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Business News
Labour’s culture man wants cross-government taskforce to consider creative industries
By CMU Editorial | Published on Wednesday 15 December 2010
Remember the Labour Party? Well, they’ve got a culture guy called Ivan Lewis and he wants the government to create a cross-department task force to provide help for the creative industries, which is something similar to what UK Music has been calling for.
Lewis says that the task force should bring together all government departments with an influence over the creative sector, including the culture and business secretaries Jeremy Hunt and Vince Cable. He wants the committee to come up with an action plan by next summer, covering issues like intellectual property, broadband roll out, creative education and skills programmes and a particular favourite of UK Music and the Music Managers Forum, better schemes to offer access to finance to small and middle-sized creative enterprises.
Speaking at a Work Foundation event yesterday, Lewis said: “This is no time for ideologically driven laissez faire, ‘leave it to the market’, economic policy. Neither business leaders or I are asking the Coalition to exercise centralised control or heavy handed interventions – what we want is leadership. Leadership which recognises active ‘joined up’ government strategy and policy can make the difference between Britain’s creative industries building on their success – generating jobs and growth – or falling back and falling behind our competitors”.
