Why we need an industrial strategy for culture

Professor Dave O’Brien will be joining us at Progressive Britain Conference 2024 on May 11th, at our panel ‘Do we need a Cultural Industrial Strategy?’. Get your tickets to hear more from him there!

The UK’s cultural and creative sectors face a range of challenges. High profile cuts in local authority funding for the sector; skills shortages in crucial roles; issues for touring and exporting following Britain’s exit from the European Union; uncertainty in the return of audiences after the pandemic; the impact of AI; and the future of arts subjects in the school and higher education system are just some examples.

These challenges confront the sector in the context of a general set of challenges facing British society. The cost of living and the housing crises are a grim backdrop for the specific problems confronting culture.

Taken together, these challenges mean many across the cultural sector fear for the future of artforms, institutions, and jobs. These fears are not restricted to sections of the arts facing the removal of local authority funding. They are present in sectors more usually associated with commercial businesses, such as film, tv and gaming, where there are currently job losses and reports of underemployment.

Addressing these issues must be a priority for any new government, irrespective of politics or party. These challenges cannot be met by separate initiatives, done piecemeal across Whitehall. What is needed is a comprehensive industrial strategy for culture.

Talking about industrial strategy for arts, culture and creativity can sometimes be controversial. Making culture- across publishing, film and tv, fashion, theatre, design, music and art- is a major industry, both in Britain and globally. At the same time, artists, musicians, writers, to name just three occupations in the cultural sector, are workers.

A recent review of the creative sector identified the need to properly provide and support ‘good work’. Precarity, low or sometimes no pay, and reports of poor working conditions, including bullying and harassment, are all problems stopping the sector delivering on the promise of well-paid and sustainable careers. The government’s Sector Vision has recognised this. It offers a starting point for a more comprehensive industrial strategy for the sector.

The need to support ‘good’ work in the sector connects directly to skills mismatches and shortages. Skills policy is a complex area, particularly where creative organisations grapple with the latest developments in digital media and AI. It is clear from government data on low levels of apprenticeships in the creative industries, through to industry reports of struggles to get staff with both work experience and the right skill levels, that a much more comprehensive plan for the sector is needed.

This sort of policy vision, addressing working conditions and giving creative workers and creative organisations access to the skills they need, brings together several different areas of government. Education, welfare, tax, and local government are all implicated, alongside culture and media policy.

The need for cross-government working means a sustainable cultural and creative sector will need an industrial strategy that draws support from economic, as well as cultural, policy. There are various metaphors for understanding how the cultural sector is organised, including ecosystems, clusters, and networks. All these approaches to understanding the sector suggest it is characterised by interdependencies- freelancers, funded arts organisations, and commercial firms all have close relationships. Better working conditions, in properly supported cultural organisations, will have knock on benefits across the rest of the creative economy.

The interconnections and interdependencies that characterise the creative economy extend to educational institutions such as schools and universities. Universities are currently the key source of workers and central to skills provision for the creative economy. It is a sector of the economy where, particularly for younger workers, degree level skills dominate. Universities are also an important source of creative work, particularly for artistic and cultural occupations such as composers and choreographers, artists and authors.

Sustainable university finances, in the context of universities as anchor institutions for local cultural economies, ties in with reforms of working conditions and transformations of the skills pipeline. From this local starting point, industrial strategy can connect to broader issues, such as barriers to exporting and touring, and visas for cultural workers to add their talents to homegrown cultural labour markets.

A comprehensive industrial strategy for culture offers the chance to secure the health of the sector for a generation. Connecting education, skills, working conditions, and exports could ensure the centrality of Britain’s creative industries to our economy and society. It is a challenge of the same scale as the challenges facing the cultural sector. It is a challenge to which the next government must rise.

Professor Dave O’Brien will be joining us at Progressive Britain Conference 2024 on May 11th, at our panel ‘Do we need a Cultural Industrial Strategy?’. Get your tickets to hear more from him there!

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