The UK arts ecosystem: Seeing the big picture

The arts in the UK: Seeing the big picture

The United Kingdom is a cultural powerhouse whose arts sector is recognised globally for its quality, diversity, and innovation. It often punches above its weight.

Let’s highlight just a few achievements. The United Kingdom is one of only three net exporters of music in the world.¹ It is the world’s second-largest commercial market for visual art.² UK authors won the highest number of Nobel Prizes in Literature from 2000 to 2023 and UK actors the second-highest number of Academy Awards for acting. And the United Kingdom is home to five of the world’s top 30 higher-education art and design institutions. The Royal College of Art (RCA) is number one.³

No less than 139,000 enterprises operate within the UK arts sector, along with 63,000 voluntary leisure-based groups. Together they engage millions of people, up and down the country, in the arts.⁴ Indeed, a recent survey by the Department for Culture, Media, and Sport (DCMS) found that 91 percent of UK adults—around 51 million people—had taken part in one way or another during the previous year.⁵ Art in the United Kingdom is a mass-engagement activity.

A good deal of work has been done examining the impact of so much art touching the lives of so many people. Often, however, this research looks at just a single section of the arts world—the theatre, say, or film—and tends to consider just one measure of impact. This independent report aims to take a wider lens. Drawing on existing data, new analysis, and interviews with more than 50 experts and arts leaders, the report looks at the entire arts sector across all four UK nations, gauging its impact both in economic and noneconomic terms. The report also seeks to understand what makes that impact possible.

At a glance

The United Kingdom is a cultural powerhouse—often punching above its weight—whose arts sector is recognised globally for its quality, diversity, and innovation.
People engage with the arts in the United Kingdom on a large scale. Ninety-one percent of UK adults did so at least once in the previous 12 months, and ten million¹ of these are regularly involved with 63,000 voluntary leisure-based groups up and down the country. ²
They are drawn by art’s intrinsic aesthetic value—its ability to entertain, stimulate the senses, and trigger a wide range of emotional responses. With so many people engaging with the arts, it has a much broader impact, too: on the economy, on individual lives, and on communities.
The arts sector, including suppliers of goods and services, has 139,000 enterprises and 970,000 workers. Together they contributed £49 billion in gross value added (GVA) to the economy in 2022.³ That’s 50 percent larger than the contribution of the telecommunications industry and a significant part of the creative industries’ GVA, which is estimated to have reached £126 billion in 2022⁴ (according to the latest data), up from £115 billion in 2021.⁵
Engagement with the arts has a positive effect on the lives of individuals, improving their skills, their wellbeing, and their health. Numerous studies have shown the positive impact the arts can contribute to managing conditions such as depression, dementia, and Parkinson’s disease.
Engagement with the arts enriches the fabric of local communities by encouraging sociable behaviour, contributing to the attractiveness of local communities, and stimulating discourse. Numerous studies have shown that participation in art programmes correlates with reduced levels of criminal behaviour.
This impact depends not only upon the individual efforts of artists and arts organisations but also on an entire arts ecosystem—creators, educators, distributors and promoters, suppliers, funders, and audiences. The health of the ecosystem depends on five connections within it: (1) between different art forms; (2) between for-profit and not-for profit organisations; (3) between different organisations working in different locations; (4) between arts organisations, local public bodies, and local businesses; and (5) between the arts sector and the broader creative industries.
For the UK arts sector to continue to thrive, all individuals and organisations involved should recognise its dynamics as an ecosystem and look for opportunities to strengthen the connections upon which its health depends.

The conclusions of the report are striking. Driven by the scale and quality of activity, the arts sector has an impact reaching way beyond its intrinsic value as a source of entertainment and stimulation. The sector contributes to the economy and to the lives of individuals—their health and education, for example—and helps improve the fabric of entire communities.

It does so not only because of the efforts of individuals in the sector—artists, teachers, funders, venue owners, and audiences, for example—but also because of the strength of a series of connections between them, in a complex and dynamic ecosystem. However, that ecosystem can be vulnerable. A decision taken in any one part of it can, intentionally or otherwise, reverberate elsewhere, strengthening or weakening the whole.

UK authors won the highest number of Nobel Prizes in Literature from 2000 to 2023 and UK actors the second-highest number of Academy Awards for acting.

Understanding the sector’s impact and the connections in the arts ecosystem could prove valuable—particularly at a time when the sector is still coping with fallout from the COVID-19 pandemic and other challenges. During the lockdown period, the arts and entertainment sector experienced the second-largest reduction in monthly GVA. The proportion of UK workers furloughed in the sector—70 percent—was second only to that in the accommodation and food services sectors.⁶

Although the government’s £1.57 billion Culture Recovery Fund has been vital for many arts organisations, today’s rising cost of living is impeding a return to full activity.⁷ Many studies have found, for example, that while audience levels have picked up, revenues haven’t, as organisations cannot bring prices into line with rising costs. Arts organisations, funders, and policymakers all face difficult prioritisation choices when budgets are tight.

The report does not make policy recommendations. Rather, it seeks to inform debate and thus to share a perspective helpful for all those working to ensure the sector’s continued impact, in all its forms. It’s a perspective that explores the connections within the arts ecosystem and where they could be strengthened.

Defining the arts sector: A dynamic ecosystem

To gauge the impact of the UK arts sector, we must first define it. There are many excellent existing frameworks and terminologies whose differences lie in nuances such as whether the literary arts ought to include all publishing or only fiction and whether the screen arts ought to include video games.

This report chooses to define the arts sector widely, as the goal is to gauge its impact as extensively as possible while maintaining focus on a coherent subset of the creative industries. Whether or not a specific art form is included in our analysis is not a judgement of its quality or aesthetics or of the degree of artistic or creative input required.

Methodology

A great deal of research has been published on the UK art sector’s scope and impact. Wherever possible, the insights in this report draw on existing research, supplemented by interviews with more than 50 experts and arts leaders.

To assess the economic impact of the arts sector, we have used publicly available data from the Office for National Statistics (ONS) for the Standard Industrial Classification (SIC) codes that match our definition of the arts sector. That definition, and therefore the choice of SIC codes for aggregating economic-impact figures, broadly matches the Department for Culture, Media, and Sport (DCMS) definition of the arts and culture sector, with small differences. For example, our definition does not include heritage, whereas DCMS includes this for the cultural sector. Given our ecosystem approach to analysing the arts sector, we include those aspects of higher education relevant to the arts, whereas DCMS does not.

In a small number of cases, only part of one SIC code is relevant for our definition of the arts sector. In such cases, we estimate the share of the SIC code attributable to that sector and apply this share to any economic metrics for that specific SIC code. For example, to estimate the gross-value-added (GVA) contribution from higher education in the arts, we start from the GVA for the higher-education SIC code, which includes arts and non-arts organisations, and take only the share of this GVA that corresponds to arts organisations, estimated to be the same share as the proportion of students enrolled in arts-related courses versus overall student enrolment numbers.

If published data exists only for 2021 or earlier, our new analysis typically estimates the 2022 figures by taking historical data for the SIC codes matching our definition of the arts sector and projecting this data forward to 2022 using the appropriate metric. These are examples:

Estimates of 2022 gross value added are projected using nominal GDP growth.
Estimates of 2022 employment are projected using full-time employment growth for the full economy.
Estimates of the total number of arts enterprises in 2022 are projected using growth in the total number of UK businesses.

In addition, the report estimates the proportion of the not-for-profits’ total funding from earned or commercial income and from philanthropy and public bodies by using 2019–20 and 2021–22 data from the Arts Council England, the Arts Council of Northern Ireland, and Creative Scotland. Equivalent data from the Arts Council of Wales is not available. The report also estimates the number of arts enterprises in the major cities of the United Kingdom by using ONS data on the number of enterprises by industry (SIC codes) across parliamentary constituencies.

All definitions and methodologies used in this report represent just one approach among many legitimate ways to define and analyse the sector. Our report makes no claim to be comprehensive or more correct than other approaches.

In our definition, the arts sector has four subsectors, each of which includes multiple art forms (see sidebar “Methodology”):

Visual arts: painting, sculpture, digital art, performative art, and creative photography, for example (including galleries and museums)
Performing arts: music, dance, theatre, comedy, and opera, for example (including production, recording, and live performances)
Screen arts: scripted TV, film, and video games, for example (including production, postproduction, distribution, and projection)
Literary arts: fiction writing, screenplays, and poetry (including publishing, libraries, and archives)

Within this definition of the sector, the report seeks to understand the different roles that individuals and organisations play. We define six roles common to all art forms: (1) creators and participants in an artistic activity, who, for example, play an instrument, write, or paint, whether professionally or as amateurs; (2) distributors and promoters; (3) arts educators; (4) donors and funders; (5) audiences; and (6) the suppliers of goods and services, such as wigmakers, caterers, and people who make musical instruments (exhibit).

Introduction

Creators and participants

Produce or take part in artistic activity for the benefit of themselves or others—this might include painting, composing, playing a musical instrument, writing a book, or performing a play. Creators and participants may be both professional or amateur.

Distributors and promoters

Connect consumers and audiences to the arts by providing platforms for creators, participants, and their artistic activities—performance venues, galleries, streaming platforms, music or book publishers, for example. Some organisations may play a convening and promotional role for groups within the arts, such as award bodies for films, representative bodies for theatre, etc.

Arts educators

Provide training and teaching in the arts, including as part of schools' curriculums, higher education, learning programmes outside of schools, or as continuous professional development.

Suppliers of goods and services

Supply goods and services upon which the sector depends—the wigmakers and caterers and those who make musical instruments, for example.

Consumers and audiences

Audiences: engage with artistic activity by seeing a play, going to a concert, or visiting an art exhibition, for example.

Consumers: involved in forms of ownership of artistic output, perhaps by buying a work of art, a book, or a movie on DVD.

Donors and funders

Finance and support artistic activities as philanthropists, foundations, corporates, or public bodies.

In the UK arts ecosystem, six roles are common to all art forms. (1 of 7)

In the UK arts ecosystem, six roles are common to all art forms. (2 of 7)

In the UK arts ecosystem, six roles are common to all art forms. (3 of 7)

In the UK arts ecosystem, six roles are common to all art forms. (4 of 7)

In the UK arts ecosystem, six roles are common to all art forms. (7 of 7)

Throughout the report, the term engagement is used for the many different ways in which people are involved with the arts—for example, by composing music, taking part in a book club, attending an exhibition, or buying a work of art. The term organisation refers both to arts enterprises (sole traders or larger) and to voluntary leisure-based groups.

These definitions, and all others in this report, represent just one approach among many legitimate ways to define and analyse the sector. Note that the report does not cover important topics such as diversity and inclusion.

Read the next chapter: Assessing the direct impact of the UK arts sector.

Introduction: Seeing the big picture