Arts
Lord Howarth of Newport Excerpts(3 months ago)
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Lord Howarth of Newport (Lab) [V]
My Lords, I declare my interests as chair of the National Centre for Creative Health—a charity independent of government —and as co-chair of the All-Party Group on Arts, Health and Wellbeing.
Since the APPG published its report, Creative Health, in 2017, the term “creative health” has become increasingly familiar in the worlds of healthcare, social care and culture. It denotes creative activities and approaches that have benefits for our health and well-being. Activities can include visual and performing arts, crafts, literature, cooking, and creative activities in nature, such as gardening. Approaches may involve creative and innovative ways to provide health and care services in healthcare settings, but also in homes, in communities, at cultural institutions and at heritage sites. My noble friend Lord Bragg referred to the important research by Professor Daisy Fancourt of the World Health Organization, demonstrating the effectiveness of creative health.
Creative health may be used as a targeted intervention to support people living with specific mental and physical health conditions. It can be applied in people’s everyday lives, supporting general well-being, reducing isolation and loneliness, and, as a component of place and community-based approaches to population health, influencing the social determinants of health: the conditions in which people live, grow, work and age.
Some noble Lords may recall that, in our proceedings on the Health and Care Bill in 2022, when the Minister declined to set up a review of the efficacy and potential of creative health, I said that we would do it ourselves. The Creative Health Review report, sponsored by the NCCH and the APPG, and led by a very distinguished group of commissioners, was published in December. It describes the current state of creative health in England and makes recommendations to government and metropolitan mayors. Greater Manchester and London are already well ahead with creative health strategies for their city regions.
We call for a cross-governmental strategy to ensure that the power of creative health is fully harnessed to improve the health and well-being of all people across the life course, reduce inequalities, improve economic productivity, reduce pressure and demand on the NHS and support the personal resilience of staff in the NHS and social care.
If the potential benefits of creative health are to be realised, this is not just a matter for the DHSC and DCMS. We addressed recommendations to the Department for Education, DLUHC, the Ministry of Justice and other departments. We recommend, for example, better focus on creativity in school and using creativity to improve working conditions and the planning and design of the built environment. Strategy to realise the full potential of creative health needs to be driven by No. 10, with a new and sophisticated analysis of the economic benefits by the Treasury.
The report is available on the NCCH website. It presents evidence that creative health offers value for money, and that creative health interventions can lead to a reduction in healthcare usage. Mindsong’s “Breathe in Sing out” programme in Gloucestershire uses singing to support people with breathlessness resulting from COPD, asthma or anxiety. They have seen a statistically significant improvement in mental well-being, a 23% decline in A&E admissions and a 21% decline in GP appointments.
Some integrated care systems, including creative health hubs in West Yorkshire and Gloucestershire, have incorporated creative health into their joint forward plans and established supporting infrastructure and funding and commissioning models that facilitate the sustained development of community-based creative health initiatives. They have also collated consistent data that demonstrate the long-term impact on health outcomes and inequalities. The Government should encourage and support such approaches across the country. This requires a whole-system approach, endorsed and led by the Government, including health systems, local authorities, schools and the cultural and VCSE sectors.
Arts and Creative Industries Strategy
Lord Howarth of Newport Excerpts(1 year, 4 months ago)
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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.
Public Libraries
Lord Howarth of Newport Excerpts(4 years, 3 months ago)
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Lord Howarth of Newport (Lab)
My Lords, does the Minister recognise that people go to public libraries not only to find books but sometimes to learn digital skills, to access their social security benefits and perhaps even just to keep warm and find some human kindness? Have not the wholesale closures of public libraries over the last 10 years been an assault not only on the concept that reading and learning are precious in themselves but on the very principle of community?
Baroness Barran
The noble Lord is absolutely right that these are invaluable institutions, which often represent a real anchor within communities and are often used by the young, those not in employment and those from black and minority communities. However, I disagree with the blanket picture of gloom that he paints. About 25% of libraries have seen their visits grow since 2010—in fact, since 2006. There is a real divergence in how libraries are responding to the needs of their communities, and we need to learn from those which are most successful.
Older Persons: Provision of Public Services
Lord Howarth of Newport Excerpts(4 years, 10 months ago)
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Lord Howarth of Newport (Lab)
My Lords, we live in a fractured society. Our twin cults of individualism and the market have tended to diminish our sensitivity to each other’s needs, untie our social bonds and induce extensive anomie and depression. In our wealthy and crowded country, social isolation and loneliness are endemic, particularly among people on low incomes. Age UK reports that 1.2 million people are chronically lonely, and loneliness impairs their mental and physical health. Figures from the NHS yesterday told us that there are 454,000 people diagnosed with dementia and perhaps another 220,000 living with undiagnosed dementia. We should try to imagine the loneliness of those people and of far too many of their carers.
The Marmot review argued that social participation leads to a healthier life expectancy. We are told that perhaps one-quarter of GP appointments are sought by people who do not have a diagnosable clinical condition but who are living in isolation. I very much admire the response to this challenge by the present Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, Matt Hancock. His speech to the King’s Fund in November and his long-term plan for the NHS place prevention at the centre of healthcare strategy, social prescribing at the centre of prevention, and the arts and culture at the centre of social prescribing. He has also endorsed the three key messages of Creative Health, the report of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Arts, Health and Wellbeing, which I co-chair with Ed Vaizey. These messages are that the arts and culture can help keep us well, aid our recovery and support us to enjoy longer lives better lived; help the NHS and social care meet major challenges such as ageing, long-term conditions, loneliness and mental health; and help save money for health and social care.
There is much evidence that engagement with the arts, whether through choirs, painting clubs, dancing, drama or reading groups, improves social connectedness and the ability to make relationships and confers benefits for health. There are a number of case studies in Creative Health which illuminate that. A randomised control trial assessing the benefits of Sing For Your Life, a project running singing groups for old people in Kent, found measurable improvements in their quality of life. The Staying Well project in Calderdale, which enables older people to have opportunities to paint, draw or sing, showed demonstrable reductions in loneliness and improvements in health. That project has been extended three times. The Campaign to End Loneliness, developed by Age UK Oxfordshire, Independent Age, Sense, Manchester City Council and the WRVS and funded by the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, is using arts strategies to improve social connectedness, including intergenerational connectedness, and to empower older people.
Age UK’s 2018 document Creative and Cultural Activities and Wellbeing in Later Life points to problems with access to transport as a significant barrier to cultural participation. In Northern Ireland, the Arts and Older People Strategy has identified isolation and loneliness as the first of six key themes. The Arts Council of Northern Ireland, the Baring Foundation and the Public Health Agency are using the arts to improve social inclusion, and they too point to the significance of barriers to transport. Similarly, the strategy for older people in Wales acknowledges a disparity of opportunity between younger and older people in regard to public transport and access to cultural or recreational facilities. The cultural strategy for Scotland, which is out for consultation, sees an important role for culture in reducing social isolation and loneliness.
In England, we should learn not only from the other nations of the United Kingdom but from New Zealand, where the recent budget of Jacinda Ardern’s Government has reframed progress in that country in terms of well-being, not GDP. In England, however, the Government have no strategy for ageing. The Local Government Association recognises the role of the arts in connecting isolated and lonely older people with the wider community, including different generations, and I pay tribute to Councillor Izzi Seccombe for her role as chair of the Community Wellbeing Board of the LGA. But what is the strategy in Whitehall? The DCMS leads on the Government’s loneliness strategy. That is very good, but it does not go far enough. In England, we need not just piecemeal initiatives but a coherent strategy to support an ageing population. I thank my noble friend from Scotland for putting us in England on the spot in that regard.
National Lottery Heritage Fund Grants: Conservation Management Plans
Lord Howarth of Newport Excerpts(5 years ago)
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Lord Ashton of Hyde
The noble Lord paid tribute to the National Lottery Heritage Fund for supporting landscape projects. It has given more than £1.1 billion to more than 13,000 landscape projects since it started. Historic England has also looked at maintaining archive records and has set up the heritage information access strategy programme, which is due to be delivered by 2022. It will facilitate the free uploading and storage of information in a publicly accessible database by any organisation. However, the problem remains that the copyright of these conservation management plans rests with the grantee, or sometimes the contractor, not with the National Lottery Heritage Fund.
Lord Howarth of Newport (Lab)
My Lords, can it be true that a body created by statute, with no responsibility other than to protect heritage, should have deliberately decided to destroy its own physical archive relating to the conservation and management of historic parks and gardens, which it has itself done so much over more than 20 years to support? Does it not beggar belief that the National Lottery Heritage Fund, aware as it most certainly is of the fragility of digital archives, should have perpetrated such an act of vandalism? Can the Minister reassure us that this story is just a bad dream?
Lord Ashton of Hyde
No, it is not a bad dream. However, it is more complicated than the noble Lord portrays. First, the records that were destroyed were not originals. The originals remain with the grantee of the fund. The conservation management programmes that the National Lottery Heritage Fund possessed were copies from a point in time. They were living documents and were changed; they were not the originals. Secondly, the fund does not retain the copyright, so even if it retained the documents, it would not be able to make them publicly available. It is trying to ensure that in future the grantees of National Lottery funds are able to make the documents publicly available, and they are encouraged to do so, but there are issues about finding an archive prepared to take all those documents.
Sackler Trust: Donations
Lord Howarth of Newport Excerpts(5 years, 1 month ago)
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Lord Ashton of Hyde
My Lords, with regard to the second question, the Government do support museums. Public funding amounts to about a third of all museum funding, and that is very important. One of the strengths of the museum and gallery sector in this country is that it has a diversified funding stream. The Mendoza review found that the amount of public funding that museums and galleries received over a 10-year period was roughly consonant. I do not think that public vetting of donors is a good idea. I do not think that the Government should be involved in assessing the rightness or wrongness of donors and whether they are suitable. It is very important that public institutions have their own trustees who look at these things, and many of them—the large ones, especially—have ethics committees to do just that.
Lord Howarth of Newport (Lab)
My Lords, although due diligence is indeed necessary, does the Minister agree that deep gratitude is owed to the philanthropists who support our cultural institutions? Does he also agree that, if fastidiousness is pursued to the ultimate, many of our cultural organisations will not be able to do the very valuable work that they do? Does he agree that, if the noble Earl’s severe audit had been applied to the Medici, the Renaissance would not have occurred?
Lord Ashton of Hyde
I do not think that that was the only reason for the Renaissance, but I take the noble Lord’s point. It is worth putting on record that this country has been extremely well served by philanthropists, including with respect to our great museums. I remind noble Lords that a quarter of the most visited museums in the world are in this country—and four of the top 10—at least partially because of the philanthropic gifts that the noble Lord mentioned. I am happy to put that on record.