Department For Culture , Media And Sport Research Articles

5G Wales Unlocked.

This paper examines Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) and Welsh Government support for 5G deployment in rural areas of Wales. This project introduced several use cases based on 5G-enabled digital applications in Monmouthshire and Blaenau Gwent. The findings highlight the ongoing challenges associated with 5G deployment in rural Wales, and the current lack of a business model for 5G deployment by Mobile Network Operators (MNOs) in such areas. The report illustrates how the public sector may collaborate with private actors to develop an experimental approach to 5G deployment challenges faced in rural areas. This approach is based on an iterative learning process, in which small-scale experimental actions aimed at identifying sources of demand and understanding the potential impacts of new technology solutions are established. The report suggests that policy action is required at multiple levels of governance in such experimentation to address the challenge of deploying new 5G, and to ensure that firms and public service provision in rural parts of Wales are not disadvantaged.

Archaeologically derived human remains in England: legacy and future

ABSTRACTThe study and curation of human remains in the United Kingdom underwent a sea-change in response to the publication of the Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) guidance in 2005. Curatorial and research ethics and practice have improved, but these unique collections face new challenges – archives which are full and an increasing demand for samples for stable isotope and ancient DNA studies. This article reviews how holdings were and continue to be created and the ethical and practical issues that arise from these decisions. In contrast to much of the literature on this topic, it does not focus on the repatriation process and its consequences for UK museum practice. Instead, we address contemporary and future concerns regarding human remains excavated and curated in England, particularly issues of consent, permission and ancient DNA analysis.

Happy now?: Well-being and cultural policy

Although much of the debate in UK circles has been on the definition and measurement of well-being, there have been as yet relatively few attempts to apply a lens to specific areas. One partial exception has been policy. In 2010 the Culture and Sport Evidence Programme (CASE) reported on a three-year research project into the drivers and impacts of participation in sports and activity. CASE was a major programme within the Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS), the UK's ministry of culture. A key strand of the programme was to understand and assess the benefits of engagement. The project assessed in terms of subjective the value to the individual of participation in sports and engagement in activity (CASE 2010, 5). In a area often criticized for its lack of investment in research and evidence-gathering, the size of the programme alone--[pounds sterling]1.8m for an effort that brought together all the main organizations in the UK--could be taken as a sign that the agenda held out some promise for policy-makers. Indeed, it could be argued that activities, with their associations of conviviality, flow-like engagement (Csikszentmihalyi 1992), and attention to questions of both meaning and belonging, offer fertile ground for engagement with well-being. Yet despite the rather startling finding that a visit to the cinema once a week had an income compensation value of [pounds sterling]9,000 per household per year (CASE 2010), developing a well-being-inflected is proving quite problematic. Although debates about and the good life are of ancient lineage, our concern is with the UK regime of the last fifteen years or so, first under the New Labour government (1997-2010) and later under the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition. This corresponds with the growth of as a discourse, both in the UK and internationally. Given that, we use the term well-being as is commonly done in circles to refer to a combination of subjective with more eudemonic measures, although we recognize that these definitions are both contested and confused. Although we understand culture in a broad sense to include the arts (visual and performing arts, music, literature, and so on), the media (film, TV, radio, videogames, and other social media), heritage (museums, built and natural heritage), and sport, the focus of this paper will be largely on cultural policy as it concerns the arts and heritage. The link between participation in sports and is reasonably well-demonstrated (Scully et al. 1998; Chatzisarantis and Hagger 2007), whereas media use is more often associated with debates about its role as a source of ill-being and a variety of moral panics (Kraut et al. 1998). Media policy-makers may legitimately wish to stress the benefits of media participation, and in the case of film they sometimes do (DCMS 2012), but theirs is often a rear-guard action against the suggestion that media use is often harmful, particularly for children (Livingstone and Haddon 2009). In the arts, however, the struggle for legitimacy, and hence the call for public spending, is generally stronger, and the use of instrumentalist arguments for advocacy purposes is more fully developed. The arts have thus been the focus--along with heritage--of well-being-influenced discourse. New Labour's Cultural Policy: The Emergence of Well-being Until recently, the engagement of with ideas about in the UK has been primarily of two sorts: encouraging arts and creative activities as a part of education, and using arts therapy as treatment for ill-being of various sorts. The latter form has perhaps the longest history: from the therapeutic benefits accorded to visual expression for sufferers of schizophrenia and other forms of psychosis, to the use of art as a form of therapy for depression, anxiety, and other mental illnesses (Staricoff 2004; Heenan 2006). …

Creative Industries and Skills: Film Education and Training in the Era of New Labour

The first decade of the new millennium witnessed significant developments in the education and training of film and television practitioners. These developments were in turn informed by the broader policy agendas of Tony Blair’s New Labour administration that had come to power in 1997. The government’s policy for film was essentially part of a wider promotion of Britain’s ‘creative industries’ as forms of high-profile cultural activity with great potential in terms of national branding – ‘Creative Britain’ being a kind of millennial update of ‘swinging London’ – and economic growth. Indeed, the advocacy of a primarily market-oriented imperative (rather than the concept of cultural value or social good) placed a priority on the creative industries to take full advantage of new global business opportunities. In the specific sphere of film, the Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) embarked on a major reorganisation of state support through the establishment in 2000 of a new all-purpose agency, the Film Council (subsequently the UK Film Council), the primary aim of which was the creation of an internationally competitive and sustainable British film industry. This involved the UKFC directly in various aspects of industry strategy and organisation, including the education and training of new entrants. The relationship between the creative industries policy agenda and the formation of new media practitioners can be usefully located in the wider context of New Labour’s approach to higher education and the needs of the post-industrial ‘knowledge economy’. While seeking to increase substantially the numbers of young people going to university,

Coalition Cuts 2: Museums

In late 2010 the coalition government set out its plan to reduce Britain’s deficit in the form of the Comprehensive Spending Review (CSR). In that same year, the Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) had received only 0.8 per cent of the national budget, but was nonetheless targeted for a budget reduction of twenty-four per cent, with severe implications for the UK’s museums sector. The Department’s commitment to free admission at national museums was maintained, but these institutions nevertheless received a fifteen per-cent budget cut, to be implemented across four years. The Museums, Libraries and Archives Council was abolished and responsibility for museums was handed over to Arts Council England, which itself received a cut of thirty per cent. Funding for regional museums was cut by fifteen per cent, and all other DCMS funding for non-national museums has since been withdrawn. Local-authority museums across the UK are also facing their own funding difficulties; local authorities were asked to make savings of twenty-eight per cent across four years, and the museums that they support (as non-statutory services) are easy targets for cost reduction. In the wake of the CSR, a wealth of anecdotal evidence pointed to a dramatic reduction in the quality of cultural provision in the UK. Our report for the Museums Association, The Impact of Cuts on UK Museums (July 2011), 1 while prompted by specific reports of such sector damage, was commissioned to provide, in so far as was possible, an objective and nationally representative picture of conditions across the sector. Identifying national patterns of change (impossible to discern on the basis of individual, localized case studies), the report offers a new, clear perspective on the present circumstances of museums, and simultaneously gives an indication of how future cuts may manifest themselves. The report was produced on the basis of data collected from a sample of 140 UK museums services, encompassing 200 separate sites, and weighted to

Artists and policy-making: the English case

The 1980 UNESCO Recommendation concerning the Status of the Artist emphasised the importance of including artists in the policy-making process. However, 30 years later, evidence suggests that artists often have only marginal involvement in the policy-making of UNESCO member states. This paper explores how visual artists in England relate to arts policy-making. An overview is provided of how artists fared in arts policy during the 50 years following the creation of the Arts Council of Great Britain (ACGB) in 1946. A more detailed account is then given of how visual artists featured in the policy-making of Arts Council England (ACE) and the Department for Culture Media and Sport (DCMS) during the period of the New Labour government, 1997–2010. The conclusion is drawn that, despite an official rhetoric which claimed artists occupied a priority position within English arts policy during this period, in reality artists continued to lack visibility and influence.

“Creative Britain”: myth or monument?

This paper is based on a keynote address for the 2010 Cultural Trends Conference “A Golden Age?”. It explores the rhetoric of “creativity” that dominated the New Labour government's cultural policy discourse, and argues that while the promotion of the creative industries and of the economic contribution of culture strengthened the hand of the Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) in attracting resources, there was a price to pay, in the form of auditing, that proved ultimately hostile to creativity. With its main focus on the English region, the paper reviews New Labour's institutional reforms and substantial investment in the cultural infrastructure, but argues that the competing claims of “access” and “excellence” remained unresolved, while policymakers failed to respond to the rapid technological developments in “unofficial” culture.

Should the UK be nominating More World Heritage Sites?

This article is an account of a challenge issued in a seminar at the Institute of Archaeology, UCL in October 2010: it looks at the changing political and economic context within which the UK nominates World Heritage Sites, and questions whether – practically, and even ethically – we should be continuing to submit sites to the World Heritage Committee for inclusion on the World Heritage List.Over the last few years, my work has provided me a with series of insights into particular aspects of the World Heritage question: an analysis of the Tentative List Review process for English Heritage, and of the responses to the “World Heritage for the Nation” consultation for the Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS), followed by a year of work on the UK’s latest World Heritage Site nomination of the Twin Monastery of Wearmouth and Jarrow, and on the management plan for the World Heritage Site of Ancient Merv (Turkmenistan).  This cocktail of World Heritage research and practice has given me, like many, a respect for the concept and the ideals behind it, but doubts about the implementation. My conclusions are personal and partial, and if they generate further discussion I will have achieved my aim.

Sektor kreatywny w gospodarce aglomeracji wrocławskiej

In the first part of article the author presented selected definitions of creative activities and the importance of these questions and the review of the literature. The second part includes the list of branches which belong to creative activities according to British classification by Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) and Polish Classification of Activity (PKD). Next part of analysis includes characteristics of entities representing creative branches in the Wrocław Agglomeration by number of employees, number of entities in different kinds of activity, the date of beginning of activity, and location, i.e. spatial diversity in Wrocław. All data present situation for 2008.

The United Kingdom's Immunity from Seizure Legislation

The UK's Department for Culture Media and Sport (DCMS) has introduced legislation to provide immunity from seizure for cultural objects on temporary loan from other countries to approved museums and galleries in the UK. The legislation is aimed at facilitating the cross‐border lending of objects and bringing the UK into line with other countries such as the United States, France and Germany, that already afford such legal immunity. In the absence of immunity legislation in the UK, many museums and private lenders had been reluctant to loan their objects because of the risk that they might be seized by creditors seeking to settle financial disputes or by claimants contesting ownership of the works. This article examines whether the new law will be effective to provide museums and lenders with the protection they have been hoping for and asks whether it goes too far in depriving claimants of legal rights and remedies.

Creative edge of cities: a comparative analysis of the top 500 creative industries businesses in Beijing and Shanghai

This article studies creative industries in the two economically most important cities in China: Beijing and Shanghai. Both cities have been at the forefront of Chinese economic modernization endeavour in the past three decades, and now lead the way in developing city-based creative economy strategies and policies. To date, research on creative industries in China has centred on the issues related to conceptual and definitional debate, with very limited attention being paid to firmlevel evidence. Through applying the United Kingdom's Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) definition of creative industries (DCMS 1998 and 2001), this study responds to this challenge by identifying the 500 largest creative industries businesses in both cities, and subsequent comparative analysis focuses on the composition, size, ownership and level of marketization of the ‘top 500’ in both cities. The article argues that the development of creative and cultural industries in China is both constrained and enabled by the existing institutional frameworks at central and local level. The strength and weakness of the particular subsector are heavily influenced by a city's own historical, socio-economic and political institutions. The concept — ‘institutional thickness’ (Amin and Thrift 1995) thus provides a useful perspective to understand why cities differ from each other in terms of subsectoral competitiveness and structure. The relative strength of particular sectors, as this article conceptualizes — the ‘creative edge’ of cities — can best be explained as a result of the ‘lock-in’ effect derived from the process of thickening a particular set of place-bound cultural and creative institutions. China is an evident example of the state acting as the key architect of building those institutions.

The United Kingdom's Immunity from Seizure Legislation

The UK's Department for Culture Media and Sport (DCMS) has introduced legislation to provide immunity from seizure for cultural objects on temporary loan from other countries to approved museums and galleries in the UK. The legislation is aimed at facilitating the cross-border lending of objects and bringing the UK into line with other countries such as the United States, France and Germany, that already afford such legal immunity. In the absence of immunity legislation in the UK, many museums and private lenders had been reluctant to loan their objects because of the risk that they might be seized by creditors seeking to settle financial disputes or by claimants contesting ownership of the works. This article examines whether the new law will be effective to provide museums and lenders with the protection they have been hoping for and asks whether it goes too far in depriving claimants of legal rights and remedies.

Measuring the Impact of Free Admission

The reintroduction of universal free admission to the government-sponsored museums is often cited by politicians and commentators as one of the principal cultural policy achievements of the current Labour administration. Both in terms of increasing the total number of visits to the sponsored museums and in encouraging new visitors from priority groups the policy has been a demonstrable success. The complexities of the data generated in support of free admission have hitherto, however, gone largely unexamined. This article therefore explores the ways in which government has gone about measuring the impact of its free admission policy. It traces the history of free admission to museums and galleries as a concept, before setting out the background to the reintroduction of universal free admission to those museums sponsored by the Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) that had introduced charging in the 1980s and 1990s. It then considers ways in which the impact of the policy can be measured, through use of the data generated by the 23 performance indicators used by DCMS in the funding agreements that it has with each of the museums. The article then considers the various factors that need to be taken into consideration in any assessment of the impact of the free admission policy, including the effect of new capital investment. The article concludes by suggesting that further work is needed to isolate the precise impact of free admission, particularly on attracting new audiences to museums and galleries.

A PART TO PLAY?

The Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) was established within months of Labour’s 1997 election victory. From the outset, it intended to ensure the effective delivery of government objectives across its sectors. DCMS’s modus operandi was predicated on the assumption that there is an implicit, highly determined and linear relationship between its funding, its policies, their implementation and outcomes. However, a series of recent statements by DCMS’s ministers suggest that this paradigm, such as it is, has come to be recognised as flawed. Given the burgeoning of current cultural policy research (not least within academia), this article considers whether, on the basis of its current form, it might have anything to contribute to solving DCMS’s dilemmas. In doing so, it examines the development of current cultural policy under Labour; the nature of the conceptual inconsistencies identified; the type of cultural policy research currently being undertaken; and the nature of the relationship between government cultural agencies and external, independent researchers.

Extending the cultural research infrastructure: The rise of the regional cultural consortiums in England

Two distinguishing features of the New Labour Government have been its focus on regionalism and the establishment of a department of state, the Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS), explicitly dedicated to ‘cultural’ policy. This paper tracks the development of a new set of regional cultural organizations, the Regional Cultural Consortiums (RCCs). These were established to contribute to regional development and to deliver the DCMS's national policy goals. The paper examines the RCCs' remit, challenges, achievements and prospects, and locates these in wider debates about evidence-based policy and continuity and change in cultural and regional policy. Particular consideration is given to the RCCs' research and data collection activities and their role in developing a move towards improved capacity in regional cultural research and data collection.

Measuring creativity: A case study in the UK's Designer Fashion sector

Since before the 1997 General Election, New Labour has repeatedly emphasized the importance of the creative industries in underpinning the national economy and as an engine of economic growth. The Creative Industries Task Force Mapping Documents of 1998 and 2001 sought to define and quantify in broad terms economic activity across 13 distinct creative industries. More detailed estimates have been published by the Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) in successive annual Creative Industries Economic Estimates. An assessment is provided of the way in which the creative industries have been measured using the Office of National Statistics' Standard Industrial and Standard Occupational classifications (SIC and SOC). These classifications have themselves been revised since the early 1990s, and further revisions are in prospect from 2007. In this analysis particular focus is given to the ‘Designer Fashion’ sector, illustrated by a number of tables and data analyses. These actual and proposed revisions have helped in documenting the rapidly emerging creative industries, which have reportedly grown at two to three times the rate of the UK economy as a whole. However, as the Regional Culture Data Framework published in 2002 records, serious problems remain in providing valid assessments of the creative industries sectors from ‘official’ published sources, even for the UK as a whole, let alone at the regional level emphasized by the Regional Culture Data Framework's regional sponsors. In any case, often the ‘scaling factors’ applied to official SIC codes to define creative industries appear arbitrary. Many of the Regional Culture Data Framework's recommendations, notably the adoption of a more comprehensive ‘supply-chain’ approach to documenting the cultural sector, make further demands upon the existing official structural classifications and the data bases underpinning them. Even where all elements in the ‘supply chain’ are well documented, there are still questions about the validity of this approach. For example, should wholesale and retail distribution of creative industry products be regarded as part of the ‘Cultural Cycle’? In conclusion, it is suggested that the ‘official’ data has marked limitations in documenting the creative industries and does not realistically or adequately capture the more interesting and dynamic elements of an industry like ‘Designer Fashion’. This is disappointing in a context where central government has placed increasing emphasis upon evidence-based policy to support the development of the creative industries, and where the British ‘Designer Fashion’ sector has lamented the lack of central support in comparison with the French or Italian industries. It is suggested that a more customized approach to collecting data about the creative industries is needed if the results are to usefully inform the further development and profile of these sectors.

A more critical view of the creative industries: Production, consumption and resistance

The UK government's Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) defines the creative industries as being comprised of: Advertising Architecture Art and Antiques Crafts Design Fashion Film Interactive Leisure Software Music Performing Arts Publishing Software Design TV and Radio Visual Arts This relatively new re-designation of artistic and creative activity as the 'creative industries' is a term that seems to have growing contemporary currency. This is, to a large extent, born of a particular focus on the role that artistic and cultural production and consumption plays within the capitalist economy. Consequently, many current discussions of the creative industries display a rather 'one dimensional' (Marcuse, 1964) analysis of cultural life, understanding it from a position firmly located within the locus of market mechanisms. The DCMS'S approach to the creative industries is similar to orthodox approaches to other industrial sectors within the national economy, and its attention is routinely devoted to auditing earnings, turnover, exports and jobs within the creative industries. Wu (2002) has charted the shift towards the commercially-oriented focus on cultural production that has underwritten this new designation of the creative industries since the Thatcherite 1980s. Wu particularly highlights the encouragement of increased interfaces between artistic production and private business sponsorship; between cultural events and corporate advertising; between culture and the 'value added' to corporations; as well as the advent of privately-owned artistic collections as economic investments during this period. This shift towards a commercial agenda was accompanied by policy changes in public organisations such as the Arts Council of England, from policies that emphasised the support of the arts as a public good to those concerned with 'value for money' and the cutting of public funding for the arts. The acceptance of an essentially commercial framework for the understanding and development of arts and cultural production has continued within the UK public sector. After the Labour Party's 1997 election victory, Chris Smith, the incoming minister for Culture at the DCMS, signalled a celebration of the role that culture and creativity could play for a national resurgence, after years of Thatcherite cultural philistinism. However, his focus on the creative industries is still very much a commercial one, located within the context of national economic growth (Smith, 1998) and seen through the lens that attendant assumptions about capitalism and markets provide. In the UK, cultural economists, government officials and cultural policy-makers at regional and local levels have taken this agenda on board, and limit themselves to the role that creativity plays in terms of regional economic growth and inward investment; job creation, business growth and start-ups; and to the development of new consumer markets such as local cultural tourism. Some aspects of this cultural policy agenda, such as urban regeneration and improved 'quality of life', social inclusion, cultural diversity and heritage protection, are to the public good; it would be crass to suggest otherwise. However, the nature of creativity, cultural production and the cultural values that inform it suggest something much wider than the current, commercially-oriented 'universe of discourse' (Marcuse, 1964) allows for, including issues about the economic and social significance of new forms of interaction and exchange within cultural production, and the politics that are expressed through acts of creativity. This is not to say, of course, that discussion of the relationship between art, culture and politics is a new endeavour. Indeed, some of the contributors to this special issue of Capital & Class survey aspects of this long and rich history. But the changed nature of work and production, and the DIY cultural interaction and political expression that are often found in certain aspects of contemporary cultural life, are throwing up new issues and have implications for how we understand these changes within the disciplines of economics, sociology and politics. …

The repatriation of human remains – problem or opportunity?

The editor’s question “who do human skeletons belong to?” (Antiquity78: 5) can be answered positively, but it must be answered in context. The question was prompted by reports from theWorking Group on Human Remainsestablished by the British government’s Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) in 2001 to review the current legal status of human remains held in all publicly funded museums and galleries, and to consider and review submissions on the issue of the return of non-UK human remains to their descendent communities (DCMS 2003: 1-8). In effect, the report was primarily concerned with human remains from Indigenous communities, using a definition which follows the UN Draft Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples as “distinct cultural groups having a historical continuity with pre-colonial societies that developed on their territories” (DCMS 2003:7). Consequently, the report deals primarily with the Indigenous communities of Australia, New Zealand and North America.

The impact of free entry to museums

The commitment of the then Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport to ensuring free entry for all visitors to national museums and galleries by the end of 2001 left many of MORI's clients in the national institutions somewhat uncertain about the future. What impact would ‘going free’ have? Would those who might be described as ‘sociallyexcluded’ be encouraged through the doors? Would the money visitors saved on entrance fees be spent in the shops and restaurants? The first question was answered in spectacular fashion when, in earlysummer 2002, the Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) announced a 62% increase in ‘visitor numbers’ in the seven months since entry charges were scrapped. While it is known that DCMS tends to use the terms ‘visitors’, ‘people’ and ‘visitor numbers’ to refer to visits per se, as a researcher two questions sprang to mind: • Did these figures mean there were actually a lot more people visiting museums and galleries, or were the same people visiting more frequently? • Was the boost in visiting restricted to the national museums and galleries, or were more people visiting museums and galleries generally? MORI decided to see what more could be discovered about these extra visits by placing four questions about the British public's museum‐going habits on its GB Omnibus study in August 2002. The results of that survey form the basis of this chapter. They demonstrate that, although the numbers of people visiting museums has increased significantly since 2001, the increase is greatest among those groups who have traditionally always gone to museums and galleries, while the increase among groups who might be described as socially excluded is much lower. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the implications of MORI's findings for the future of the museums and galleries sector.

Social inclusion: A historian's perspective

In January 2001 the Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) published a document: Libraries, Museums, Galleries and Archives for All: Co‐operating Across the Sectors to Tackle Social Exclusion. As the then Secretary for State, Chris Smith, put it: ‘There have been some comments that it is not the business of [such bodies] to be involved in social regeneration by serving a wider and more diverse audience. I cannot agree. It is clearly right that these national treasures should be available and accessible to all citizens, and there need be no conflict between the dual responsibilities of responding to the needs of society today, and protecting and conserving treasures for future generations.’ The pressure was thus on for libraries, museums, galleries and archives to show that they were taking such issues seriously and developing social inclusion as ‘a policy priority’.1 Existing and additional funding were clearly implied to be at stake—providing a carrot and a stick for those involved. One response to this government initiative was an internal conference at the Public Record Office in Kew devoted to ‘Social Inclusion’ which took place in June 2001. Historians of African Caribbeans and of gays and lesbians, officials from the DCMS, archivists and others were invited to give papers. I gave a presentation on ‘Social Exclusion: Perspectives from a Historian of Ethnicity and Immigration’. What follows is a revised version of this paper (although I have largely kept the informality of the original). My contribution to the conference itself reflected at least to some extent the vision of the founders of Immigrants & Minorities nearly 20 years earlier and many of those who have contributed to the journal subsequently.2