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Computer Games Industry

It is a pleasure, Mr Howarth, to see you in the Chair and looking after us this afternoon. I thank the hon. Member for Dundee West (Jim McGovern) for initiating the debate. As he says, the computer games industry is an important part of our national economy. It is responsible for many high-quality and high-skilled jobs, and it is also part of the knowledge economy. The debate is therefore most timely, and I congratulate him on securing it. I start with a brief apology, Mr Howarth. You may have noticed that I am not the Minister who was supposed to have answered this debate. The reason is that the Under-Secretary of State for Business, Innovation and Skills, my hon. Friend the Member for Wantage (Mr Vaizey), is currently at an OECD conference in Paris—some people have all the luck, you may say—on the subject of broadband and the internet. I am therefore standing in for him. I toyed with the possibility of getting my ministerial colleague to represent himself by Skype, possibly by superfast broadband, as he is also Minister with responsibility for the digital economy, but I thought that might be a step too far even for the newly modernised House of Commons. I therefore stand in his stead. I am not sure that the hon. Member for Dundee West and I will agree on all points of industrial strategy—I suspect not—but I shall respond to some of the points that he made. In particular, I respectfully take issue with his comment that the Government are pursuing a ““do nothing”” strategy. We are doing a great deal, although not necessarily precisely what he suggests. I shall say what we are doing, and then we can debate whether there is room for additional activity. I am sure that we agree that the economic and cultural value of the UK video games industry is high. The long-term potential of the global market is exciting. PricewaterhouseCoopers suggests that the global market for video games will grow from $56 billion in 2010 to $82 billion in 2015; that is an 8.2% compound annual rate of growth. The hon. Gentleman and I have also said that games companies are typically knowledge-intensive and high value, and offer high-quality jobs. They fit well with our aim to rebalance the economy, both in terms of sectoral ability and geographical coverage, and to move away from the historic over-reliance on things such as the financial services industry and the south-east.