Introducing the West Yorkshire Create Growth Programme Stage 2 cohort
//
Written by Sarah Gregory, Head of EDI at Creative UK
In June, the UK Government launched the Creative Industries Sector Plan: setting out a vision for how creativity can drive growth. As the dust settles on its launch, I want to take a moment to reflect on where real prosperity may come from across the creative and cultural industries over the next 5-10 years.
I use the term ‘prosperity’, because for me, this embodies the dual impacts that the cultural and creative industries have, both economically and socially. This means benefitting bottom lines, as well as community health and infrastructure.
Across the breadth of the creative and cultural industries, there is almost universal underrepresentation in both our workforce and audiences. Women; people from ethnic minority backgrounds; people from working class backgrounds; people who have disabilities; people who live in the regions – they are all underrepresented in the cultural and creative industries. I could go on.
The most recent Creative Industries Policy & Evidence Centre’s State of the Nation Report on Arts, Culture and Heritage Engagement demonstrated a significant underrepresentation of Black, Asian and working-class audience members (O’Brien et al., 2025). This was mirrored by these same groups’ underrepresentation as leaders and workers in these sectors.
Meanwhile, significant audience decline can be seen across many creative subsectors – including TV and film. The number of programmes with more than four million viewers has halved between 2014 and 2022 (Ofcom, Media Nations, 2023). Less than half of 16-24-year-olds now watch broadcast TV in an average week (Ofcom, 2024). Cinema attendance has decreased by over 30% since 2019 (UKCA).
It’s a similar story in the cultural sector. The number of people attending arts events on a weekly basis fell by 10 percentage points between 2023-24 (Arts Professional), and more than half of museums have seen a 10% decline since the pandemic (Museums Association).
The connection between stalled or declining diversity in our workforce and the decline in audiences is far from coincidental. If we are going to grow audiences and deepen engagement with creativity, then we must diversify. We need our workforce – and particularly our leaders – to be truly representative.
This is what we are working towards at Creative UK. On the 11 September, we launched a new report – Leadership Diversity in the Creative & Cultural Industries. This paper represents the first attempt to take an overview of the sector’s leadership diversity as a whole.
The initial results were concerning. Across all the sectors included in this research and for all underrepresented demographics, except those identifying as LGB+, there are significant gaps in leadership diversity across both the creative and cultural sectors that need to be addressed.
We believe that an increase in the diversity of leadership is the key catalyst for diversifying the sector’s workforce – and this in turn is the key to our shared prosperity, enabling more innovation and creativity.
Greater diversity is how we will make better products and services, expand audiences and markets, increase economic and social value and drive returns on wellbeing across society. And it must be reflected in our leadership.
Over the coming year, Creative UK will support the sector on the journey towards greater leadership diversity by not only benchmarking what leadership diversity currently looks like, but by identifying what works, and codifying practices that the sector can emulate. We will also robustly model the economic benefits of greater leadership diversity and cost to UK GDP of inaction.
We are committed to this because of the essential value of creativity and cultural exchange. Creativity builds communities, bridges divides, helps people to feel seen and valued, makes us laugh and helps us to feel good about ourselves. Not to mention it supports many other well-evidenced health, mental health, education and social outcomes.
As the Sector Plan turns to action, diversity must be included as a driver for growth. Doing so will lead to dramatic increases in the economic and social value that the sector holds.
