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Creative Industries

My Lords, I thank my noble friend Lord Bragg for his initiative in securing this important debate and for his entertaining and forceful review of our creative life. I grew up in Scotland before television, and a pretty bleak time it was. Our most exciting cultural activities were watching films and listening to music from America. We saw very little that reflected our own lives, and a career in what we now call the "creative industries" was open to very few. Well, how things have changed. When I left school in the mid-1950s, about four pupils in 100 went on to university. Today, almost half of pupils go on to higher education, more than half of whom are women—another remarkable measure of our progress in the past half-century. And, of course, many of those students now choose media-related courses, or study for careers in other creative activities. As chancellor of Glasgow Caledonian University, I see hundreds of gifted media students graduating each year. In recent times, their options for further training have multiplied in all sorts of fascinating niches. For instance, as a former television executive, I am delighted to see our university being used by broadcasters and independent producers, led by Shed Productions, to train scriptwriters of long-form dramas, from serials to soap operas, with the opportunity of working live on location. In previous educational roles, on the council of Sussex University, as a governor of the National Film and Television School and as a visiting professor of film and media studies at Stirling University, I endured all the inane jibes about "Mickey Mouse" degrees in media studies. My most effective response was to say that when I was chief executive of Scottish Television, there was nothing "Mickey Mouse" about the profits that we made producing the "Disney Club" each week for ITV. However, it took a long time to persuade politicians and opinion-formers that our creative work was also a serious business, in which Britain often led the world. I think that that argument has been won, and it is accepted that we are now well into the revolution that is shaping a very different, service-based, online economy. I recall back in the 1990s a pioneering effort by Glasgow, an industrial city in decline, to rebrand itself, quite brilliantly, as the first European City of Culture, although that, for me as a Glaswegian, is a title permanently held by Edinburgh, which hosts each August the most exuberant collection of festivals anywhere on the planet. Once dismissed as arty and frivolous, that festival is now seen as an economic and aesthetic treasure—and I speak as a former chair of the Edinburgh Film Festival who endured what Bernard Levin once denounced as Edinburgh’s "annual ceremony of the grudging of the money". Just last month, our ambitious and successful arts festival in Brighton, where I now live, attracted many visitors from abroad and kicked off a summer holiday season. As my noble friend Lord Bragg said, we must surely marvel at all the activity that is going on: music festivals, book festivals, art exhibitions, poetry readings, opera events, free and more attractive museums and, as the noble Lord, Lord Roberts, said, dance groups such as Diversity from Dagenham—Britain has indeed got talent. We have all this, and Liz Forgan now chairing the Arts Council, where we shall all benefit from the bubbling energy of the kind which she showed in her time running BBC Radio and, before that, at Channel 4, where she helped create a whole new industry sector of independent producers of television. Six hundred indie companies now turn over about £2 billion a year and employ more than 20,000 people. It is another huge success in our media sector, helping us to maintain our reputation for producing the world’s best broadcasting. As noble Lords will hear in a later debate today, your Lordships’ Select Committee on Communications has been conducting inquiries into the state of our television and film industries. Here it is not, alas, all good news. One great achievement of broadcasting policy in the UK was the creation of a network of commercial broadcasters, mostly based in the regions and coming together in the national ITV network to compete with the BBC in the quality of their public service broadcasting. For 50 years, this very robust business was funded by television advertising, but the ITV network now faces acute problems. Despite maintaining pretty decent audience ratings, ITV sees its advertising migrating to online services. Newspapers are also in financial trouble, as ad revenue is sucked out of the UK economy by global operators such as Google. The ITV regional companies have now mostly been absorbed into a consolidated ITV plc, based increasingly in London. To compensate for the loss of ITV production from centres across the English regions, I am sure that the Minister will want to give every encouragement to the BBC in its plans to devolve operations outside London. Perhaps Ofcom, while considering how best to support ITV, would have a word with it about its obligations to support training in television by renewing its vital contribution to Skillset, the sector skills council for the creative media. Skillset does a great job and support for it should be mandatory from all companies that benefit from our systems of public service broadcasting. Our talent base is what underpins the success of our television industry at home and in international markets, and is also what attracts international film makers to shoot in Britain and work with British crews. I congratulate the DCMS and, in particular, our own the noble Lord, Lord Smith, on setting up the UK Film Council, which has been a force for progress across what has always been a rather unco-ordinated but talent-driven business. That talent has to be trained, as my generation was not, to maintain the remarkable position that the UK has achieved as a global leader in the creative industries. I trust that the Minister and politicians of all parties will follow a basic rule of business; invest in success and back your winners. If we are in for a lengthy recession and the possible shrinking of the financial sector, it is all the more important that the Government continue to invest in new skills and talent, which will build new creative businesses, starting in our schools and universities. The White Paper on Digital Britain, to be published later this month, will highlight the challenges and opportunities of the online revolution. Let us be under no illusions: a wave of disruptive technology is sweeping across our creative industries. We are already counting the casualties in regional newspapers and television. Piracy has to be suppressed; global predators and free-riders have to be confronted. Levies may have to be imposed to pay for the support of this vital industry sector, which is a creative cluster of talent, uniquely British—and irreplaceable if allowed to atrophy. Above all, we need strategies in government that help our creative industries to understand and deploy these new technologies ahead of other nations. I hope that the Minister and official bodies such as Ofcom will conclude that, in times such as these, they may have to be as radical as reality itself.