The Birmingham Post reports Michael Ryan, of the Birmingham Learning and Skills Council, as saying that in the West Midlands there are…
“at least 60,000 people now employed in the [creative industries] sector.”
The article doesn’t say where his figures come from, which is a pity. It seems unlikely that he’s using the Sector Skills Council’s own 2006 regional breakdowns of employment, The Footprint: A Baseline Survey of the Creative and Cultural Sector (PDF, 190kb). Since the figure given there for the West Midlands is just 36,790 jobs, which apparently includes the self-employed. I’d say that’s about right, and would estimate that there’s a core of perhaps 12,000 ‘real’ creative jobs in wider Birmingham.
Ryan is reported as going on to say that his figure of “at least 60,000″ is…
” likely to rise by seven per cent within the next 12 months … This is a 15 per cent increase in just two years,”
Great news, but I wonder where such precise and up-to-the-minute statistics are coming from — given that regional and even national statistics on the creative industries are either a minefield or don’t really exist.
Could it be that we’re actually seeing the nth recycling of that notorious 1991 figure from the Office of National Statistics, which estimated creative industries employment of 60,225 people in the West Midlands, and also claimed it was then growing at just under 7 percent a year? A figure that then seems to have found its way into NOMIS, and thence onto page 22 of a document titled Birmingham — Creative City: Analysis of Creative Industries in the City of Birmingham, June 2002.
That Office of National Statistics’ 1991 figure of ’60,225 jobs plus 7% growth per year’ is almost identical to the claim that Michael Ryan made today.
Primitive (children's street art)
by Pete Ashton
05 Mar 2007 at 23:36
I’m sure I heard that antique dealers come under the “creative industries”.
by site admin
06 Mar 2007 at 11:18
The definition varies, which is part of the problem in measuring activity. The DCMS included antiques and software services, the latter thus heavily distorting the national figures. There was an academic article in Cultural Trends recently, that explored how including software had distorted the regional figures. Once “software consultancy and supply” were taken out, regions such as Manchester/North West seemed not to have developed their creative industries at all in recent decades.
What’s interesting about the new Footprint: A Baseline Survey of the Creative and Cultural Sector is that it seems fairly tightly defined, and tried to include freelancers and the self-employed (who are very difficult to count, unless you do pro-active web-surveys) – although it appears to be based on 2004 data.
by Stef Lewandowski
07 Mar 2007 at 10:15
Perhaps these are feeding from the work of Culture West Midlands, in their recent publication.
by site admin
07 Mar 2007 at 17:47
Hi Stef; thanks for the comment. No, his claim certainly didn’t originate in that document. It was the first place I looked. The document refers to the wider “cultural sector” – which is far wider than the “creative industries” – and it includes employment in sports, sports facilities, parks, children’s play, all tourism, wildlife habitat management, archeology, etc. Even with this wider definition, they say…
“West Midlands employment in the cultural sector stood at 236,000 in 2004.”
Their figure was based on the national 2004 Annual Business Inquiry, ONS. One can break this down – to abstract “audio-visual” employment, for instance. Yet the problem there is that the national data tends to include manufacture and distribution of hardware/equipment (i.e.: your local branch of Dixons or your mobile phone shop, presumably) as “audio-visual”, as well as what we would think of a genuine creative production. National data is a very blunt instrument.
Little better is the Regional Culture Data Framework. A June 2005 academic paper in Cultural Trends stated…
“Readers of the Regional Culture Data Framework will search in vain for actual data – even at a national levelâ€.