Tony Hall speech to the Creative Industries Federation
Speech delivered by BBC Director-General Tony Hall to the Creative Industries Federation on 23 September 2015.
Published: 23 September 2015
The BBC’s job is to discover and invest in the best British creative content and people and connect them with an audience at home and abroad. We are the largest single investor in British creative ideas and talent.
Good afternoon.
It was less than a year ago that the two Johns approached me to help set up the Creative Industries Federation. And I’m very glad they did!
I am delighted that the organisation is growing – 700 members – with more joining from across the UK every day. It’s a great opportunity for us to all work together, to build on our success and act as a catalyst for economic growth and jobs across the UK.
Thank you for coming today and participating in a debate about the role of the BBC in the creative economy and how we can do more to work together to help put British culture on the map and help the creative industries become even stronger.
Let me declare a strong belief of mine which I reflected on last week at the Royal Television Conference. In this job and the last I've been a huge believer in the power of Britain's creative industries. In my lifetime I have seen the growth of British music as a huge global success - starting in my teenage years with the Beatles. But also the success of British fashion, literature, design, musicals, architecture, the arts, video games. And – of course - broadcasting.
All of them benefitting from a uniquely British mix of creativity and entrepreneurial spirit.
The BBC’s job is to discover and invest in the best British creative content and people and connect them with an audience at home and abroad.
We are the largest single investor in British creative ideas and talent.
Each year, we invest well over £2 billion of licence fee income directly into the UK creative sector. Around half that money is invested outside of the BBC, with £450 million in small creative businesses.
And let’s not forget that we have built a world-class and growing media business. BBC Worldwide has a £1bn turnover - that gave the BBC a record return of £226million last year. Critically, this has supported not only the BBC but also the hundreds of independents who partner with Worldwide in production and distribution.
And this is not just a financial story: Worldwide is instrumental in showcasing UK content across the globe.
There are not many industries where the UK goes toe-to-toe with the US. But the creative industries do – over a sustained period we have grown much faster than the UK economy as a whole.
And this success is a UK story, not just a London-centric one.
Look at the clusters of media activity now in Salford, Glasgow, Cardiff and Bristol and how that's raised local pride and economic activity.
We are setting up a centre for digital innovation in Fazeley Street, Birmingham, so we are looking at how to enhance our content - to include new digital ideas, gaming and, most exciting of all, new formats we can’t begin to imagine today.
Of course, it’s not all about money. It’s also about the environment we work in. The richness of the culture we create.
I want the BBC in the next decade to be a magnet for creativity – the place people come to make brilliant programmes - programmes of distinction.
For producers, directors, writers, artists to have the creative freedom to do things they would find it harder to do elsewhere, for people to be able to take creative risks.
That’s why, for me, reforming the BBC to be a leaner, simpler organisation – a process I began in July – is so important.
That’s why I also want to open the BBC to become – even more – Britain’s creative partner, to become a platform for this country’s incredible talent, cultural institutions, and to open up to our audiences in new ways.
An Open BBC for the internet age will be a BBC that is truly open to partnership.
And that means, I hope, us all working much more closely together.
I have laid out proposals to open up the BBC.
The ‘Ideas Service’, bringing together what the BBC does across arts, culture, science, history and ideas – alongside the work done by some of our country’s other great institutions.
We want to bring the best from Britain’s great cultural institutions and thinkers to everyone. We have already started working with many organisations including the British Museum, the Royal Shakespeare Company and the Science Museum.
A new discovery service to showcase the best in music today, working with our partners in the music industry and be a champion for new British music on new platforms as well as traditional ones.
When we launched our proposals, David Joseph, Chairman and CEO of Universal Music kindly said that,
"Music is at the heart of the BBC, from their programmers and presenters through to their programming and live output, throughout their digital and broadcast arenas. I firmly believe the BBC respects and values music more than any other broadcaster in the world."
So I hope we can build on that.
And we will also be putting iPlayer at the service of the sector. We want to explore new opportunities to bring together UK original content, to help audiences and industry alike.
I believe the BBC has improved as a partner organisation – recent successes include how many of us joined together to launch Get Creative or with our digital partners to take coding into schools as part of Make it Digital.
Thank you to Deborah Bull for hosting us here at King’s. Deborah and her team are working with the BBC to look at how partnership can work more effectively across the arts and cultural sectors, and I suspect some of us will be returning here when King’s College London launches its new cultural enquiry, The art of partnering, next week.
But I know we have so much more to learn and so much more we want to do working in partnership with others. I want to start that conversation with the members of the Creative Industry Federation today.
Working with partners, the BBC will convene seminars across the UK with key organisations on some of our proposals to discuss how they want to use an open BBC platform to reach out to new audiences and enthusiasts.
We will learn from you, and as Martha Lane Fox has pointed out many times, the next part of the BBC’s open strategy must be to show not tell, respond to your ideas and feedback as we take the next step together.
For I believe not in a bigger BBC, but a better BBC, an open BBC acting in Britain's best interests and as a cornerstone of the British creative economy.
I look forward to our discussion today and the ones to follow over the next few months to help shape the BBC’s future.
Thank you
