Creative Sector

Lord Marland Excerpts

Thursday 4th November 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Marland (Con)]

My Lords, I cannot tell you what a pleasure and honour it is to follow my noble friend Lord Spencer of Alresford’s maiden speech. What an excellent speech it was. We started in the City together in the 1980s and, frankly, I have been living in his shadow ever since. As noble Lords just heard, some of his magnificent achievements far outweigh those of most human beings. He is a child of the Commonwealth, as he said. His father was committed to public service. He was a scholar at Oxford. None of those things have I ever been able to attain. In 1986, he built the biggest inter-dealer broker—a truly British company. It went from nothing to being a multi-billion-pound business—a magnificent achievement. As my noble friend alluded to, his greatest achievement—he was modest in what he said—was the more than £150 million that he raised for charity through his ICAP charity day. I therefore think that his addition to this House is remarkable for his own achievement but is also of great benefit to the House.

I also congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Featherstone, on this truly important debate. Actually, I congratulate the arts because, through these horrible Covid times, many of them, like so many of us and so many other business, have struggled to maintain their existence, to strive and to create, while using the new technologies available to perform. It is a magnificent achievement. I chair a charity called Tickets for Troops. Before Covid, the performing arts gave us around 150,000 free tickets for our Armed Forces each year, so my affection for the performing arts is unrivalled. I have not only lived with the fact that our charity has not had any tickets; I have seen what the arts have had to put up with through this difficult time.

I want to contradict the noble Baroness slightly because I think that our Government have done incredibly well. They have had to struggle with Covid, but they have set aside an enormous amount of funding for the arts. The arts are still thriving and are, for want of a better phrase, ready to roll. The Government are fostering the arts against a lack of insurance, which is a big problem; it is very disappointing that the insurance industry has failed to offer them coverage, which is key for them.

The noble Baroness and the noble Lord, Lord Bassam, were quite right to talk about the future, because this is about the future, how we build on success and what the Government do to make it. As noble Lords will know, I was an international trade envoy for the Prime Minister and one of the founders of the GREAT campaign. We recognise the importance of promoting the arts globally.

However, there is a failure in the system. Look at the movie industry. Take the James Bond films; they are magnificent productions. We have the actors, studios and technicians in this country, and then we produce the product. Look at the music industry, which the noble Baroness referred to earlier. Again, we have the talent, production studios and orchestra halls in this country; we therefore have the product. Then look at the creative industries, including fashion, design and architecture. We can design the product but cannot produce it. The focus for the Government in the next few years should therefore be creating enterprise zones and freeing up the banking system so that, in this post-Brexit Britain, production can be created to supply rather than things having to be produced elsewhere. I would like to hear my noble friend the Minister’s views on this.

Again, I welcome my noble friend Lord Spencer to these Benches and congratulate him on his excellent maiden speech. I look forward to hearing my noble friend the Minister’s response.