This review was commissioned to inform the work of the West Yorkshire Mayoral Combined Authority in their support of the Creative Industries.

The report was carried out by Ema Talam, Prof Geoff Pugh and Prof Jon Fairburn

Overview of the report

Creative industries represent a vital segment of the UK economy, contributing to the growth of local economies (Mateos-Garcia et al., 2018) and the country’s competitive advantage (HM Government, 2018). In 2018, the creative industries comprised 6.2% of the economy of the United Kingdom in terms of employment (DCMS, 2019) and 5.8% in terms of gross value added (GVA) (DCMS, 2020). Additionally, the creative industries are fast growing – employment in the creative industries grew by 30.6% over the period 2011 to 2018, while the GVA in real terms increased by 43.2% since 2010 (DCMS, 2020). Creative industries tend to be innovative (Bird et al., 2020) and can be highly productive, although they constitute a diverse sector of the economy embracing a wide range of productivity levels (see Section 2 below). Currently, the creative industries, and arts, humanities and social sciences more generally, are ineligible for R&D tax policy support in the United Kingdom (Bakhshi, Breckon and Puttick, 2021). This report explores the potential of R&D tax policy to support the creative industries.

The report is available on this page or as a direct pdf download here