As director of the Creative Industries Policy and Evidence Centre (Creative PEC), the first half of this year has been as busy as any I can remember in the 20 or so years I’ve worked in this field.
As part of the government’s Creative Industries Taskforce, I’ve seen firsthand how seriously the growth potential of the sector is now being taken. It’s a coming of age, and a far cry from the days before, say, the Creative Industries Council was first established in 2011, when the sector struggled to join up and make its voice heard.
The government’s Creative Industries Sector Plan, a priority in the its overall Industrial Strategy, is expected imminently.
A vision for the future
This enthusiasm, and the opportunity it gives rise to, places a responsibility on us working across the UK’s brilliant, dynamic and world-leading creative industries to seize the day, to present a vision of the myriad ways in which the creative industries contribute, not just to growth and the jobs of the future, but also the kind of future we want to live in.
A future that is inclusive, fulfilling, sustainable, where everyone benefits from creative education not just those in private education, and where technology enhances individual flourishing, not shuts it down.
The creative industries have come a long way since the 1990s when the government first recognised them as an economic force in their own right. One of the few sectors where the UK can claim to be world-leading, they account for 2.4 million jobs and contribute around £124 billion in value added to the UK economy.
Although there are enduring controversies about the sector’s definition, undoubtedly the growing evidence base is a major reason why departments like HM Treasury are now engaging with the sector.
New policy opportunities
The Creative PEC, thanks to funding from the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), is proud to play its part. With a team based between Newcastle University and RSA House in London, we have responded to the new policy opportunities, publishing State of the Nations reports on vital topics, such as access to finance, skills needs, inequality and exclusions in access to culture, further and higher creative education and international trade and foreign direct investment.
As I write, the ink is drying on our next publication: on migration and the creative industries, due for publication shortly after the government White Paper on immigration. All the reports draw heavily on official and other available data sources.
In the past, policymakers have used a perceived absence of data for the creative industries as an excuse for policy inaction. Our State of the Nations series shows that, in fact, in many areas good data is available. But that doesn’t mean there are not gaps which, where budgets permit, the Creative PEC must fill through its own data collection.
Creative Business Panel
An important example of this is our Creative Business Panel: a multi-year, multi-wave survey of creative industries companies. A collaboration with the AHRC-funded CoSTAR Foresight Lab, it is run in partnership with the Department for Business and Trade, with support from the Department for Culture, Media and Sport.
The longitudinal data it will provide, enabling causal relationships between organisation behaviour and performance to be identified as opposed to just correlation, represents a ‘coming of age’ for the creative industries in research terms too.
Crucially, its ambition is to collect data on a full range of business practices, from investment, hiring and sustainability to Equality, Diversity and Inclusion and technology use, from firms in all creative sub-sectors, of all sizes across the UK.
Our survey is open to all creative industries organisations with more than one employee – watch this space for plans for data collection from the self-employed and freelancers. I urge everyone who cares about our sector to take 25 minutes to help us reach the robust sample size we need to inform supportive policies for the UK’s creative industries.
Integrating data collection
The Creative Business Panel brings together the vision of the Creative PEC and the CoSTAR Foresight Lab to ensure we create a data whole greater than the sum of its parts.
Our data on innovation and growth benefits from including the Foresight Lab’s questions on advanced media technology use. While in turn, it benefits from embedding its data collection on media technologies in a wider understanding of creative industries business practice.
Instinctively, those of us passionate about the creative industries feel the sector has a special role to play in a ‘good’ future. But good policies to bring this about need independent research, evidence and high-quality data. The heterogeneity the creative industries presents obvious challenges in this regard.
We hope the Creative Business Panel will partly address this challenge, thereby becoming a key source of business intelligence for all parts of the sector.
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