House of Commons, Select Committee on Business and Trade Inquiry into ‘Industrial Policy’
• The performing arts and culture sector, including the film industry, is yet to fully recover from the effects of the pandemic on audiences and business models, which pose an increasing threat to the financial sustainability of many cultural and creative enterprises, with consequences for the prosperity and competitiveness of the creative ecosystem as a whole.
• Possibly the biggest challenge to the creative industries comes from the development of generative AI, given the centrality of intellectual property to this sector. There is a clear potential threat to the business models of content creators, of whom thousands are based in the UK.
• The government’s Creative Industries Sector Vision lacks strategic thinking, in that it does not clearly explain what inputs are required to deliver the desired policy outcomes on employment growth, or what the impediments to achieving these outcomes might be. Nor does it show a clear understanding of what is required to grow creative clusters sustainably in such a limited timeframe.
• A contradiction exists between the government’s creative industries policy ambitions and the progressive disinvestment by the state in creative education.
• The digital technology sector can play an important part in responding to challenges faced by the film & TV sector, by establishing a cogent data infrastructure for creative industries. The UK can follow examples in Europe by adopting practices to address the shortage of data-informed and ‘knowledgeable’ capital.
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