Queen’s Speech

Lord Bichard Excerpts

Wednesday 12th May 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Bichard (CB) [V]]

My Lords, I also congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Lebedev, and the noble Baroness, Lady Blake, on their maiden speeches and bid farewell to the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Portsmouth, whose contributions I have always enjoyed. He will understand that, as a Southampton man, I am not easily persuaded that anything good can come out of Portsmouth but, today, I will happily make an exception and I wish him well.

For seven years, I was privileged to be vice-chancellor of the University of the Arts London, the largest and still the best centre for art and design learning in Europe. It is not surprising, therefore, that I am speaking today about the need to protect funding for the arts at all stages of education, but not least in higher education. I do so because of the Government’s recently announced proposal not to prioritise subjects such as music, dance, drama, design and performing arts in HE funding allocations. This is misguided and ill judged and will do incalculable damage not just to the arts but to the future prospects of the UK at this critical juncture. That is not just because of the massive contribution our creative industries make to our GDP, but because our future economic success and our capacity to tackle unprecedented challenges like climate change and an ageing population will, above all, demand innovation: innovation from business to stay ahead of the competition, and innovation from the public sector to ensure that the efforts of science and industry are not wasted.

That kind of innovation requires people who are creative, who challenge accepted wisdom and think outside the box—the very kind of people that our art and design schools have produced in abundance down the years. Yes, our art schools produce great artists and great performers but, above all, they develop creative thinkers who are worth their weight in gold. They also produce a seemingly endless supply of great designers. People like Jonathan Ive, who transformed Apple, the late, great Terence Conran and the likes of Richard Seymour and Dick Powell, have all taken ideas and scientific discoveries and turned them into world-beating projects which, it is no exaggeration to say, have changed the way we live our lives. Time and again, we have seen how great science needs great design to realise its potential—and time and again, we seem to turn a blind eye to all the evidence.

At a more human level, for many people art and design education offers the only route to fulfilling their personal potential. For me, the greatest gift that education can offer is the opportunity for someone to realise their particular talent. Many of the brilliant students I worked with at the university had not found traditional academic subjects easy and had struggled in their studies at school. Alexander McQueen—one of our greatest ever fashion designers—would have told you that this was his experience before he went to Central Saint Martins. Why should we deny people such as Lee McQueen the chance to make their unique contribution and to enrich our lives so wonderfully by so doing?

There is more. A year or so ago, the noble Lord, Lord Howarth, chaired an APPG that demonstrated the powerful contribution the arts is now making to our physical and mental health. Social prescription, in one form or another, is now accepted by the vast majority of medics as an effective way of treating many debilitating conditions. But we need a pool of trained providers to deliver treatments, and we need them now as we exit the pandemic.

I know that some of us feel that the term “world-beating” has been devalued, but there is no doubt that Britain is world-beating in the world of art and design. We did not achieve that by chance, but because of the excellence of our learning centres—envied around the world—and their ability to recruit students from all social classes and many different cultures to create a melting pot of talent. Why on earth would we want to endanger that? Why on earth, when we need to build and market a brand that is unique to the UK, would we turn away from something that has long defined us in the eyes of the world? I know that we will be told that these cuts will not have that impact, and we can spend hours debating the numbers, but the most depressing aspect of this affair is that it suggests that the Government still do not understand the critical contribution that the arts make to our national endeavour.

[Baroness Scott of Bybrook (Con)]

May I ask the noble Lord to wind up?

[Lord Bichard (CB) [V]]

Even worse, it suggests that the Government think we have to decide between the arts and science in the way we allocate our resources.