Arts and Creative Industries Strategy

Lord Aberdare Excerpts

Thursday 8th December 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Aberdare (CB)]

My Lords, this is a timely and important debate. I congratulate the noble Viscount on obtaining it and on his powerful opening speech. Like many others, I shall focus on music.

A government strategy for the music sector might have been less necessary in the past, but it is much needed now. In 2019, the industry contributed £5.8 billion of gross value added to the UK economy, with exports worth £2.9 billion and 197,000 jobs supported. Of course, that is without taking any account of the industry’s incalculable value to health, quality of life, and the UK’s global reputation and soft power. All this was achieved without a specific strategy; it was driven by the skills, talent and entrepreneurship within the industry. Music is one of the UK’s great strengths, with world-class talent and expertise not just among musicians and performers but in all the technical supporting roles needed to support them.

Since 2019, the sector has been hit by a perfect storm of challenges, arising from Brexit, Covid and, most recently, rising energy and living costs. These not only reduce the industry’s economic contribution but make it harder to attract audiences when people are seeking to reduce spending. Ticket sales at music venues are down 28% since 2019. So there is a real need for government to be clear about its role in enabling the industry to return to its world-leading position as

“a true engine of growth in the UK”,

in the words of the Secretary of State for DCMS, Michelle Donelan, last October, and in ensuring that the talents and skills which underpin its success are not lost.

That might avoid the kind of deeply unsatisfactory situation resulting from the recent Arts Council England proposed future funding allocations, which other noble Lords have mentioned. They remove all funding from the English National Opera and severely cut funds for other major, highly regarded and successful opera and music organisations, including the Welsh National Opera, the Glyndebourne touring opera and the Royal Opera House. These are all organisations with a national remit, providing top-quality music and opera to diverse audiences and in many cases touring to cities and regions that otherwise could not enjoy large-scale musical performance. This evening I shall go to a performance of Britten’s “Gloriana” at the ENO, the cast of which includes my godson, Charles Rice, in whose developing career the ENO has played a key part, as it has for so many other young artists. I am clearly far from alone in seeing the Arts Council allocations as the exact opposite of “levelling up”. The cuts seem arbitrary and lack any discernible consistency or direction—in other words, they lack a strategy.

One key element of a strategy should address the skills needed to maintain the value of the UK music sector. Many of these skills are in high demand from employers across numerous sectors, not just the arts. They include creativity, entrepreneurship, communication skills, teamwork and resilience. They are often termed “soft skills”, but they are far from soft for the businesses that need them.

Despite the Government’s good work in many aspects of education, the number of students taking formal music education has plummeted over the past decade, with declines of 31% in A-level music entries and of 17% for GCSEs. The alarming gap between independent and state schools is widening: 50% of privately educated children get sustained music tuition, but only 15% of state school pupils. It is surely time to rethink the focus on the EBacc and Progress 8 measures, which have had such a damaging impact on music education.

UK conservatoires are recognised world leaders. They play an essential role in maintaining the pipeline of talent and skills, and ensuring that they can continue to do so and attract top talent from abroad, both students and teachers, should be central to a strategy. The new national plan for music education is welcome, but the funding currently available will not be enough to implement its ambitions and there is insufficient emphasis on ensuring the availability of the music education workforce needed to deliver it—perhaps through restoring bursaries for training music teachers. Of course, one important way for young musicians to hone their skills and broaden their experience has traditionally been through touring and performing overseas, above all in Europe, so the sooner exchanges of this sort can be restored, the better.

I hope the Minister will say something about whether he expects public funding for the arts to remain at current levels. If not, there is surely a need for the Government to think about other ways of boosting funding, whether from fiscal incentives, as in other cultural sectors such as film and TV, as mentioned by the noble Lord, Lord Foster, or by encouraging more individual giving. The Charities Aid Foundation’s latest UK Giving Report found that:

“Fewer people are giving—and those who do continue to give on a regular basis tend to be older.”


So there appears to be considerable scope for improvements in encouraging individual giving. What consideration are the Government giving to providing greater tax or other incentives for individuals to make donations to good causes, including the arts?

For all the reasons I have stated and more, an arts and creative sector strategy, including the music sector, is urgently needed to give clear guidance about the resources the Government expect to be able to commit to these sectors and their priorities in deciding how to allocate them. A proper strategy would play an important part in enabling the arts and cultural sector to rebuild the leading contribution to our economy and culture which it has shown it can deliver. It would also give the Arts Council a clear strategic framework in which to make decisions—the experience of the English National Opera and other bodies that have suffered arbitrary funding cuts shows just how not to go about this. I hope the Minister will confirm the Government’s intention to produce such a strategy with cross-departmental coverage, as demanded by the noble Lord, Lord Foster, and with a much shorter timescale than “in due course”.