Creative Industries

Baroness Randerson Excerpts

Thursday 3rd November 2011 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Randerson]

My Lords, we should do this more often; that is, spend three hours talking about the creative industries. Indeed, we could spend three hours speaking about each of those creative industries given their importance to our economy. Many noble Lords have talked about the economic importance of the sector. It is worth pointing out that the CBI predicts that by 2013 the sector will employ more people than the financial services industries, although I imagine that the average rate of pay might be slightly lower.

The term “creative industries” came to prominence at the time of the Tony Blair premiership. I am pleased that the noble Lord, Lord Smith of Finsbury, will speak in the debate given the contribution that he made to this sector at that time. Creative industries are a very broad church. It is the strength of the creative industries that they are such. From advertising to fashion and design, and from publishing to the arts and music, the contrasts within the sector are unlike any other sector of industry and that is its strength. It means that when one sector is not doing so well, another industry will still be motoring on very well indeed.

One of the advantages of the creative industries is that they are often not capital intensive and it is therefore relatively easy to establish a new business. Indeed, the sector is dominated by SMEs, although some sub-sectors are the exception to that. Publishing, for example, involves very large businesses. Creative companies of similar types tend to cluster together to feed from each other and to establish concentrations of specialised skills. When I was Minister for Culture in Wales for three years, I recognised the immense potential of the creative industries in a country which continues to suffer from the decline of its manufacturing. As a result I produced the first strategy for Welsh culture and the creative industries called Creative Future. That was as much about economic development as national cultural identity. I wish to pay tribute to the tremendous contribution of the noble Lord, Lord Rowe-Beddoe, to the achievements that we had following that strategy. The noble Lord, Lord Rowe-Beddoe, has spoken about the importance of the creative industries to Cardiff but it is important to emphasise that Cardiff has the largest concentration of media employment outside London with the big broadcasters, BBC, ITV and S4C, of which your Lordships have heard a great deal recently. We also have a cluster of content-driven providers, including in animation, design, gaming, TV production, film and music. The Drama Village has been mentioned. It is one of the interesting pastimes of citizens of Cardiff to watch “Doctor Who” in order to spot the streets they know masquerading as being from another world. The important thing is that there are 7,000 workers in Cardiff engaged in the media sector. That is 3.5 per cent of the workforce and it is growing rapidly.

With so many of the creative industries heavily dependent on IT, it is a major problem in Wales that broadband speeds are still so poor across much of the country, as indeed they are in Scotland. I draw noble Lords’ attention to the report out this week from Ofcom on the broadband network which has highlighted this problem of very low 3G speeds in Wales and Scotland. I urge the UK Government to work closely with the devolved Administrations to overcome these problems.

Throughout the world the ebb and flow of economic prosperity depends in large part on the speed with which each country can seize the technological initiative. The economic prize goes to the area which picks up the newest technology and runs with it, so it is vital that we stay ahead and lead the field. Our video games industry, which has been mentioned by several noble Lords, is the largest in Europe, with a projected growth of 7.5 per cent over the three-year period ending in 2012. It has many thousands of highly skilled jobs, and 80 per cent of employees in that industry are graduates. But there are still problems with the skills that our young people are being provided with not being relevant to that industry. I repeat what many noble Lords have said about the importance of computer science courses—not standard office-based IT courses but courses involving programming and software skills—up to and including university level if we are to stay ahead.

Finally, I wish briefly to mention the importance of providing good finance for these industries. They are not, as Demos has pointed out, risky businesses any more than those in any other sector of the economy.