---

Creative Industries

My Lords, I thank my noble friend Lord Bragg and congratulate him on the masterly way in which he introduced the debate. However, I gently chide him for overlooking the astonishing contribution of the members of the Lunar Society in Birmingham—among them James Watt, Matthew Boulton, and Michael Faraday, to name but a few—who saw the problems facing people at the end of the 1700s and into the 1800s. They met on the night of the full moon because there was no street lighting, and they set about solving those problems. Although it is a small matter, it is the West Midlands and not quite the north. That apart—and it might be something for the next debate rather than this one—there is expanding success in our creative industries. That success, as has already been said, is built on a very wide and deep base of talent—in schools, colleges and universities, amateur dramatic groups, choirs, orchestras and musical groups—and among all those people inspired to put the book which we all have inside us on to paper or on the screen. Musicians, film makers, script writers, authors, TV producers and designers are world renowned alongside a wide range of other talents, and the artists and programme makers do not all have to live within the M25 belt. In Birmingham and the West Midlands, we have the Royal Shakespeare Company, the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, the Birmingham Royal Ballet and the Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery among many other companies, both professional and amateur, which enrich our cultural lives and take their talents into schools and community groups to encourage others to enjoy what is on offer and perhaps to participate themselves. Advantage West Midlands, the development agency, has a £1.3 million fund to support festivals and events to underpin the region’s leisure tourism. These include the Shakespeare birthday celebrations, an international dance festival and a film premiere with Screen West Midlands. As has already been said, Britain truly has got talent. Making a massive contribution to Britain’s creative energy, as well as to the enjoyment of its viewers and listeners, is of course the BBC. There is no other public broadcaster in the world, publicly fund, which is able to offer such a wide variety of programmes in sound and vision and digitally, and, in the process, to discover and nurture the talent and skills which this range of output needs and depends on, all paid for out of the licence fee. Only the BBC can sustain investment in a huge swathe of musical events, ranging from the joyousness of the Proms at one end to the big band concerts at the other. I very much agree with what Sir Michael Lyons, the chairman of the BBC Trust, said last week: ""The licence fee is key here … And when people come up with ideas about ‘top-slicing’ the licence fee for other causes or commercial players, they would do well to remember that licence fee-payers give us their money in good faith, believing it will be spent on BBC services and content. To suddenly tell them midway through the settlement that their money is being siphoned off, as some have suggested it should be, would be more than an act of bad faith, it would be tantamount to breaking a contract"." The BBC also makes increasing use of the independent production sector, which stimulates and encourages talent outside London as well, to bid for programme commissions. Channel 4 does the same, investing around £400 million a year in core independent production companies and also supporting digital content production. Similarly, ITV, the largest of the commercial broadcasters, invests around £800 million a year in original content, encouraging and using the talents of writers, actors, musicians, designers, directors and editors. It also gets overseas revenue of around £300 million, up last year by 25 per cent compared with the previous year. All these activities in the audiovisual sector face serious theft issues—the theft of intellectual property. Copyright theft alone costs the sector an estimated £0.5 billion a year, meaning a loss to the economy of £1.2 billion a year and cheating the Exchequer out of £85 million a year in VAT. Organised criminals pocket this cash instead of it going where it should through physical and digital distribution. A report last week by the Strategic Advisory Board for Intellectual Property revealed that, ""50 megabytes-per-second broadband access can deliver 200 MP3 music files in five minutes, a DVD of Star Wars in three minutes and the complete digitalised works of Charles Dickens in less than 10 minutes"." The UK Film Council told the authors of the report that there were, ""just under 100m illegal DVD downloads in 2007 and the global film industry is thought to lose more than £4bn a year"," through this theft. Respect for Film, which campaigns on behalf of the moving image, commissioned Oxford Economics to look at how legislative changes might help. It concluded that tightening laws to tackle physical and digital copyright theft would increase UK economic output from this sector by £614 million. That should interest any Chancellor of the Exchequer in these straitened times. What changes could be made? One example is to make camcording illegal in cinemas. This is the source of 90 per cent of seized first-release films and DVDs. It is already a criminal offence in France, Italy and Spain, and, in my view, there is no reason why it should not be made a criminal offence here. Next, there needs to be better regulation by local authorities’ trading standards departments of car boot sales and other markets. It is said that the Digital Britain White Paper, which we are expecting later this month, will commit the Government to the aim of reducing the file-sharing of illegal content by 70 to 80 per cent within two to three years as one step towards reducing online copyright theft. If that is the case, I much welcome it. I well understand that it is a complex issue but ways can and must be found to protect intellectual property rights for the future of our creative industries. This debate is right to celebrate the value of our creative industries socially, culturally and economically, and the depth and range of the talent that underpin them. I do so with enthusiasm.