Launching Our Creative Future: The Manifesto
// creative industries // event // manifesto // our creative future
Caroline Norbury OBE, Chief Executive Officer, Creative UK, issues statement following the Spring Budget 2023
Creative UK recognises that creativity is the driving force of our present and our future. The Chancellor’s actions today provide short-term support and potential for the economy’s growth, but longer-term, strategic investment in the Creative Industries is needed to ensure our continuing global success story.
Our sector has long outperformed the wider economy in increasing growth, boosting job creation and creating opportunities. In advance of this Budget, we clearly set out how the UK Government can unleash this significant opportunity.
Today the Chancellor recognised the Creative Industries as an innovative, high growth industrial sector and the Budget included measures Creative UK has been calling for. As well as reiterating the commitment to existing Creative Industries tax reliefs, and increasing headline rates, the Chancellor has locked-in higher rates of relief for theatre, orchestras, museums and galleries for a further two years.
New investment zones can build on the success of the Creative Clusters Programme, further boosting collaboration between industry and universities. There is a real opportunity for this investment to be leveraged across the breadth of Creative Industries. As part of improving tax reforms for R&D the UK Government needs to include the arts, humanities and social sciences in the eligibility definition.
The measures outlined today will provide some essential relief. However, our country deserves even bigger ambition. This includes ensuring a well-funded, mixed investment ecology – alongside a range of accessible measures which unleash creative innovation, supercharge inclusive growth, and invest in our future workforce.
Given the scale of economic and social benefits the Creative Industries generate, making impactful changes now could see the sector generate an extra £28 billion for the UK economy by 2025, as part of realising our full potential at home and globally too. We want a paradigm shift in political decision-making.
