Local Arts and Cultural Services

Lord Stevenson of Balmacara Excerpts

Thursday 30th March 2017 Grand Committee

[Lord Stevenson of Balmacara (Lab)]

My Lords, this has been a fantastic debate. I thank, as have others, the noble Earl, Lord Clancarty, for his tireless efforts in the arts and cultural world, for his support of it and for his really excellent speech which I could not match—certainly not in three minutes. I am sure that the Minister will want to respond in detail to that, so I will not cover that ground. Instead, I want to use my short time to make two main points.

When the industrial strategy Green Paper was introduced, Greg Clark, the Secretary of State for BEIS, spoke of the importance of recognising the country’s strengths,

“from science to the creative industries”.

The Prime Minister is also on record as saying that special emphasis in the industrial strategy would be placed on helping sectors of the economy such as the creative industries. However, the specific challenges mentioned in the industrial strategy are energy, robotics, satellites and space, leading-edge healthcare, manufacturing and materials, biotechnology and quantum, and transformative digital technologies. It might be possible that the last one includes creative industries, but they are not mentioned. It is an awful gap, so can the Minister confirm that the interests of the DCMS will be represented in the final version of the industrial strategy? It is very important that we see it there and that it is part of the discussions.

Secondly, the Government need to think carefully about research in the creative industries if they are going to see a vibrant sector arrangement. As part of the Autumn Statement, a £4.7 billion announcement was made about an industrial strategy challenge fund. This will be cross-disciplinary and cover a broad range of technologies to be decided by an evidence-based process. As part of that process, a number of consultative workshops have happened and it is evident from those that there is a high level of interest from the cultural and creative industries in bidding for and obtaining money from the fund. We do not know, however, whether that will be possible.

An interesting aspect of our creative industries sector, which is enormous and does a fantastic job for our economy, is that it is largely made up of very small companies—micro-companies and very small SMEs—that rarely have the scale to engage in research. There is a research council—the Arts and Humanities Research Council—and it has a plan to create eight regional hubs, anchored in higher education institutions, that reach out to SMEs in the creative sector. This is a very good idea and I would be grateful if the Minister confirmed that the creative industries will get a fair share of this vital research funding.