They love to have their names up in lights and, when it comes to their economic contribution, it turns out that they richly deserve to. Actors, artists, authors, advertisers, architects, musicians and fashion designers form part of a buoyant — and far too often overlooked — British business success story.
The numbers are surprising. According to the Creative Industries Trade and Investment Board, such sectors have been growing at more than twice the
rate of the wider UK economy since 2010. In 2019, the creative industries were worth more than life sciences, automotive manufacturing, aerospace and oil and gas combined. They include more than one in eight of Britain’s businesses. Executives point to their importance in levelling up, with clusters of excellence nationwide, from gaming in Leamington Spa and Dundee to television in Birmingham and Leeds.
Insiders say it was pleasing to have the creative sectors singled out in the budget this year, even better to have that delivered by Jeremy Hunt, a former culture secretary. This is quite a turnaround from the criticism of the government in a report by the Lord’s communications and digital committee in January, which complained of an approach that was “complacent and risks jeopardising the sector’s commercial potential”.
The report went on: “The creative industries scarcely featured in the 2022 autumn statement and were not included in the government’s five priorities for growth. This lack of focus risks affecting the UK’s future prosperity, especially at a time of rising international competition in the sector and domestic economic challenges.”
The Creative Industries Trade and Investment Board, chaired by Caroline Rush, chief executive of the British Fashion Council, wants to hit £55 billion in exports of goods and services by 2025 and £78 billion in 2030.
However, the pandemic hit parts of the sector hard. A report by Oxford Economics said the creative industries were estimated to have lost £12 billion in gross value added as a result of Covid, dropping from £115.9 billion in 2019 to £104.1 billion in 2020.
The biggest headache will be finding enough people to fuel exponential growth, according to Ed Shedd, who leads the global media and entertainments industry team at Deloitte Global and who helped to found Monkey Kingdom, the television company behind Made in Chelsea. In 2018, the sector employed more than three million people in the UK and this is expected to rise to four million by 2030, according to a Deloitte report. The types of jobs varied widely, Shedd said, from administrative to creative.
John McVay, chief executive of the Producers Alliance for Cinema and Television, which represents independent production companies, said he would like to see Stem, the training and skills acronym used for science, technology, engineering and maths, become Steam, to include the arts. “We need to increase and develop the workforce,” he said. “We have a boom and need to invest more to bring more people into the industry.”
Dan Conway, chief executive of the Publishers Association, said Britain was the biggest exporter of physical books in the world: “We often feel like the overlooked part of the creative industries, but publishing is a hugely robust sector, driving jobs growth — and indications are that the reading boom of the pandemic is continuing.”
While the sweet spot for economic
growth is where creativity meets technology, the latter is also a threat and a disruptor. The rise of artificial intelligence looms large because of its potential to breach intellectual property rights as it uses other people’s work to generate content. It is also a competitor because the technology can do everything from write poetry to make music.
“IP is the driving force behind all the creative industries and ensuring that value is safeguarded and championed is really important,” said Sophie Jones, of the British Phonographic Industry, which represents music labels.
In his recent review, Sir Patrick Vallance said the government should set out rules on the relationship between intellectual property and generative AI to protect copyright while still allowing technologists to train their models.
Michelle Donelan, the science, innovation and technology secretary, said: “This will ensure we keep the right balance between protecting rightsholders and our thriving creative industries, while supporting AI developers to access the data they need.” The Intellectual Property Office will be asked to produce a code of practice by the summer.
Technology is also changing the way in which people consume content. The music sector sees opportunity in the rise of streaming because of the reach it offers, but it is also a challenge: “Any artist is competing with the entire catalogue of music ever recorded and with every artist on the planet,” Jones said.
Government policies are helping.
While long overdue, the Media Bill modernising broadcasting legislation was published this year and “at least it feels like stuff is finally getting done”, as one executive put it. The decision not to
Pulling the strands of the creative industries together is a real boon for Britain and there is an opportunity in how content spills into different genres.
A classic example is Harry Potter, where book sales, though high, are lower than box-office revenues and merchandise sales from the subsequent film franchise. “I call it layering, putting varying formats on top of another,”
Shedd said. “In the UK, we’ve got a real breadth of sectoral expertise, which means we can come up with new ideas and new formats that other countries might not be able to.”