Government Complacency 'Risks UK's Creative Industries'

The House of Lords Communications Committee has released a report, At risk: our creative future, warning that "Government complacency risks undermining the UK's creative industries in the face of increased international competition and rapid technological change."

In the report, the Committee warns against "missed opportunities and a failure among senior Government figures to recognise the sector's commercial potential"

The report points out that the UK's creative industries' contribution to the economy in 2019 was more than the aerospace, life sciences and automotive industries combined and "delivers higher levels of innovation than many other areas of the economy."

The report makes a series of recommendations to support the future of the creative industries, including that the Department for Education must "address the decline in people taking creative GCSEs".

Key recommendations include:

• Improve tax policy to boost innovation: The Government's definition of R&D for tax relief is narrow and restrictive. It should be changed to include more of the creative sector. The Government should also benchmark other creative sector tax reliefs against international competitors to address the UK's declining competitiveness.
• The Intellectual Property Office's proposals to change the text and data mining regime are misguided and should be paused immediately. The proposals were intended to support the development of AI, and could enable international businesses to scrape content created by others and use this for commercial gain without payment to the original creator. This would threaten business models and income streams in the UK creative industries.
• Protect the UK's intellectual property framework, which is respected across the world. These protections underpin the success of the UK's creative industry exports. The Government must not water them down when striking new trade deals.
• There should be a cross-Government focus on skills shortages in the creative industries. The Department for Education should encourage students to learn a blend of creative and digital skills; improve careers guidance; reverse the decline in children studying design and technology; change lazy rhetoric about 'low value' arts courses; and make apprenticeships work better for SMEs in the creative industries.
• UK Research and Innovation should identify options to continue the most successful parts of the Creative Clusters Programme after March 2023. Discontinuing support would be a needless waste of a programme that is exceeding co-investment expectations by 600 per cent.

Baroness Stowell of Beeston, Chair of the Committee, commented: "The UK's creative industries are an economic powerhouse and have been a huge success story. But the fundamentals that underpin our success are changing, and rivals are catching up. The Government's failure to grasp both the opportunities and risks is baffling.
"International competitors are championing their creative industries and seizing the opportunities of new technology. But in the UK we're seeing muddled policies, barriers to success, and indifference to the sector's potential. We acknowledge the Government has introduced important programmes in recent years, but we are concerned past success has bred complacency."

Read the full report here.