Nick Clegg promises 'decentralised' focus from London for media and creative industry
Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg looked to reassure the regional creative industries that the Government was focusing on driving the media away from its long standing focus on London.
Speaking at an event organised by Bristol Media yesterday, Clegg discussed some issues surrounding the creative industries, and said that the Government recognised the need to dispense with ‘an over reliance’ on one city.
As well as highlighting changes to business tax and support that had been put in place by the Government for small companies such as the creation of enterprise zones and technology innovation centres, he also discussed the investment being placed on the creative sector in America, especially Austin and Los Angeles, as a potential model to be adopted in the UK.
However Clegg said that he believed that there was a different in the mind set between the US and the UK in that in the US.
“In the States you fall, then you dust yourself down and start again. We are maybe a little less willing to entertain failure and restarting,” he explained.
His main focus, while highlighting the work already done to drive business in the UK was to show that the Government did wish to offer more control to business within the regions.
“What we want is to direct capital to you to compete with other cities, with Newcastle, with Liverpool, with Manchester to create that extra edge and competition,” he told the audience before adding that the current system was ‘extraordinarily’ centralised and was not allowing for control to happen.
He continued to say that he recognised that the Regional Development Agencies had previously failed in their funding strategy to support for the creative industry, something that he said, would not be allowed to happen again.
“We had the problem which is that you had these greater regional quangos that did some good work but they were on the whole too wasteful and in a sense covering too large an area,” Clegg admitted to The Drum. “We’ve replaced those with local enterprise partnerships where you’ve really got business in the driving seat. That’s the big difference. Instead of having bureaucrats and administrators trying to cook up an economic development plan you’ve actually got the people who know what makes an economy tick locally in the driving seat within these local enterprise partnerships.”
Clegg also promised that the newly created Creative Industries Council, announced earlier this year to act as ‘a standing forum’ for the industry, would feed directly into Government and would not have a focus on London.
“It will be an expectation of the Council that it is not just going to be a few representatives from a few film and ad agencies in Soho. This has got to be truly representative of the creative industries in this country,” he promised.
As to the move by the Media away from London, Clegg added his support to the BBC moving some of its operations to MediaCity in Salford but added that the improving infrastructures linking London to other cities, including Bristol, would also be important to infrastructures, along with developing superfast broadband connections.
“We need to make absolutely sure that cities such as Bristol have a much greater say in how money is raised and spent,” he concluded telling The Drum.