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Creative Industries

My Lords, I, too, am extremely grateful to my noble friend Lord Bragg for initiating this debate, which comes just a week or two ahead of my noble friend Lord Carter’s Digital Britain report. This Labour Government, I am proud to say, and my noble friend Lord Smith of Finsbury should take enormous credit for having put the creative industries on the public policy map since 1997. Twelve years on, and with a severe contraction in our financial services sector as well as elsewhere in the economy, it feels as though the creative industries’ time has finally arrived. We have the strongest creative talent base in the world, certainly on a per capita basis and possibly even on an absolute basis. We need to invest in that talent and to harness it to both our industrial and our cultural ends. Should we do so, the rewards will be immense. I should like to identify myself with the remarks made by my noble friend Lord Macdonald of Tradeston in what I thought was a marvellous speech about the talent base. The talent base is everything. Without the talents and skills, this entire debate becomes, I am afraid, something of a waste of time; with them, it becomes packed with potential. The really big thing that has happened since 1997 in relation to this sector is the serious arrival of digital technology. My noble friend Lord Carter, who sadly is not in his seat today, knows this better than anyone in your Lordships’ House, and I am sure that we all look forward to the imminent publication of his report. The digital environment, and the huge changes that it brings with it in terms of access to audiences and the use of our creative output, is a massive opportunity. It means, for example, that organisations such as the Tate, the Royal Opera House, the National Theatre and the British Film Institute, all of which were once thought of simply as cultural organisations, are suddenly in the digital content business—and on a global level. The Royal Opera House and its production arm, Opus Arte, are now delivering their productions to cinemas across the UK, Europe, the United States and well beyond. Last year, over 450 million people in China saw one of its productions. Some of this work is being done in 3D. As anyone who has seen a demonstration of 3D cinema knows, it pretty well knocks your socks off. Tate Media has taken one of the best-known brands in the country and created and commissioned content that expands on and contextualises its activities in all sorts of innovative ways via its Tate Player. Later this month, the National Theatre will screen "Phaedra" with Helen Mirren live to a chain of cinemas across the UK. This is a huge opportunity for the UK, culturally and commercially. In fact, the two happily go hand in hand. Building on our cultural assets, we can create global commercial value, while also delighting audiences at home who, both as taxpayers and as lottery players, helped to subsidise that content in the first place. However, the creation of new content, vital though it may be, is only part of the contribution that our creative industries can make in a digital age. I happen to think that we are simultaneously entering a fascinating phase in the development of this country’s literal treasure trove of archival content. Much of it was funded by the public purse in the name of our creative industries, although they were not called that at the time, and much of it was for years hidden from public view. In other words, they are creative assets that have not been allowed to sweat their value to the benefit of the creative economy and, indeed, to the broader public. This content is staggeringly rich and diverse, ranging from hundreds of episodes of "The South Bank Show", courtesy of my noble friend Lord Bragg, to award-winning amateur films about life in rural England, few of which have ever seen the light of projection. I offer just one example. Inspired, I am sure, by the runaway success of its Mitchell and Kenyon titles, the British Film Institute moved up a gear last year with the restoration and release of the public information masterpieces, which it put out on DVD, entirely made up of archival material. The British Transport Films collection, the stunning collection of public information films collected together under the generic title "Land of Promise" and the GPO film packages are all absolutely invaluable to anyone with the remotest interest in this nation’s recent past. The next phase is to really build on the BFI’s existing online activities, such as www.screenonline.org.uk, and make sure that schools and colleges of every kind across the UK make use of these films in citizenship classes and, indeed, in modern history classes. These are films that can and should be used for a whole series of different purposes. It is hard to argue the case for producing a brilliant series on British Rail if it is going to reach and engage only a few hundred rail anoraks; I sincerely apologise in advance to those one or two anoraks who invariably emerge from the depths of your Lordships’ House as world experts on pretty well every subject on earth. On the other hand, if, through films such as these, citizens across the UK, young and old, develop a better understanding of the overwhelming importance of our transport infrastructure, that can surely only be a good thing. There is real added value in ensuring that, for example, a national debate on the future of rail is both informed and stimulated as a result of the availability of such material. Within the context of many issues surrounding future sustainability, such films suddenly become an even more valuable teaching and learning resource. Until we encourage people, particularly young people, past the so-called expert custodians and allow them to understand the implications of the many irreversible decisions being made daily on their behalf, we are merely delaying the opportunity of creating a more engaged, better informed and more responsible citizenry. Let me put that another way. By combining the availability of an extremely rich array of material from the UK’s archive and the possibilities offered by digital technologies, we have the opportunity of looking at things and, as it were, reassembling them. We can try to reimagine our world as it might be, or even as it might become. All this is part of what is really an enormous opportunity for the strategy for UK screen heritage, for which the Government have recently given the UK Film Council a capital allocation to begin to bring forward. I am also enormously encouraged by the work that Roly Keating is now leading as director of archive content at the BBC. The decision by the BBC’s management to make one of its most senior executives head of this whole area signals something very important. It is the kind of management change that suggests a serious interest in releasing this potential. Tony Ageh, the BBC’s controller of archive development, recently came up with an extraordinary and prescient analogy in which he compares archives to energy. He makes the point that coal has for ever lain underground and was for millennia just sitting there to be dug up from time to time because it burns slowly and you can warm yourself by it. Basically, it was an entirely passive asset. However, eventually someone realised that this coal stuff was really quite useful. Under the right conditions you can generate sufficient heat to make tools and weapons and do all sorts of other useful things. A few thousand years go by and along comes James Watt, with another enormous leap forward to the realisation that you can turn heat into steam and thus generate energy, so passive coal became active energy. Surely that is exactly what we should now be trying to do in moving our archives from their passive, collection-based status to a thorough-going, energy-generating, productive resource—effectively a brand-new form of invaluable intellectual energy for our creative economy. As during the first Industrial Revolution, culture and commerce can go hand in hand as an engine of growth. In the end, though, our ability to deliver all this rests on our commitment to invest in our creative and technological talent. It seems absolutely self-evident to me that, without that commitment, which has to be a judicious mix of public and private investment, we cannot be among the winners in this new economy. I am absolutely persuaded that, as we enter the era of the digital economy, our creative industries have the potential to be world leaders in many respects. I do not have time today to touch on the contribution that our games sector, designers and musicians make to that economy both at home and abroad. But we have the creative talent. We have the creative and cultural assets. All we really now need in order to deliver our potential is the vision, ambition and energy that demonstrate our commitment to these creative industries as being the real standard-bearers for our national prosperity in the 21st century. I very much hope that today’s debate will reinforce the fact that all sides of your Lordships’ House recognise the opportunity and the fact that it is there for the taking.