Industrial Creativity - the latest

July 2025

This post was written following some discussion amongst various people on LinkedIn regarding the new UK sector plan for the creative industries and the absence of any critical commentary. It is intended to help maintain some discourse around the principles that are informing future interventions in the sector and to function as an invitation for further dialogue and responses.

Every few years the UK government publishes a new industrial strategy for the creative industries. The frequency of these reflects the ways in which a range of policy initiatives are proposed by new governments as they are elected, an approach which is in itself a challenge for longer-term economic development (as articulated by Mariana Mazzucato and others). Over recent years we have had the Peter Bazalgette review in 2017, a Creative Industries Sector Deal in 2018, the Creative Industries Sector Vision/Deal in 2023, and the most recent, which emerged last month under the stewardship of the year-old Labour administration. This latest iteration continues the theme of trying to stimulate the secret sauce that will sustain a complicated landscape from which may emerge the next Harry Potter (films US-owned), Grand Theft Auto (US-owned), or Stormzy (US-owned record label).

This post focuses mainly on a critique of the principles that sit behind the latest strategy, rather than an appraisal of the actions proposed within the strategy. Others may focus in on the details of the individual actions, but unless we have a clear shared sense of the bigger mission that the strategy represents, our ability to see the emergence of success (or failure) remains elusive.

So, while the concept of the creative industries as a coherent industry deserving of a strategy has been the subject of some background debate, the UK government (along with many others globally) has bitten hard on it and its impressive growth figures, sustaining the belief that it may provide a positive way forward for a somewhat becalmed economy.

However, the simple story that successive governments have clung to of couthy Brits creating world-conquering culture from a vast background creative industry is not entirely solid. And while it’s easy to snigger at the fevered hyperbole of each iteration of the Government strategy/vision/plan, it somehow feels necessary to try and locate a bit more of a strongly developed level of insight than is on offer here. The use of terms like “unlock”, “unleash”, “open for investment” and “tackle misperceptions of the sector’s value” tend to read as ‘please believe me’ statements, uttered by a Minister in a smiling grimace in the hope that the reality of what actually lies under the bonnet might not be seen until their watch is over. The current Culture Secretary’s statement earlier this year in Gateshead that she intends to ‘take the brakes off our fastest growing industries’, echoes this in an interesting comment on approaches to safe travel if nothing else.

While there is no doubt that the sector does produce some great things - economically and culturally - the analysis by academics such as Justin O’Connor set out some potentially sobering truths in an alternative narrative. In this he argues that the impressive growth figures of the creative industries are largely determined by the inclusion of the digital software sub-sector. This leads to the suspicion that the creative industries sector has been growing as a consequence of the cannibalisation of other non-digital sectors, rather than as result of increasing global impact for the products of UK culture businesses. This is illustrated by an example of one of Scotland’s largest creative industries businesses - Skyscanner - which describes its business model as ‘connecting travellers with travel service providers around the globe’. Their inclusion in creative industries reporting is down to their chosen SIC code of ‘58290 other software publishing’. Whilst one can argue that there is likely to be much creativity involved in the design and development of their services, this example perhaps reflects somewhat on the dissonance between the image of the ‘creative industries’ and the reality of a range of enterprises moving from non-digital business models to digital ones, and hence being counted in the creative industries.

The admirable work of the Creative Industries Policy & Evidence Centre provides some powerful evidence on the realities of the sector. Although their striving for independence and objectivity does not necessarily explicitly confound or confirm the O’Connor position, it illustrates in the detail many of the challenges that might require fresh principles at the Government policy level. In highlighting the many complexities involved in determining the different fortunes of the many sub-sectors of the creative industries and also the assessment of creative business activity against creative jobs in non-creative businesses, it lays out the detail from which differing conclusions may be drawn.

For example, recent Creative PEC reports that detail a fundamental (and somewhat frightening) long-term shift from creative goods to creative services are repackaged in the Sector Plan as a national strength, saying ‘We have a comparative advantage in creative services exports’. In terms of creativity and culture this needs unpacking further to determine whether an intervention to influence this is essential, desirable, or even feasible. While this can be understood as a shift in the way knowledge-intensive industries function internationally, this shift impacts significantly on the principles of how we currently understand the creative industries - or at least the image that we promote to ourselves of the sector.

The loss of the digital software mainstay (the counting of digital moved from DCMS to DSIT in April 2024) is also repackaged as the opportunity of CreaTech and its associated whizzbangs. This draws a range of digital bits and pieces into a single buzzy brand, that somehow manages to feel new and very old at the same time. However, saying things like ‘3D printing has revolutionised sustainable fashion’, sounds like one of those things we have all nodded at over a glass of wine on the Westminster Terrace at some point over the past decade. But what does it actually mean?

In terms of the positives, the consideration of creative industries R&D is interesting, but it is very clear that the absorptive capacity of creative businesses remains very low because, as the document correctly says, they’re mostly very small. The ability to structure what might be some intrinsic R&D within a 3-person business within the framework of a university-scale UKRI project creates demands that can be very challenging for the business to accommodate. Because of this the business will often find themselves as a very junior partner in UKRI-funded relationships with our Universities. This is a structural issue and a policy alone will not resolve this, as unless creative businesses can engage as equal partners in R&D activity - ideally through governance structures that are not solely driven by academic validation - they will always spin off, not as exciting new ventures, but as lost satellites tumbling into the further reaches of the darkness. A new publicly-owned R&D broker to foster these businesses would not go amiss here.

It’s also worth noting that one of the most potentially impactful academic undertakings for the creative industries sits outside of the clusters programme and is not mentioned at all in the strategy. This is the CREATe program at the University of Glasgow. CREATe is the Centre for Regulation of the Creative Economy and has a focus on the regulation of creativity, technology and markets (intellectual property law, competition law, information and technology law). This focused work on rights - and especially on the potential impacts of AI - provides a far more valuable intellectual resource for the creative industries than any technological fetishisation.

We also know that this sector is massively relational in the way it does business, so we need to be cautious of the sustained focus on clusters - and especially on spillovers. These can often feel like nods to fair and equal distribution of resources based on clear analysis of opportunity, but are as likely to be exercises in politically expediency. The idea that this approach might work for all the different sub-sectors in each of the different places seems to be a little over-simplified. I have been involved in a number of these, but have yet to see a really honest appraisal of their successes and failures informing the next stage of this work. The May 24 Evaluation of the Creative Clusters Programme provides a lot of data about the outcomes of the intervention, but doesn’t aggregate this into an opinion, although the reporting of the data tells its own story. Without some discourse around this, the narrative has little grounding and there is little that we can do to learn how to sustain this opportunity and do it better. The creative corridors concept also reappears in the strategy. A strange concept without much in the way of rationale that refuses to go away.

The plan boldly says that the ‘long-term fundamentals are strong’, but if one looks at the numbers around the success (GVA/jobs) of UK-owned businesses and factors out the non-cultural digital software figures, there is a different story that emerges. A story of a sector brought into Government policy in the mid-90s on the back of an economic growth narrative, but which is now a hostage to this narrative, protected only by a thinning blanket of insubstantial weave, while believing its own PR and labouring under an illusion of exceptionalism. A narrative of a sector clinging to a story that it is world-leading, yet increasingly serving other masters; that it is highly skilled, but rides on a tide of an over-supply of cheap labour; that validates itself through a range of moral certainties, yet is deeply exclusive; and which claims economic success while expecting tax breaks and public sector underwriting.

It’s great that the Plan keeps alive the idea that creativity and culture in the UK has something to offer our citizens and the wider world something of value. There is certainly a strong, valid, case to be made for how creativity can be a foundational element in our future society - economically, socially and culturally. But in failing to acknowledge the frailty of the current dominant narrative that the Government has inherited there is a danger that its actions may do more damage than good. Committing really valuable and scarce resources to models that have at best failed to provide honest appraisals of their previous successes and failures will do little to help us fundamentally develop a way to nurture what still remains as a widespread motivation amongst thousands of people in the UK - to earn a living through their creativity. It may be naive to expect Government to openly demonstrate a level of critical analysis in their public plans - especially if it may be unpalatable to those closest to the policy levers. But good analysis does exist and while many of the policy initiatives detailed in the plan can provide an opportunity to move forward, unless Government is able to be brave enough to develop a new narrative and the mechanisms that will fundamentally test and progress its principles, this sector will collapse under the weight of its own illusions.