Creative Industries

Jessica Toale Excerpts

Monday 27th January 2025 Commons Chamber

[Chris Bryant]

The hon. Lady makes a very good point about the Edinburgh festivals; I hope that the Hansard Reporters heard the “s” at the end. Sometimes people just refer to the Edinburgh international festival, but there is a series of festivals, including book and television festivals. That ecosystem has managed to grow and grow; it is precisely the kind of thing that we want to do. Another element of the Edinburgh international festivals is that there is a cluster there. The previous Government rightly identified that where we can create a cluster around a creative industry, we stand a greater chance of building it and enabling greater growth. For instance, Royal Leamington Spa is a cluster for the video games industry, as is Dundee. There are various clusters around the country; that is something that we want to build on.

The hon. Lady asks about small venues. As she may know, we have backed the call made in the previous Parliament by the Chair of the Culture, Media and Sport Committee, the hon. Member for Gosport (Dame Caroline Dinenage)—I wanted to call her the Secretary of State—for a voluntary levy on tickets for gigs in arenas to provide money for small venues. I am very hopeful about that. I am pushing as hard as I can for the industry to adopt the measure on a voluntary basis, but we have made it very clear that if it does not, we will make it happen on a statutory basis. I hope that we can move forward on that relatively soon. Likewise, many small venues in the hospitality industries thought that there would be a cliff edge at the end of March for the 70% relief on business rates. We have said that the relief will be 40%, and there will be a renewal of and change to business rates in future years. We are trying to help small music venues in all those ways, but in the end, if there is nobody to perform in a small music venue, it is not a small music venue. That is why I return to the effort to ensure that we have creative education in all our schools.

As hon. Members will be aware, there are many creative businesses in this country that have a great idea or product and are ready to expand, but cannot access the finance that they need to take their growth to the next level. Like every part of the UK economy, the creative industries have amazing start-ups that struggle to scale up. As a first step to addressing that all-important finance barrier, the British Business Bank, which supports over £17 billion in finance for business, committed in the last week to increasing the scale of its support for the creative industries. Possibly one of the most important things that we can do over the next couple of years is try to improve access to finance for all our creative businesses, whether at the moment of their inception, at the point of scale-up, or when they are 10 years in. We should back venture capital funds investing in UK creative industries, and support experts who understand the unique strengths of the sector in the UK.

To provide creative businesses across the country with the support that they need to scale up, we have confirmed over £16 million of funding for the Create Growth programme. In addition, we are backing early-stage games developers with £5.5 million funding for the Dundee-based UK games fund. We want the next generation of hit UK games to be made across the UK.

[Jessica Toale (Bournemouth West) (Lab)]

I welcome the measures the Government are bringing in to support our important creative industries. Those businesses also need a talent pipeline, and my constituency has a world-leading arts university and a higher education and further education system supporting film, television and games development. What are the Government doing to support that talent pipeline and our educational institutions?

[Chris Bryant]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. Indeed, I have often wondered whether we should have a specific programme for her area, because she is right that there is a concentration of courses, universities and businesses devoted to those same industries. I would be happy to meet her, and perhaps if she would like to come into the Department, we could go through some of the specifics about how we will be assisting in her area.