My Lords, it is a privilege and a pleasure to chair the Communications and Digital Committee and to introduce this debate. I am delighted that many of my fellow committee members, both current and former colleagues, will contribute to this debate on our creative industries report, published in January. I make special mention of the noble Baroness, Lady Featherstone, who is not here today as she is still recovering from an injury—I know that she would be here if she could. She was a strong advocate for our inquiry.
Before I go any further, I pay tribute to the excellent team that advises and supports us; indeed, it deserves a huge amount of credit not just for its hard work but for the quality of our work. It is led by our exceptional committee clerk Dan Schlappa, and we are also ably and professionally supported by our policy analyst Emily Bailey Page, Owen Williams from the Press Office, Rita Cohen—one of the best and most reliable administrators I have ever come across—and Soham Karwa, a second year PhD student temporarily on attachment to the committee from Imperial College. On the committee itself, we are lucky to have such a diverse array of knowledge and expertise from across the media, digital and creative sectors. I thank all members for their dedication and contribution to our collective effort.
Some noble Lords may remember that, as part of our inquiry, we took evidence from Ai-Da, the robot artist. The House will be pleased to know that she is not here today to accompany proceedings, but the release of ChatGPT in the time since we had to reboot her during her evidence shows just how fast technology is moving and why we need a coherent strategy to ensure that the creative sector keeps pace and can thrive in the modern world.
This debate is timely, coming shortly after the publication by the Government of the Creative Industries Sector Vision, which my committee has been calling for. I was pleased to see that it recognised and directly addressed many of the key concerns we raised in our report, which I will come to later.
First, let me clarify what we are talking about and why it matters. The creative industries are an economic powerhouse, generating £108 billion a year and employing over 2.3 million people. Between 2011 and 2019, job growth in the creative industries was three times that in the UK overall. This job market offers a range of rewarding roles, with many vocational entry routes. Clusters of creative businesses are located across the country, which supports levelling up. Creative sector businesses are addressing net-zero challenges by driving innovation in concept design and material sciences.
Much of the growth potential lies in areas that combine technology with creativity, and the UK has particular strengths here. Our gaming market is worth £7 billion alone, and our animation market is world-renowned. A record £5.6 billion was spent on film and high-end television production in the UK in 2021. The number of UK firms working on immersive technologies rose by over 80% between 2016 and 2021.
My Lords, I draw the House’s attention to my interests in the creative industries as set out in the register. I pay tribute to the skilful and consensual chairing of the inquiry by the noble Baroness, Lady Stowell of Beeston, and to the skill of our clerk and the rest of the team in helping the committee distil this rather amorphous subject into a robust set of recommendations, which, as we have heard, perhaps made some contribution to recent policy announcements.
However, at the time of the inquiry, the mood music from government was fairly grim for the creative industries: the BBC was under siege, Channel 4 was going to be privatised, unhelpful copyright changes were being tabled, and the successful creative clusters initiative was languishing on the cutting room floor. There was little recognition of the creative industries’ significant contribution to the UK economy or that the sector’s job growth, as we have heard, was over three times that of the UK as a whole. There was little acknowledgement of the civic contribution of the arts, and no vision for the future.
We are now on our third Prime Minister and third Culture Secretary since we began the inquiry a year ago, but in June, as we have heard, a creative industries vision document was published, which talked of growing these industries by £50 billion by 2030, a renewed focus on creative clusters, and the possibility of 1 million extra jobs. That is refreshing, but there is no room for complacency, and we still risk losing the leading global role of the UK creative industries. Academics warned that we were in danger of frittering away our great talents, while other countries move ahead with relentless policy focus and investment. As is noted in the vision document, the export of our creative IP alone is one of our great strengths. Figures released on book publishing support that, showing an export growth in English language books in 2022, with sales to Germany, the largest of the European markets, up by 27%, and to Spain up by 30%.
My Lords, I also welcome this report. We are an island with a wealth of creative talents, which have shaped and illuminated our history and national identity, and our modern and wonderfully diverse United Kingdom, and we must remain a brilliantly creative nation. However, we cannot be complacent, because the sector is fragile; it needs attention and nurturing to continue to flourish.
This is an excellent report from the Communications and Digital Committee—sadly, I no longer sit on the committee—and I congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Stowell, the chair, and whoever came up with the title. Plaudits there, as it is very apt. The report addresses that complacency and points out that, despite annual, biannual and more red carpet back-slapping, our creative industries continue to be undervalued and undercapitalised. Further congratulations are due because, as the noble Baroness, Lady Stowell, mentioned, the Government’s Creative Industries Sector Vision document was published last month and has taken on a lot of what the report says. Since the publication of the committee’s report, as the noble Baroness, Lady Stowell, said, the Chancellor has identified the creative industries as one of the five key growth sectors.
I shall become a little repetitive, I am afraid, but it is important that people from across the House mention what I know the Minister knows I am going to talk about—the problem that we have with our education system and skills. Why do the Government not understand the importance of creative and cultural education, which supports and feeds into the skills pipeline of this incredible sector?
This Government say that arts subjects are not strategic priorities. Do they not understand that arts and culture education is integral to what they recognise as a priority sector? No—they persist with a STEM-obsessed EBacc. As Grayson Perry said many years ago—and he was so correct:
My Lords, I draw the House’s attention to my interests as set out in appendix 1 of this report and updated in the register.
It is a privilege to speak today as a member of the committee that produced this important report. The committee includes a wide range of experience and expertise. I also want to say how much we miss hearing today from the noble Baroness, Lady Featherstone, who always speaks with so much passion on these issues. Of course, the expertise of its members can make the chairing of any committee a challenge. I pay tribute to our chair, the noble Baroness, Lady Stowell, who navigated between different views with great skill and brought healthy and well-reasoned challenge to the arguments and assumptions of those of us who have been advocating for the sector for so long. This was genuinely welcome: it strengthened our arguments and made for a better report.
I acknowledge the superb clerking team and the first-class academic support we received from Professor Dave O’Brien. Their first contribution was to take the committee’s broad interests and ambitions and focus them into an inquiry that was achievable in the allotted time and would complement the many excellent reports and pieces of research on the sector that already exist. Over the course of the inquiry, we were fortunate to hear from the authors and generators of some of that existing material. I point in particular to the research from the AHRC-funded Creative Industries Policy and Evidence Centre, whose work is specifically calibrated to inform policy. This is not to undervalue the many submissions we received, from which we learned so much.
What they told us—and what we concluded—was that the UK’s creative industries continue to be an economic powerhouse. Our opening paragraph quotes the Government’s own figures—that they generate
“more value to the UK economy than the life sciences, aerospace and automotive industries combined”.
My Lords, it is a great pleasure to take part in this important debate. I refer to my register of interests, where I have numerous creative jobs, including being the president of Marlow Film Studios; that is probably the most specific one. I just want to say how grateful I am to follow such incredible and eminent speakers, all of whom have genuine and real experience of working in the creative industries. My former chair, the noble Baroness, Lady Stowell—I say “former” because I was kicked off the committee—gave an incredible outline of the report, setting out all the key details; of course, she has worked at a senior level in the media. We have also heard from the world’s greatest publisher, the noble Baroness, Lady Rebuck; the noble Baroness, Lady Bonham-Carter, who has had a glittering career in the media; and the noble Baroness, Lady Bull, one of our foremost arts educators and practitioners—and we still have the world’s greatest Methodist preacher to come.
I welcome the Government’s vision for the creative sector industries. It was clearly provoked by our hard-hitting report; through the recommendations that we made, we managed to force some importance concessions from the Government and get a comprehensive strategy from them for the creative industries. It is a bit depressing, when the Government represent the creative industries, that they cannot come up with a more poetic title than Creative Industries Sector Vision; it does not exactly make for light or enjoyable reading, but we know that the spirit is willing and the Government are working to support our creative industries.
As noble Lords can probably tell, I want to provide a bit of a corrective because I do not think that the Government tell their own story well enough. For example, they deserve an enormous amount of praise for the way in which they handled the cultural recovery fund during the pandemic; it really made an enormous difference. There is also their recent announcement of the cultural education advisory council to implement the cultural education plan and the new music education plan. That is to be ably chaired by the noble Baroness, Lady Bull; there are one or two glaring omissions in the people appointed to that commission, but we will skate over them.
My Lords, I am glad to start my speech by agreeing with two things just said by the noble Lord, Lord Vaizey. First, the current Minister should stay in his post for ever. However, this will require a small sacrifice on his part, in changing from his side of the House to ours, before he is eligible.
Secondly, I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Vaizey, about the ghastliness of the phrase “creative industries”. It is hopeless for describing what we are talking about. “Creative” immediately makes you think of a painter scratching away on her canvas, but this goes far wider than art and the arts. They are a terribly important part of the creative world, but this sector is a financial as well as an artistic powerhouse. It deserves a better name. “Industries” just makes me think of LS Lowry and those smoky chimneys, but you have fewer smoky chimneys with this than with anything else.
With that aside, this is a valuable report. I was a member of the committee, so I am showing off a bit, but the real credit belongs with the staff, who get through more work in a day than I do in a month, and with my fellow committee members and our chair, the noble Baroness, Lady Stowell.
We say in our report that the Government have been complacent. I cannot help but think there is a bit of a paradox here: you can hardly pick up a newspaper now without a picture of a grinning Rishi Sunak in white overalls and black protective goggles proclaiming that Britain’s future lies in the creative industries. Meanwhile, the reality is, in our report’s words, a “lack of focus” by government. The creative industries, or whatever we will call them in a better world, do not even feature in the Government’s five priorities for growth, and they did not mention them in the last Autumn Statement. The reality seems a lot less present than the glorifying pictures of the Prime Minister.
When we see the flaws in policy, they are major. As we point out,
My Lords, like others, I welcome this report. I congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Stowell, and her colleagues on the many cogent and important points that they make. Likewise, but to a rather lesser degree, I welcome the Government’s response. It acknowledges some of the failings identified in the committee’s report but does not satisfactorily deal with some of the more profoundly serious problems facing the creativity of this country and its future, as identified in the report.
Being a report from the Communications and Digital Committee, there is naturally considerable stress on technology. But, in today’s world, everything is to a greater or lesser degree wrapped up in the hungry but enabling embrace of technology. I remember Brian Eno showing me, about 15 years ago, how he had managed to create sounds on video games that would change every time somebody put in an input. In other words, you would never get the same piece of music twice; every fresh input would create a new sound. This defies the imagination. That was 15 years ago, so that gives you an idea of the way technology is beginning to frame things and the skills we need to continue it.
Whether it be the electronic creation of film and pop music, journalism, computer-controlled lighting for dance and theatre, or the streaming of live concerts from Wigmore Hall, the Barbican or venues up and down the country, technology is at the heart of creative thinking and creativity. I welcome the fact that a lot of the money that goes into concerts, theatre and ballet now enables the wider public—the people whose taxes pay for it—to see these things. That is a huge step forward.
We have heard of the pre-eminent role that creativity plays, both financially and socially, in our lives. In this regard, it is held highly by the Government. At least, that is what they repeatedly tell us, but it does not always seem that the Government understand the sector’s problems. When they do—here I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Vaizey, that we must salute things that have been done well—we have welcome results, such as the extension of VAT relief for orchestras and theatres for another two years. I compliment my co-chair on the APPG for Classical Music, Barbara Keeley, for pursuing this successfully in the other place. I too acknowledge the support for much of the sector during the pandemic; we must not take that for granted. I do not overlook the plus side. Necessarily, though, to be of any constructive use, it is the downside to which we must address ourselves.
My Lords, there has been so much wisdom shared. I am a member of the committee, and I am glad to be surrounded by other members of the committee—it is like a Sunday School outing; we have can have a cream tea on the Terrace afterwards—particularly because we have been able to give force to the thinking incorporated in the report. At the end of a week when, with the debates on a certain Bill dominating the space, I have had nothing but murderous thoughts about people on the opposite Benches, the debate allows me to emphasise that I have such positive things to say about the chair of the committee. It is wonderful to have a nice antidote to some of my dark thoughts this week. Her skill is terrific. My noble friend Lady Rebuck has already talked about the consensual way that she had us all working, and that is certainly true. Beyond that, to take the recommendations of the report in January through to the Government’s response in April and then the Government’s statements in June, incorporating so much of the thinking of the report, suggests there was a bit more than simply consensual working and that there was focused thinking and follow-through, which seems to me to be very considerable. One quality of the noble Baroness, Lady Stowell—I will get it off my chest now—is that she knows the highways and byways of how politics works and she gets into the kind of web of things. We have our lovely thoughts, we shape them as we can, and then she takes them away and worries away in the right places so that we get some kind of progress.
By the way, it is lovely to respond to the noble Lord, Lord Vaizey, who is clearly possessed of all the skills necessary to recognise a fine Methodist preacher when he sees one, and I must pay him my tribute.
My intellectual life was marked seriously by the novels of CP Snow and the idea of The Two Cultures. In those days, it was arts and science. I had a particular proclivity for pure maths, but I could not do it because it was a choice between arts or science, so I ended up with English, French and Latin. None of them gave me any mathematical scope at all. The idea of technology, possibly, and the humanities being two cultures is the one that our report seems to knock on the head. Cross-government working has been mentioned again and again; from a government end, the approach to creative industries must be generic, not departmentalised or compartmentalised. That is the first thing. The other thing is to recognise, as the noble Lord, Lord Berkeley, said, that creativity, technology and imagination all work together.
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The UK has long been regarded as a global leader in both the privately funded and the publicly funded creative sectors, and rightly so. But international competition is hotting up. In the last 10 years, the global value of exports of creative services has more than doubled to reach $1.1 trillion. Countries across the world are seeking a greater slice of this lucrative industry. Let me explain how. Many of the things that made the UK successful—like fiscal incentives, public arts programmes, centres of excellence and high-end production centres—are being copied and improved on by Governments abroad. At the same time, small UK businesses are selling up and, with them, valuable intellectual property is moving overseas.
UK experts are being left out of leading international research collaborations, which leaves us less influential and less engaged at the cutting edge of innovation. Huge American tech giants are dominating the emerging market in virtual and augmented reality, and they are reaping huge dividends from all of the consumer data that this generates. Also, technological advances and disruption risk shifting people out of the creative workforce and, in the process, reducing the vibrancy and creative spark on which so much of our economic success depends. In short, we face mounting challenges and cannot take the continued success of our creative industries for granted.
When we published our report, we had major concerns about how seriously the Government were taking this sector and the challenges it faces. Political attention had waned in recent years, I regret to say. The sector scarcely featured in the Chancellor’s 2022 Autumn Statement and was not among his key growth industries. International summits were being skipped by Ministers, and industry experts had started to speak openly about the UK’s decline in a fast-moving and highly competitive global market.
We also had concerns about what seemed to be an incoherent policy landscape holding the sector back. UKRI, the national funding agency for investing in research and innovation, was proposing to cut the creative industries clusters programme, which had delivered unprecedented success and return on investment. The Intellectual Property Office was proposing a new text and data mining regime that would undercut creative sector business models. To be blunt, Whitehall was blindly favouring new technology at the expense of creative IP. Efforts to tackle skills were not aligned with industry needs, and support for organisations receiving public funding placed too little emphasis on the innovation, cross-sector collaboration and sustainability that are key to ensuring the arts sector’s long-term success.
It is vital to stress that championing the creative industries is not a matter of special pleading. There is a serious and well-evidenced business case for the sector to sit at the heart of the UK’s future growth plans.
Perhaps I may at this point direct a comment to the creative sector itself. The emphasis from some who work within it on how it is “special” and should not be dirtied by talk of money, efficiencies and the value it adds to the economy has not always helped its cause and I would argue to those who maintain that position that it does need to change.
Given the importance of the sector, I was very pleased to see the new sector vision, which is a collaboration between government and the creative industries and sets out plans and commitments to help the creative sector fulfil its potential. While, of course, it is not perfect, it addresses some of the core issues we raised.
First, the new level of political attention is notable. The Chancellor has now included the creative industries in the UK’s priority economic growth areas. The sector vision has a foreword from the Prime Minister. These changes matter, and industry will be paying attention. I believe this recognition at the very top of government has not happened by accident.
Second is the new £50 million of funding being provided to continue the creative clusters programme. This will build on the hugely successful previous round of clusters, which exceeded expectations and provided a proven model for stimulating innovation and generating significant returns on investment. I must emphasise, however, that while this investment is welcome, UKRI and the Government must ensure that the value generated by previous clusters is not lost; they must be supported to transition to a long-term, sustainable footing. One practice that we saw quite commonly across the policy areas relevant to the creative industries was what I might describe as a bit of “initiative-itis”: instead of sticking with what is proven to have worked, trying to reinvent things and start again from scratch.
The additional £75 million investment in the CoSTAR programme to boost R&D is also welcome, and speaks to the fact that the nexus between technology and creativity is a core UK strength that we should double down on.
Thirdly, the Government’s commitment to dropping the proposed text and data mining regime is crucial. I understand that the Intellectual Property Office is now working on a new voluntary code. My committee will keep a close eye on how that develops, because creative businesses, whether they are in the music industry, publishers, artists—all of them—remain very concerned about getting this right. As we emphasised in our report, developing AI is important—indeed, we have announced today that our next inquiry is on AI—but it should not be pursued at all costs. Otherwise, we will find that things we value and make us distinctive as a country gradually disappear in the name of efficiency and technological progress.
The previous proposals, which have now been scratched, threw creative sector businesses under the bus, and needlessly so. The trade-off does not need to happen in this way: many sectors marry technology and creativity very well, and generate huge profits in the process, without undermining IP and business models. A fair deal that promotes innovation and supports the creative sector is possible, and we look forward to seeing the IPO’s plans in due course.
Fourthly, the Government have committed to using a data-driven approach to mapping skills requirements in the sector, which will make use of the new Unit for Future Skills. This too is vital. There are thousands of training courses and initiatives, yet far too many employers say that skills shortages are getting worse and that the Government do not have a good enough plan to address this. The first step is to set out exactly where the most acute shortages are. The Government must ensure that this then informs policy decisions around the development of apprenticeships and T-levels, and the provision, funding and advertisement of lifelong learning courses.
On the subject of skills, I will reiterate the committee’s recommendation that innovative ideas, such as the flexi-job apprenticeship, should be scaled up to address a pressing problem: namely, that apprenticeships should be an excellent route into the sector, but many of them are poorly suited to the industry’s work practices and SME-dominated set-up. The Government have committed to ministerial round tables to discuss creative apprenticeships and say that they will “improve” the flexi-job model. I would be grateful for further clarification from my noble friend about what specific changes and improvements are planned, and the timeline for delivering them.
Fifthly, we called for better support for SMEs to boost growth. I was pleased to see that the Create Growth Programme is receiving a funding uplift. It will be important to review the most successful outcomes of this programme and help scale learnings more widely across the country. There are other welcome commitments around delivering national plans for cultural and music education, joining up the creative sector with public health, and awareness of how the sector relates to environmental targets.
I cannot claim that the sector vision addresses all the committee’s concerns. The UK’s definition of R&D for tax relief, for example, is an outlier compared with other OECD countries. It remains overly restrictive and excludes a large proportion of work in the creative sector. As one business owner told us, it can mean that technical staff are able to claim R&D relief but the key creative contributors working on the same project cannot. As a result, the whole team’s ability to innovate is limited by the number of creatives the company can afford to employ.
I appreciate of course that we cannot distribute endless tax cuts, but we can double down on our strengths and at least explore further options for stimulating more innovation. I reiterate the committee’s call for the Government to look at this issue more seriously by expanding the definition of R&D. A limited pilot could be a good start.
I would also welcome more clarity on what is happening with careers guidance. The committee’s inquiry heard evidence that guidance is patchy and needed significant improvements. This is vital to getting young people into the right courses and jobs, and filling extensive skills gaps. The sector vision refers to “inspiring creative careers guidance”, but does not say much about what that actually means. Perhaps it will be addressed in the forthcoming education plans; I would certainly welcome clarification from my noble friend if he can give that today.
Finally, we also need a solid plan for dealing with technological disruption. Technologies are moving at breakneck speed—to state the obvious. We cannot simply wish them away or pretend that they will not have significant disruption, particularly for people who have roles with insecure contracts and work in areas of the creative industries that are more exposed. The Government are not there to back up everyone’s business models, but they can create the conditions and planning to help UK businesses prepare and adapt. Supporting businesses and freelancers to be more resilient, dynamic and flexible will stand them in good stead to manage the looming changes facing the sector.
Other countries will doubtless be looking at this, and the UK must not be left behind. I look forward to seeing the Government’s response to the Creative Industries Policy and Evidence Centre’s report on working practices and hope that it will address, in further detail, concerns about helping businesses and freelancers understand and manage the impacts of technological disruption.
This sector vision is very much the start, not the end, of a process. We must not be lulled into a false sense of security: publishing a plan does not mean that it will automatically be successful, or indeed that other countries will not similarly publish ambitious plans which see the UK fall behind. Continued high-level political commitment will remain crucial. As I said at the beginning, our creative industries are critically important to our national life and economy. They help us to unite and generate our collective pride in being British and to promote the best of British around the world. They do not deserve special treatment or exceptions from the basic demands placed on all businesses and organisations which are necessary for their survival, but we need to make sure that the right policy frameworks are in place and that we take them seriously. In the end, their continued success will be down to the creative industries themselves and the very many talented people who work within them.
There is much more ground that I could cover, but I am sure that it will be picked up by other noble Lords in the debate, which I look forward to hearing. I beg to move.
However, in the time I have in the debate, I will concentrate on what I think is the biggest threat to our long-term growth in the creative industries: the issue of skills. How will we fill those promised extra 1 million jobs? Creative skills must be developed alongside STEM subjects, from nursery through to further, higher and postgraduate education. The current Department for Education’s consistent blind spot on the value of the humanities must be addressed. Universities such as East Anglia, have drunk the Kool-Aid of the Government’s rhetoric on so-called low-value humanities courses. Under financial duress, East Anglia is planning to cut its world-renowned creative writing course, which launched the careers of Kazuo Ishiguro, Anne Enright and Ian McEwan, whose novels are exported and translated the world over and the source of so many top British films.
Dr Darren Henley of Arts Council England told us that the three pillars of education were numeracy, literacy and creativity, which I hope will figure strongly in the cultural education plan which may be published later this year. I would add oracy to that list, as suggested yesterday by Keir Starmer, having seen the positive effects of this educational focus when I visited School 21 in Newham some 10 years ago and was so impressed by the articulate and imaginative students I met.
I know that the Minister supports a cultural education plan, but I still wonder why the EBacc continues to be so narrowly focused, excluding creative and tech skills, and why creative industry careers guidance is so inadequate, resulting in 41% of 16 year-olds not knowing that they could have a career in our successful screen industries. Time after time, we heard evidence of creative industries being held up through a lack of workforce skills. Some 88% of creative employers find it hard to recruit the right staff, against 38% across the rest of the economy, which is bad enough. That statistic was quoted to the inquiry by a Minister from the Department for Education. ScreenSkills told us that skills shortages were the biggest inhibitor to growth, and one fast-growing gaming company was turning work down because it could not recruit people with the right skills.
Why is it so difficult for government to fully embrace the STEAM agenda? By STEAM, I of course mean science, technology, engineering and maths, but the “A”, for me at least, means the whole of the humanities and the teaching of creativity and critical thinking. One academic said that, despite the evidence of science, technology and artistry as the unicorns of the modern world, so many students were nervous about investing in their creativity. Surely the Government must recognise the central role of the humanities, imagination and critical thinking in harnessing technologies such as AI, which will have such a profound effect on every aspect of our society.
One of the starkest concerns for me was the 70% drop in the take-up of the design and technology GCSE over the last decade, higher even than the 40% decline in other creative subjects. How could this happen, when arguably one of the most successful companies in the world, Apple, was born through a unique combination of the technological vison of Steve Jobs and the world-beating design of Sir Jony Ive? A product of our own—creative higher education—is now under threat.
People say that a reimagining of the education system would be difficult, if not impossible, but we had some very interesting evidence from Dinah Caine, chair of the STEAM initiative in Camden, London. I declare that my daughter is the leader of Camden Council and that it is the borough in which I live. I knew that it had started a STEAM agenda some five years ago to build a bridge for the kids on the local housing estates, who would walk past the glass edifices of Google, Meta and even St Martin’s School of Art and think that they were never for them.
Today, many young people’s lives in the borough have been transformed by hearing of the opportunities available and by getting top careers advice and work placements inside these exciting institutions and in many smaller creative businesses. However, I had no idea of the effect on education in the borough and the power of the STEAM teachers’ networks with local businesses. I therefore asked to visit Torriano Primary School in Kentish Town, home to 446 children, of which just under 50% were on free school meals. Walking into the school and seeing the accomplished art on the walls alongside representation of polymers created by five year-olds was impressive enough; then I heard that six and seven year-olds had worked with an engineering company to design a greenhouse of the future and had coded a watering app to use the least amount of water for the seeds to grow. Yes, six and seven year-olds were combining tech, design and creativity to invent the future. This school, a beacon of STEAM excellence, was also delivering the national curriculum—it can be done.
I realise that the Minister cannot wave a magic wand and secure an instant new skills pipeline for the creative industries, but, with the promised 1 million new jobs to fill, can he reassure us that he recognises the skills threat and will advocate with the DfE at all levels to ensure a fundamental focus on arts and creative education alongside STEM, and that skills are a “cross-ministry issue”, to quote Sir Peter Bazalgette, co-chair of the Creative Industries Council and co-author of the vision document? Can the Minister confirm his support for the STEAM agenda and the key role of teaching and nurturing creative and critical thinking, without which the threatened decline of our world-leading creative industries will be a self-fulfilling prophecy.
“If arts subjects aren’t included in the Ebacc, schools won’t stop doing them overnight. But there will be a corrosive process, they will be gradually eroded … By default, resources won’t go into them”.
That is what has happened. Compared to 2022, entries at GCSE have fallen dramatically in art and design, drama, music and performing, and expressive arts—I shall not give figures—and it is the same at A-level.
It is suggested that it is up to individual schools to choose what is in their syllabus, but in the state system there is no incentive to offer creative subjects. There are 119 accountability measures that a state secondary must consider and, as I understand it, not one of them pertains to the arts. Just look at the stark difference with the private sector, which recognises the benefits, because it is a fact that schools providing high-quality cultural education get better academic results. It is a fact that private schools entice parents with access to culture. As Mark Rylance has said:
“If, in modern day England, an institution like Eton deems drama important enough to have two theatres, why are we allowing the government to cut arts education from the life of the rest of our young people?”
As Lib Dems, we have always argued for STEAM, not STEM. There should not be a choice between arts and science—they are symbiotic. As the committee report says:
“Employers are increasingly calling for a blend of creative and digital skills. This interdisciplinary approach needs to be encouraged at school”.
The noble Baroness, Lady Rebuck, mentioned the Jony Ive case. Sir Peter Bazalgette, co-chair of the Creative Industries Council and co-author of the sector vision, has said:
“Our global competitiveness will increasingly depend on the fusion of creative and technological innovation”.
He also asked:
“Wasn’t the last industrial revolution powered by steam? There’s a lesson there for us”.
Indeed, the Victorians understood that it was this very fusion that fuelled the first Industrial Revolution. They had a department of science and arts, and invested in what was to become the V&A to develop the skills needed to feed British industry of that time. To ensure that the generation of the fourth industrial revolution is a generation of creators, schools need to be empowered to promote not just science or arts but the arts-science crossover. Sadly, this is an area in which the Government are not in listening mode, and there will be no move on the EBacc.
This report recommends that Ofsted’s outstanding ratings should be given only to schools that can demonstrate excellence in creative and technical teaching—something the Lib Dems have long called for. Does the Minister agree, and, more importantly, will he convince his colleagues in the education department?
The disparity between access to creative subjects for children in state schools and those in fee-paying schools leads to a pipeline of talent that has become ever more dependent on the affluence of parents. Research by the Creative Industries Policy and Evidence Centre has found that people from more privileged backgrounds are twice as likely to be employed in the cultural sector. This means less diversity in every sense.
There are T-levels, which should be able to provide a vocational route into creative occupations and help alleviate this problem, but in their present incarnation they are not user-friendly for the creative industries. The requirements for workplace placements are hard for SMEs to follow, and the sector is full of SMEs. Training pathways are confusing for students and employers; clearer routes into the industry are needed. I am sure my noble friend Lord Foster will speak more on this, but the present apprenticeship system is also not flexible enough.
Then there is HE, as the noble Baroness, Lady Rebuck, mentioned. Lately, there has been an unhelpful rhetoric about the low value of creative courses, emanating from the Department for Education. This is both a case of misunderstanding and short-sighted. Many of those starting out in the creative industries work flexibly in freelance roles, so will take time to generate higher salaries—their jobs are not only very worthwhile but they contribute to one of the highest growth sectors of the UK’s economy. I am not sure that Minister Lopez, in her reply to the committee’s report, understands that. She refers to
“stringent minimum numerical thresholds for student outcomes”.
Does the Minister not accept that reducing outcomes to salary alone is both unhelpful and simplistic?
Finally, I come to the issue of careers advice or lack of it, again mentioned by the noble Baroness, Lady Rebuck. We need institutions and businesses from the creative industries collaborating properly with schools. My noble friend Lord Willis chaired the Youth Unemployment Committee, which recommended that careers guidance should be a compulsory element of the primary and secondary curriculum. This committee’s report recommends the same: expanding programmes that provide guidance for routes into the creative sector. I hope the Minister agrees with that. On which point, would it also be a good idea, as recommended by the report, for the Secretary of State for Education to sit on the Creative Industries Council alongside the DCMS Secretary? This would surely help co-ordination between creative business needs and skills.
However, not all is gloom. There is money promised for cultural education in the sector vision, and this provides the opportunity to plan and fund new activities taking place within and outside schools. It is essential that creative subjects are not shoe-horned into the corner of a crammed school timetable.
Another big positive is the noble Baroness, Lady Bull, who everyone holds in high esteem and who we will hear from in a minute. She is chairing a group coming up with a national cultural education plan. I am glad to say that, in this instance, it appears that the DfE is working alongside DCMS. Let us hope that when the noble Baroness and her team deliver a solution to righting the wrongs I have been discussing—which I am sure they will—the Government will listen and will provide adequate funding support.
To go back to the gloom, this Government’s record is not very good. Where is the arts premium, a manifesto commitment lost? Music hubs have been reduced from 116 to 43. But what a good report. I hope the Government understand that to continue to flourish in this area—in which we excel—we need to invest in our future and our future talent. I end with the words of the noble Lord, Lord Bragg:
“Athens managed to become world-renowned through its arts. Two and a half thousand years later, we still gaze at the results with awe”.
This comparison is so oft cited that I asked whether we might find an alternative expression of the nearly £116 billion GVA that the creative industries contribute, but I was rightly shouted down. It tells a compelling story and, besides, it was this well-established evidence of success, alongside the clear potential for growth, that led our chair to sum up the committee’s view by describing the Government’s failure to grasp the opportunities and risks for this sector as “baffling”.
From different witnesses we heard how the creative industries should be at the heart of government plans for economic growth. The sector has outpaced the general economy, it is growing in every part of the UK, and job growth over the decade from 2010 was five times higher than that of the UK overall. I am aware that this is a higher figure than the noble Baroness, Lady Stowell, quoted, but I am quoting the figure referenced in the sector vision. It is a sector that contributes to other national priorities, including health and well-being, civic engagement, social cohesion and place making.
Given these wide-ranging benefits, unlocking the potential of the creative industries will necessarily involve a level of policy coherence and departmental join-up that we did not find. Some of the disconnect and lack of engagement was, frankly, alarming. We noted a degree of complacency and, in some places, a regrettable sense that, despite all the evidence, the sector’s potential is still not taken seriously. I exempt the Minister at the Dispatch Box from this criticism; I think the whole House recognises his commitment to arts, culture and the creative industries.
We found blind spots in education, with a mismatch between careers guidance, apprenticeship schemes and sector skills shortages. We noted few incentives for young people to study the combination of creative and technical skills that the industry requires. We found a persistent and unhelpful rhetoric of “low-value” courses in higher education that fails to take into account the realities of work in the sector. We could not understand why a highly successful model of innovation, the creative clusters programme, was being discontinued. We heard that international tax relief schemes were undercutting the UK, making it less attractive for creative businesses.
What concerned us was not just the range of individual issues, important though they are; it was the policy incoherence, different levels of engagement among departments and repeatedly changing Ministers that formed the backdrop against which the impact of rapidly developing technologies on the creative industries will play out. These technologies will fundamentally change the way content is made, experienced and disseminated. Some of our most fascinating discussions were about how the opportunities for innovation and growth that this represents are balanced with the regulatory and rights issues that arise and the potential impact on creative jobs.
Some argued that the sector was less exposed than others because creativity is a uniquely human skill. Others were not so sure, arguing that if one definition of creativity is the ability to recombine knowledge in new and original ways, an AI tool—which has theoretical access to everything that humans have ever written or said—could, in theory, come up with something that is entirely novel, whether or not the machine knows it. This may be the 21st-century equivalent of the infinite monkey theorem.
The sector vision has set out how the Government plan to address some of the issues we raised, and I particularly welcome the announcement of renewed support for creative clusters. But other responses have been more disappointing, including to our recommendation that the R&D definition needs to change. While we argued that the Government’s definition is narrower than that in other OECD countries, the response claimed it to be consistent with the OECD Frascati standard. It is worth explaining exactly why this is not the case. There is an anomaly in UK policy in that HMRC also requires that R&D relates to scientific or technological delivery, despite the Frascati manual having a wider scope.
DSIT’s guidelines on the meaning of research and development for tax purposes specifically state:
“Work in the arts, humanities and social sciences … is not science for the purpose of these Guidelines”.
This means that R&D in the creative industries that draws on these disciplines is excluded from targeted R&D incentives, and this is not consistent with other OECD countries. I apologise for heading into the weeds on this point, but the sector vision’s ambition for increased R&D would carry more weight if HMRC did not dismiss the research on which much of it relies as ineligible for tax relief.
Our specific focus for this inquiry inevitably meant that we did not address all the issues that threaten the sector today. We did not comment on the disproportionate impact that Brexit is having on the next generation of talent. We did not discuss the distribution of arts funding. We touched on issues of inequality, specifically in relation to the ways in which automation could hit hardest those on lower salaries or insecure contracts, but our remit was not to investigate the reasons for stubbornly persistent inequalities of opportunity and access: the disparity of arts provision between independent and state schools, the reliance on freelancers and the precarity it breeds, the long hours and low pay—all the factors that risk widening the gap between those who can afford to work in the sector and those who cannot. I welcome, therefore, the specific focus on inclusivity in the workforce in the sector vision and look forward to seeing its ambitions turned into action.
The fact that these issues were not part of our inquiry does not mean that the committee does not recognise their importance—far from it. Many members wanted a broader remit than time would allow, and I hope that future inquiries will see the committee focus its efforts on these critical challenges.
I always find these debates on reports in which one has had a hand rather difficult to navigate. I have skated across the broad terrain and hovered briefly over one or two topics that were in—some out—of scope but everything that I want to say about this issue is in the pages of the report; I hope that Ministers across government will reflect carefully on what it says. Unless we address the current disconnect between the sector’s potential and cross-government priorities, and unless Ministers recognise the necessity of cross-departmental collaboration, the UK’s creative future and the well-evidenced contribution that the creative industries make to our economic, social and cultural well-being will remain very much at risk.
One thing I always think when we talk about the arts is that it is important for Ministers—this is just a word of sage advice for my noble friend Lord Parkinson, who is without question the best arts Minister we have had since 2016—always to keep hold of the outputs, not the inputs. There is always a tendency for those of us who care passionately about the arts to talk constantly about the inputs, such as better budgets and so on, and not look at what is happening around us.
Let us look around us. The recent reopening of the National Portrait Gallery was a complete triumph. In my role as a Tate trustee, I am looking forward to the complete refurbishment of Tate Liverpool. There are new storage facility sites for places such as the Science Museum and the Natural History Museum. There is the reopening of the children’s museum via the V&A and V&A East. Factory International in Manchester reopened recently, reassuringly over budget. Of course, the Manchester Art Gallery has also been a triumph. In Birmingham, there are the Steven Knight-led film studios; there are also new proposals for studios in the north-east. Look at the kind of leadership that we still enjoy in the creative industries; for example, with David Chipperfield recently winning the Pritzker Prize, the Nobel Prize for architecture.
These are all great stories. Only today, if you read the excellent newsletter the Vaizey View, written by Alex Pleasants, you will see a reference to music exports having increased by 20% in the last year alone. No doubt many of us here will celebrate that tomorrow night in Hyde Park when we pop along to watch Bruce Springsteen. When the noble Baroness, Lady Bonham-Carter, mentioned Melvyn Bragg, I was wondering whether to refer to his interview in his absence. In it, he bemoaned 12 years of Tory philistinism. Nothing could be further from the truth, as there have been huge success stories along the way. I noted that he compared a successful arts policy with the success of Athens. I do think that the one glaring omission in the Government’s arts policy is the return of the Parthenon sculptures to Athens, which will unleash a huge and thriving cultural partnership between Greece and the UK.
These are all great success stories. It sounds facetious, but the most important thing that the creative industries and the arts sector need from any Government is proper, committed and passionate leadership. It is important that we have Ministers who are there for a significant length of time and it is good to see that the noble Lord, Lord Parkinson, looks like he will never leave his post. That is very important. It is important that we celebrate, for example, David Chipperfield receiving the Pritzker Prize. I do not know whether the Prime Minister wrote to him, but these are the kinds of success stories that the Government should be talking about, even if they are not directly responsible for them.
To put it another way, the relentless and pointless attacks on the BBC just undermine some of the great jewels in the crown of our creative industry sector. Any sensible Government would stop them and celebrate these incredible success stories, because the UK’s creative industries are, without doubt, a massive success story. There are lots of intangible reasons why that might be the case—the English language, our ability to grow and export to the US, and so on. British individualism—the fact that we have been able to be rude about our politicians for the last 400 years—may be a factor that allows us to follow our creative nose, but there are other things that the Government could do.
At the core of what makes a successful creative industry ecosystem, to use a rather crude and inept word, is tax policy. Here again the Government deserve an enormous amount of credit for: maintaining the film tax credit and even improving it over the last couple of years; the video games tax credit; the television tax credit; and the museum and theatre tax credits, which, again, they extended. Those are very good things. Noble Lords have referred to the R&D tax credit. I know of one video games company that has taken a year to get its R&D tax credit, which may not even come through. I would be interested to know the Minister’s view on whether there is perhaps a silent agenda to make it tougher for the creative industries to access the R&D tax credit. It remains a very important piece of fiscal support for the creative industries.
The other important role is having a proper intellectual property regime. As the noble Baroness, Lady Stowell, pointed out, the Government have climbed down, thankfully, on their proposals to weaken that regime. Again, this is about constancy and certainty. People do not want to hear bright ideas about messing about with an IP regime that, broadly speaking, works, is robust and which people rely on. One of the points that is referred to in the report is the need to scale up funding for our creative businesses and the fact that many are sold too early. This is a conundrum that is very difficult for the Government to solve. They have world-class incentives for start-ups. The same kinds of incentives do not necessarily exist for scale-ups but at the same time, there is nothing that one can do about the fact that in the US there is a huge wall of capital that can be deployed, which is not deployed in the same way in Britain.
I will pause and talk a bit about education and skills, since that seems to be the main topic that is emerging in the debate. This took up a lot of my time as a Minister. I referred earlier to the Government’s cultural education plan, which is a good thing. Again, one has to be robust to a certain extent. It is often down to head teachers to put in place a strong creative curriculum for their pupils. There is nothing stopping visionary secondary heads doing it but, of course, government can help. Things such as the EBacc did not help particularly. We talked in the culture White Paper about a proper school engagement plan in the arts, twinning arts institutions with schools and allowing children to have work placements—not just front of house or on stage but working across the whole range of different jobs that exist in any arts or creative industry organisation.
Sorting out creative industries apprenticeships is long overdue. The apprenticeship levy itself is a terrible policy to which for some reason the Government remain committed. Sorting out creative industries apprenticeships and the freelance nature of work in many creative industries should certainly be a priority.
The Government also need to get their hands around our conservatoires and specialist arts education institutions. They really are world class. We talk about the Ivy League and Oxbridge, but no country in the world has such an incredible infrastructure of these colleges. You visit them and see some of them being held together with sticky tape. They do not have a strong relationship with government and are not celebrated as a collective force. As far as I can see, there is no real, coherent strategy to support them going forward. We have things such as the Music and Dance Scheme, but these are random and bitty. It needs some coherence. This is a free hit for the Minister, because it need not cost much money and engagement at a senior government level would be so welcomed by these institutions.
I praise the Labour Party for its announcement on education yesterday. It was wonderful to see a commitment from the party opposite to put cultural education at the heart of schools until the age of 16. I learned a new word: oracy. That is really important in terms of the class ceiling and giving kids at state school the opportunity to debate and argue, with the self-confidence that it gives. That goes to the heart of why arts education is so important; it is not just about skills and creative skills but about self-confidence. Things such as the music education plan are not about creating the next generation of world-class violinists, although that would be a welcome development, but about giving a lot of children who would not have that opportunity incredible self-confidence in their achievements.
I will not dwell on Brexit, but it has obviously been a massive and comprehensive disaster for the creative industries in the UK. Even one small win, such as allowing our musicians and artists to tour freely in Europe, would be welcome. I know the Minister will redouble his efforts to sort out this unholy mess. He is not immature enough to keep blaming our European partners for being unable to solve that problem.
In summing up, I started with leadership and I will end by saying that we need joined-up government for the arts and creative industries. I have always thought that. The excellent suggestion from the noble Baroness, Lady Bonham-Carter, about putting the Education Secretary on the Creative Industries Council goes to the heart of that. At the heart of education, health, levelling up, and soft power and diplomacy lie our creative industries. They are world class, world beating and something of which we should all be immensely proud.
“UK tax relief … remains restrictive … The UK business environment lacks sufficient incentives for small businesses to scale at home; too many sell up”—
perhaps to other international firms—
“Data collection in both Government and the sector is muddled and under exploited. Academic research funding does too little to encourage commercially orientated creative projects … Successive governments’ efforts to address skills shortages have fallen far short of what is needed”.
Those are direct quotes from our report and have been reflected, for example, by the noble Baroness, Lady Rebuck, on skills. It is a pretty damning indictment.
That said, the Government seem to be waking up. Perhaps it is partly the result of our report. Who knows? In June they published their creative industries—those words again—sector vision. This directly addressed two of our recommendations: the Government have ditched their plan to turn copyright into a Wild West where AI producers could simply steal the data produced by others, and they have revived the creative industries clusters programme, a highly successful policy that had been due to meet its maker in March 2023. Those are promising steps forward.
There is much more that our report recommends, and that our committee and others will continue to push, until the lights go on in Whitehall. The plain fact, and a frightening one, is that if Britain does not succeed in this field, it is difficult to see where its future economic dynamism will come from. It has been high in the Government’s rhetoric but, for too long, not high enough in their practical policy agenda. That must change.
I do not apologise for repeating the committee’s ominous conclusion that the Government’s current policy towards the sector is “complacent” and “risks jeopardising” its commercial potential. The sector “scarcely featured” in the 2022 Autumn Statement and was not identified as one of the Government’s five priorities for growth. The report said the sector should
“sit at the heart of the UK’s future growth plans”.
I could not endorse that more.
The Government have rejected the committee’s suggestion that tax relief should be applied to those areas where innovation is born and developed. This is surely an error, since future success, and therefore economic prosperity, depends on innovation and new ideas. A lack of R&D is inimical to future development.
As a composer, I should declare an interest where intellectual property is concerned, but I would like to share the experiences of some of my colleagues. I think we all feel torn by the dilemma of, on the one hand, wishing to see music—this applies to other art forms and journalism as well—disseminated as widely as possible so that the greatest number of people can enjoy it, but against that is the problem that, if you can access intellectual property for free or for very little, the creators become disfranchised. It is not just the creators: as we heard from the noble Baroness, Lady Rebuck, publishers and record companies become disinclined to invest in music that is widely available.
I will give an example: if you have to realise a one million streams to earn just touching four figures, you will begin to see the problem. Furthermore, the illegal reproduction of sheet music only compounds the problem. I have a friend who has just released a song for a very worthwhile charity, but all it can really achieve is to draw attention to the cause, because the income stream, whatever the degree of success, will be negligible.
On the other hand, these are the norms in an ever-changing world that is now, to a degree, beyond our control. So, rather than complaining, we must take advantage of the many opportunities while safeguarding as far as possible current and future IP protection. On that note, the committee’s concerns over data mining, IP and AI seem extremely serious, and I am glad that the Government have decided to pause deliberations in this area for further reflection.
Having formed a cultural attachment to the University of East Anglia a few years ago, I, like the noble Baroness, Lady Rebuck, was dismayed to hear of the threat to the stunningly successful and highly regarded writing course. Thanks to the input principally of Malcolm Bradbury, among others, it has produced writers such as Angela Carter, Ian McEwan and Kazuo Ishiguro. However, I was not entirely surprised: a few years ago, the vice-chancellor wrote to congratulate me on receiving an honorary doctorate of music. Six months later, he wrote to say that the department of music, which was giving me the honorary doctorate, was closing. I just could not believe it. There are things that we have to protect; we cannot take for granted things such as the UEA writing course. The music has gone—let us not allow that writing course to go down too.
The University and College Union recently said that 31 of 36 cuts at UEA’s faculties would fall on the arts and humanities. I fear it was ever thus; that is why this report warns the Government that they must take care to protect creativity in this country and invest further in it. Whenever savings have to be made, it tends to be the arts and humanities that are the first to suffer. I understand why people are reluctant, for example, to look towards the NHS or education. It is always the arts and humanities which suffer, and we have to protect them. I would argue that they promote a more cohesive society as well as being a sound investment, as Treasury receipts demonstrate.
I was very interested when the noble Baroness, Lady Stowell, said that we sometimes do not serve our own cause well in the way that we talk about receipts and things like that, and that things should change. I would welcome hearing from her the ways in which we could improve that dialogue. After all, whether you are a composer, a writer or a Peer in the House of Lords, we are here not just to scrutinise but to learn. So, if there are things we could do better, I would be interested to hear about them.
The downgrading of our skills development goes back to the loss of arts in state schools, which means, for instance, that instrument tuition and provision has become the preserve of the affluent. The noble Lord, Lord Vaizey, is right in saying that the individual headmaster can make a huge difference, but if there are no peripatetic teachers or instruments, even an enlightened head is going to be up against it. This was a point that the noble Baroness, Lady Barran, reiterated when I asked her about how we are going to find more skilled teachers for music in schools. She conceded, as I think the Minister has, that there is a real problem here. It is something the Government need to address.
If it is only the affluent pupils learning the violin, the clarinet or the guitar, what does that say about levelling up? I know, like others, that the Minister is deeply committed to music, and I apologise for repeating ad nauseam my concerns in this area. However, the fact is that exposure to music and the arts at an early age is, to my mind, the overriding issue in the creative health of our nation. After all, these are the artists and the teachers of the future. As we have just heard, the decline in the number of students taking arts in schools is therefore desperately worrying. Goal two of the Government’s Creative Industries Sector Vision aims to:
“Build a highly-skilled, productive and inclusive workforce for the future, supporting million more jobs across the UK”.
How do the Government reconcile that aspiration with the lack of arts opportunities in state schools, which is where it starts?
Let us suppose that despite these difficulties you make it as, for example, a performing musician. The lack of royalties from the dissemination of your ideas, which I have already mentioned, will mean that you or your group, be it pop or classical, will need to tour to make ends meet. Here, as the noble Lord, Lord Vaizey, mentioned, you will encounter further obstacles in terms of the time and money required for visas in Europe and the lunatic rules of cabotage that will affect the transport of your instruments and staging, even if you yourself manage to get there.
I think the Government need, as many people have said, to think as though they are an orchestra. You have the brass there, the strings here—you have education here and you have business here—and they need to join up to make a synchronous sound. I know the Prime Minister is looking at the desperate pleas of the science community in relation to the Horizon program. I think we should link these endeavours in the light of the progress made with the Windsor Framework. Even committed Brexiteers acknowledge that there is much to sort out in order to create a better exchange of scientific and artistic ideas. That exchange—that curiosity—is the daily bread of progress, whether it be in the arts or business. The secret to writing a great book, or composing a piece of music or a dance, is the ability to refine, to hone, to improve and to admit that something is not quite right. That is what we need to do in relation to our cultural life and its relation to our nearest neighbours.
Finally, despite all the problems that the creative industries face, we will go on creating and performing. That is the nature of the creative imperative, but it is not something we should take for granted or take advantage of. There is so much, as the Minister will doubtless acknowledge, to build on. I hope that he and his colleagues will hear the concerns outlined in this excellent report because, I assure him, they reflect wide concern and fears on what you might call the shop floor of our creative industries. They are full of ideas, but they really are struggling.
Others have great expertise and life experiences which I do not have; I have others, but not those. I will now share a couple of my experiences. In 10 days’ time, at the Old Street roundabout near Moorgate, a new school will be opened—or rather, a refurbished Victorian school in a very unprepossessing site will be opened. It is the Central Foundation Boys’ School. Around £51 million will produce a brand new school with a fantastic head teacher. The skills that have been referred to repeatedly and the need not to put the thinking of one discipline and another into silos are being incorporated. This is the kind of school that will be equipped with the necessary wherewithal to shape young minds in cross-referencing the ability to think outside the box with science and technology. This will be wonderfully provided for.
It is a state school, it is downtown and it is in Islington. There is nothing special about the catchment area, but the pupils will learn the skills we have been discussing today. I am happy to offer that information for the general interest. How can we do something like that? Because we had £51 million to spend. How many state schools across the land do not have and will not have the wherewithal? Some of their buildings are falling down and they do not have modern, state-of-the-art facilities.
We also have a Central Foundation Girls’ School. Twenty years of my life have gone into governance and the shaping of policy in both these schools. Out in Tower Hamlets, 85% of the girls are Bangladeshi and come to school in their hijabs. At that school, we are bringing back former pupils to remind those caught up in a culture that tends to be inward-looking about what will help them to break into new avenues of understanding, of self-development and of contribution to the common good.
I am very proud of those schools. It is 18 months since I stepped down from my responsibilities there, so I do not declare an interest as there is no conflict. It does, however, seem to incorporate a certain spirit at a young age. When I go for the opening in 10 days’ time, it will all begin with a concert. At one stage, they asked the trustees if we could help them to buy 20 pianos. I have never bought more than one in my life. They need 20 pianos so they can have rehearsal rooms and all the rest of it. That is my first experience.
The other is perhaps more homely. My wife would go over to Tower Hamlets to fetch my grandson, little Thomas—he is not little; he is a teenager now—from his primary school to take him home two days a week. On one occasion, holding his grandmother’s arm, he said, “Grandma, I am a chatterbox. I love talking. It is my grandpa, you know”. He went on to say, “But I’m going to be quiet for a few minutes. Please understand. Don’t worry. My head is bursting with imagination”. At home, his father, who is a mathematician, and his mother, who is a teacher, ensure that he has cross-references to every conceivable thing in the world. He has sat down and explained cosmology to me.
All I want people to understand is that the educational challenge for a nation such as ours is to open people’s minds from the earliest possible age—we heard about seven year-olds building greenhouses—to the possibilities of working with hand and brain, and thinking and feeling, so that the composite whole that comes out of all of that is a creative contribution to the well-being of the land and the improvement of the people who live in it.