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Abstract
This paper examines several aspects of the developing evidence base for regional creative industry policy making in England and argues that the focus of the current research base is disproportionately determined by the demand for evidence for advocacy purposes. It offers an evaluation that challenges the basis on which some of the central sector advocacy claims have been made and argues that unless the evidence base is allowed to develop beyond advocacy, then the claims for evidence-based policy will be seriously compromised.
Acknowledgements
The author gratefully acknowledges the valuable discussions with colleagues in academia, regional policy and consultancy on the topics covered by this paper. All the errors are his alone. An earlier version of this paper was presented at the International Conference on Cultural Policy Research in Montreal in August 2004.
Notes
1. The paper is not intended to review all the perspectives on the creative industries in regional development, for example Florida Citation(2002). The concern here is simply with the way in which advocates of the creative industries in England have mobilized economic arguments about their impact.
2. In a recent paper, Garnham Citation(2005) addresses similar concerns and concludes that economic impact is a misplaced basis for developing arts policy. The present author shares that view with the qualification that the absence of a credible economic case does not exclude the possibility that the traditional objectives of arts policy may have a constructive relationship to build with broader economic imperatives.
3. Here, the paper offers some reflections on how a new regional framework for collecting and presenting data for the cultural sector including the creative industries provides a starting point for developing a more differentiated and nuanced approach to supporting policy making for the creative industries in regional development. The Department for Culture, Media and Sport [DCMS] commissioned The Regional Cultural Data Framework in 2002 (DCMS, Citation2002) at the request of the new Regional Cultural Consortia. Subsequent to the initial report on this, a revised version has been published by the DCMS as the DCMS Evidence Toolkit (DCMS, Citation2004). The author was a member of the national Steering Group for the development of the framework in its initial phase.
4. The Regional Development Agencies were established by Act of Parliament in 1998 and began operations in 1999. The London Development Agency was established in 2000.
5. The work on clusters in regional development is vast and no attempt will be made here to summarize it, but to note in passing what appears as a growing anxiety in the academic regional policy literature about the apparent proliferation of ‘fuzzy concepts’ (Markusen, Citation2003). The author has some sympathy with this point of view with regard to the terms ‘cluster’ and 'creative industries'.
6. Some RDAs, for example London and the North West, appear to broadly accept the definition developed by the DCMS that has been widely adopted by advocates. By contrast, the RDA in Yorkshire adopted a related approach that emphasized the 'digital' elements over the ‘creative’, although this may now be changing.
7. London has been particularly enthusiastic about the role of the creative industries (London Development Agency, Citation2004). In other cases, and with some justification, the creative industries have only been adopted in terms of their relationships to other industrial sectors, most notably the software and new media sectors, for example as in Yorkshire and the Humber.
8. This work takes a number of forms, but typically includes regional interrogation of national economic and labour market datasets, consultations with industry and contributions from sector experts. It is typically presented in a number of forms, including baseline studies, mapping exercises and economic impact assessments.
9. To date, the author is aware of RDA commissioned or co-commissioned research work on the creative industries in the North West, South West, East Midlands, Yorkshire and the Humber, the South East, London and the North.
10. This refers to the extent to which the provision of timely, relevant and clear intelligence for policy purposes (signal) may entail some calculated compromise in methodological robustness and/or acceptance that it is not possible to achieve a perfect match between research and policy purpose within the current methodological or resource constraints (noise).
11. The role of intellectual property rights is not without its own problems. See Howkins Citation(2002) for a discussion of this point.
12. The paper does not repeat the now very familiar difficulties with the application of Standard Industry Classifications to the cultural or creative sectors. For further discussion of these see Pratt Citation(1997), Burns Owen Partnership et al. Citation(2002) and Centre for Cultural Policy Research (2003).
13. The regions are the North West, the South West and Yorkshire and the Humber. These regions have been selected because in each case there has been vigorous advocacy for the creative industries. The source of data is the national Annual Business Inquiry (ONS), the annual survey of employers 1998–2002.
14. Formed by combining 2211 (Publishing of books), 2212 (Publishing of newspapers), 2213 (Publishing of journals and periodicals), 2214 (Publishing of sound recordings) and 2215 (Other publishing).
15. This cannot be dispensed with altogether in two types of case. Where there is a five-digit SIC code that can with confidence be allocated wholly to the creative industries, a co-efficient is still required for application to the relevant four-digit SIC code. Some four-digit codes have to be shared across domains and this requires an unavoidable level process of estimation.
16. At least one RDA (that for South East England) explicitly makes it clear in its public information that whilst it regards the cultural development of the region as important, it does not directly fund culture for culture's sake. See http://www.seeda.co.uk/seeda_documents/corporate_&_strategy/docs/Culture.pdf (accessed February, 2004).
17. The relative lack of support for the creative industry concept from some of its other constituent sectors is more of a persistent problem.