education through our work with the Arts Council. The hon. Gentleman should look at that before he draws too many conclusions about the effect that any changes will have on our schools. We have all agreed that cultural organisations in our communities do a huge amount, and no Member of this House would suggest otherwise.

Having worked in the creative industries for 17 years, I have first-hand experience of the importance of culture and the arts in supporting what I believe is a world-class sector, and the work we have done will help ensure that our creative industries stay world-beating. It is clear to me that a symbiotic relationship exists between culture and the arts and the creative industries, and that view is reinforced time and again when I go on regional visits, whether to Bury, Bristol or—as I did recently—to Brighton. It sings out loud and clear.

--- Later in debate ---

[Tristram Hunt (Stoke-on-Trent Central) (Lab)]

It is a great pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Folkestone and Hythe (Damian Collins). His was a masterclass in how to get ahead in advertising.

It is even more of a pleasure to follow my right hon. Friend the Member for Exeter (Mr Bradshaw), who is no longer in his place, because last year his constituency won the museum of the year award. I must declare an interest in that I sat as a judge on the museum of the year award this year. We visited the great Narberth museum, the great Horniman museum, close to the constituency of my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Camberwell and Peckham (Ms Harman), and the William Morris gallery, in the north of London, the latter winning with a great display of excellence, scholarship and curatorial skill—and this was a museum that was threatened with closure in 2007 on the grounds that William Morris had nothing to offer the modern, multicultural, urban community of Walthamstow. How wrong they were!

Arts for all is the Labour tradition. As William Morris put it in 1877:

“I do not want art for a few, any more than education for a few, or freedom for a few.”

What we achieved in government was for the many: we increased visits by children to museums and galleries by more than 2 million; provided a solid funding infrastructure for both national and regional arts organisations; supported creativity in education through creativity partnerships; and established the spectacularly successful UK city of culture, which my hon. Friends from Liverpool will no doubt explore in greater detail.

[Ian Mearns]

Rather than doom and gloom, we need to celebrate the previous Government’s achievement in the arts. I remind the House that the Conservative party visited the Sage Gateshead, and that the Northern Sinfonia was last week granted the title “Royal” by Her Majesty the Queen.

[Tristram Hunt]

I thank my hon. Friend for his intervention. One had only to read Bagehot in The Economist last week to know of the great economic impact of the arts in the north-east, exactly on the template that Richard Florida has explained for urban economies.

Sadly, much of that achievement has been undermined by the current Government. Their assault on the British economy—stripping out demand and growth and fomenting unemployment—has hit the arts hard. They have cut the Arts Council budget by 35%, condemned philanthropists as tax dodgers and abolished the future jobs fund, which did so much to bring new talent into the arts. Meanwhile, their assault on local authority budgets has been passed down to the arts, libraries and galleries.

It is a question not just of funding, but of ethos. We have a Government who give a direct subsidy to local authorities to ensure that they can empty dustbins rather than keep galleries and libraries open—it is garbage not galleries under this Government. We have a Government who think libraries are only for luvvies and that those who are campaigning to save them are somehow misguided. What we also have is a dramatic and, frankly, Stalinist purge of personnel in the arts community. Sadly, we know that the Prime Minister has a terrible problem with women. We have seen the purge of Liz Forgan from the Arts Council and Baroness Andrews from English Heritage. Many of us now worry about the future of Jenny Abramsky at the Heritage Lottery Fund, who has done a great job.

--- Later in debate ---

[Alex Cunningham (Stockton North) (Lab)]

The people of north-east England hold a tremendous passion for the arts. Since the late 1990s, the region has developed a budding significance in the creative industries, spurred by finances made available under the last Labour Government, as well as from the EU and the national lottery.

The placing of the now-iconic Angel of the North welcomed in a new era for the region.

[Ian Mearns]

Does my hon. Friend recognise that we owe a debt of gratitude to the people of Hartlepool, where the Angel of the North was made? Last weekend marked the sculpture’s 15th birthday.

[Alex Cunningham]

My hon. Friend is also an angel; I congratulate him and my hon. Friend the Member for Hartlepool (Mr Wright)—who personally constructed the angel, if we are to believe some of the stories that I have been hearing.

During the decade that followed the erection of the Angel of the North, some £350 million was invested in new and established arts venues, which saw the beginning of an under-recognised British success story. It has provided a major boost to the regional economy and resulted in the creation of not hundreds but thousands of jobs across the culture and tourism sectors. The result of that clever combination of investment and foresight is that the north-east, often one of Britain’s poorest and most deprived areas by many other measures, has established some of the finest creative arts infrastructure in the entire country.

We can boast of not only international attractions such as the Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art and the Sage Gateshead concert hall, both in the constituency of my hon. Friend the Member for Gateshead (Ian Mearns), but national and regional establishments such as the ARC in Stockton and the Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art.