Arts and Creative Industries

Richard Burden Excerpts

Wednesday 19th June 2013 Commons Chamber

[Richard Burden (Birmingham, Northfield) (Lab)]

May I add my welcome to my hon. Friend the Member for South Shields (Mrs Lewell-Buck) and congratulate her on her maiden speech? The innovation that she talked about in her constituency is similar in many ways to the passion for innovation that fired my city of Birmingham in the early days. It is there to this day and it is changing. Many of the traditional industries are still there, although they are different in the 21st century.

In addition, our creative industries are really interesting and dynamic, focusing on such things as design—from designing cars to fashion design. We see innovation in small and medium-sized enterprises in the Custard Factory area in Digbeth and in firms such as Maverick, which is a dynamic independent company working in film and TV. We see it in Birmingham’s Symphony Hall and the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, which Sir Simon Rattle made his own all those years ago, and in the Birmingham Royal Ballet and the Hippodrome theatre, which attracts more than 500,000 visitors a year to the city.

We also see it in the development of community arts. My constituency of Northfield is not normally regarded as a hotbed of the arts, but I can tell hon. Members that one of our city’s foremost poets, Spoz Esposito, a former Rover worker, is today nurturing young talent in slam poetry in schools there. There is also an arts forum in the area which this summer will provide an open-air theatre for young people aged 16 to 25.

Another name—the BBC—should be not only part of the list, but on top of it. There are good news stories. The Drama Village is the centre for the “Doctors” TV programme and other programmes might be in the pipeline. However, there is a “but”, and it is a big “but”. One of the BBC’s six public purposes is to represent different nations, regions, communities to the rest of the UK. What does that mean in practice? The midlands region, which has 16% of the UK’s population, receives just 2% of the BBC’s programme making. No other nation or region of the UK receives as little. Where are the midlands voices and characters on our TV screens? That is why there are legitimate calls from the Campaign for Regional Broadcasting and others for the midlands to receive its fair share.

We have heard words before—the previous Conservative leader of the council came out with a lot of words, as did the previous director-general of the BBC. However, we must go beyond words and into action. We must have investment in our people—in the writers and crews, in Equity members; actors and production talent, in our Drama Village and beyond.

We have a strong heritage—everybody still talks about the great days of Pebble Mill in the midlands—but the fanfare that accompanied the BBC’s relocation to the Mailbox has not been followed through with action. My hon. Friends the Members for Birmingham, Selly Oak (Steve McCabe), and for Birmingham, Edgbaston (Ms Stuart), and I met the director-general of the BBC to say, “Things have got to change.” The early signs have been positive, but they must lead to action.

Birmingham is one of the youngest and most diverse cities in Europe. If the BBC and other programme makers are looking to where broadcasting needs to be in the next decade, they need to look at Birmingham’s population, and at what our young people are saying today, tomorrow and next year. That means action to commission and produce more programmes in Birmingham.

It also means action from the Government. I hope that they talk to the BBC, but they must also end the growing disparity between regional investment and investment in the capital. They must also think again about the impact of their cuts to Arts Council funding and to local authorities. I want young talent to be nurtured, not snuffed out. I want the Government to help our creative industries to live up to Hamlet’s call to the arts to

“hold…a mirror up to nature”.

That means fostering our cultural ecosystem, not undermining it by neglect. Unless the Government change course, I fear the latter will happen.