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Creative Industries

It is delightful to have this debate under your very good chairmanship, Mr. Weir. I am truly grateful to all hon. Members for listening and contributing to it. The debate has been inspired by the Government's recently published strategy on the creative industries: ““Creative Britain—New Talents for the New Economy.”” The creative industries are a key part of the UK economy. According to our latest figures, they contribute 7.3 per cent. of UK gross value added, and have been growing at 6 per cent., which is double that of the UK economy as a whole. They export £14.5 billion of goods and employ nearly 2 million people. They are a key part of our knowledge-based economy, on which our future prosperity as a nation depends. The Government's definition of the sector, and our specific work with it, is relatively new, but extremely important and constantly evolving. Labour's first Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport, now Lord Smith of Finsbury, created the Creative Industries Task Force, which produced the definition of the creative industries and the initial mapping document, which we published in 1998 with an update in 2001, and which set out the relative strengths of the 13 industries. We have retained that initial definition as the basis of our engagement and work with the sector, but no one in 1998 could have predicted the phenomena that are now part of that sector—YouTube, MySpace, Facebook and so on. As convergence increases, the gaps between the creative industries are blurring. Film, music, publishing and games can all be accessed and enjoyed on a range of platforms. The convergence of technologies creates new opportunities and new markets. Instead of referring to individual industries, it has become valid to see relevance in an overall creative economy, which recognises the economic potential of creative expression, whatever its form. We launched the creative economy programme in November 2005, when the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions was Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport. He saw it as the next stage in Government involvement in the creative sector. The first part of the programme was talking, investigating and consulting. We formed a number of working groups to look at the key drivers of the UK's creative economy, and ran a number of policy discussions and sector summits to obtain the views of industry stakeholders and others. Those groups produced a series of documents, which became the basis of a further consultation exercise in the summer of 2006. Those reports were then published in November 2006 and provided the solid base for the next phase of the programme. Many of the ideas and recommendations in the document that we are debating have been translated into commitments. I pay a warm tribute to those who were part of the working groups, with special praise to those who chaired them. In late 2006, we approached Will Hutton of The Work Foundation to write an economic underpinning analysis of the creative economy in the UK so that we had a good context in which to take the work forward. His thesis was discussed during a series of seminars covering the entire creative industries, which enabled the sectors to raise their concerns with us. His work was published in June 2007 in ““Staying Ahead: the economic performance of the UK's creative industries.”” That set out the great performance of the UK's creative sector and attempted to capture the reasons for that success. Its publication is the basis on which we have taken forward the programme of work. There is now growing recognition of the vital significance of the creative industries to the UK economy. Most recently, the Prime Minister recognised them as being in the premier league of the economy, and the Chancellor referred to their contribution in his Budget speech. Industry reaction to the creative economy programme has been extremely positive, and there has been no shortage of enthusiastic endorsers expressing their willingness to engage and give their views. The creative industries share many features of other sectors of the economy, so what they ask of the Government in some ways is the same as other sectors. I shall give two examples. They depend, as does every other sector, on macro-economic stability.