Arts and Creative Industries Strategy

Lord Howarth of Newport Excerpts

Thursday 8th December 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Howarth of Newport (Lab) (V)]

My Lords, Arts Council England has a strategy, and a very good one, in its plan for 2020 to 2030, Let’s Create. It charts progress towards

“a country in which the creativity of each of us is valued and given the chance to flourish, and where every one of us has access to a remarkable range of high-quality cultural experiences.”

Earlier this year, ACE also published Creative Health & Wellbeing, an excellent plan for how it will work within health and social care and encourage collaboration between the creative and health sectors.

The Government’s strategy, or lack of it, is a different matter. Everyone wants to see the historic imbalance between London and the regions redressed, but to do this without it being disruptive and upsetting needed a substantial increase in funding for the arts and culture. If provision were made for funding for London-based artistic endeavour to be held steady in real terms, and growth in the culture budget channelled into the regions, the correction could be achieved over a period without damage. Fiscal austerity for the arts is not needed to salvage our economy. The DCMS budget for the arts and culture is indiscernible in the national accounts.

Ministers should recognise that they cannot default and expect philanthropists and the lottery—let alone financially starved local government—to take the strain. It is hard for arts bodies in the poorer areas of the country to raise money from private sources. Lottery players are predominantly people on relatively low incomes facing the cost of living crisis. It would be both foolish and immoral for Ministers to assume that lottery players will bail out the arts economy. It is crucial to sustain it, and that is inescapably the responsibility of Ministers.

The rate of growth of the creative industries has far exceeded the anaemic growth rate of the overall economy over the last 20 years, but the Government should not take for granted that that will continue. They should actively back the creative industries with support in relation, for example, to availability of capital, digital infrastructure, rents and training. The Chancellor has identified five growth sectors that he proposes to support. Any rational industrial strategy must include the creative industries but, as the noble Lord, Lord Foster, observed, he has not done so.

No. 10 and the Home Office should abandon their belligerent attitudes to the European Union and, in a civilised and courteous way, negotiate a visa regime that supports creative individuals to move to and fro and creative organisations not to be hampered in working on the continent of Europe. Brexit absolutely should not mean cultural isolation.

We should value the arts for their emotional and spiritual significance but also for their benefits for health, community and economic progress. The arts and culture can be a driver for levelling up, as I have seen in chairing a current inquiry by the National Centre for Creative Health and the APPG on Arts, Health and Wellbeing. Our round table on the benefits of creativity for mental health and well-being focused on young people. The Horsfall, part of 42nd Street—a mental health charity in Manchester—is a creative space and gallery for people aged between 13 and 25. One young woman described how, in this non-medicalised environment, “the help comes really naturally”. Working with ceramics had provided the means to express herself in her own way. She said it had provided her with agency and the confidence to pursue other creative projects. Another said about coming to the Horsfall: “It was a life-changing moment”.

At our round table on creative health and health inequalities, David, a homeless man, told us: “For me it saved my life. Arts gave me that access to see the world differently and for the world to see me differently.” With the pandemic having exacerbated health inequalities, and with the cost of living crisis damaging health and well-being for so many, our witnesses emphasised the power of creativity to release individuals and communities into fruitful self-expression, confidence and achievement, and the power of communities to be creative and organise themselves.

In East Marsh, a deprived area of Grimsby, the community group East Marsh United has run a grass-roots arts project including a choir, a writing group, a library, a recording studio and a community garden created on wasteland, as well as music, theatre and storytelling events. Kelly told us about joining the creative writing group: “After battling with systems and getting let down for nine years, this amazing creative writing group gave me my voice back. Creativity helped me be part of a community, helped me to be heard.” Their work on creativity has energised and empowered the East Marsh community also to address issues of housing, crime, education and training. Our witnesses insisted—as many noble Lords have today—on the need to revive the arts in the school curriculum. Music lessons and drama clubs, they said, should be core and not a luxury.

The arts and culture can open the way to transformational improvement of health and well-being in deprived communities. Whether that happens on a larger scale will depend on two policy shifts. One will be a full recognition by the NHS that the new integrated care boards must form effective partnerships with local government and the voluntary and community sector, including arts and cultural organisations. Northumberland County Council sees investment in the arts and culture as crucial to improving health and prosperity. It is funding an “arts for well-being” co-ordinator post within the NHS integrated care system, with a view to embedding arts and cultural provision in health and social care.

The second policy shift will be radical decentralisation of power, as the Labour Party is promising. Devolution to Greater Manchester has already enabled the launch of its creative health strategy to harness the power of creativity, culture and heritage in addressing health inequalities. There must also be real devolution to local authorities, and they in their turn must devolve power to ward level, supporting local leaders to mobilise their communities in new hope, energy and achievement. If, as was once the case in our history, local authorities and mayors have power and resources to develop their own cultural strategies, we could see new cultural, social and economic flourishing in places that are now sadly depressed.