House of Lords Debate - Support of the Craft Industry - Thursday 12th June

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Apologies for the super late notice!

I’ve had an email from my contact at the Chartered Institute of Export and International Trade giving me a heads up about a debate in the House of Lords this afternoon.

The topic is “Support of the Craft Industry” and it will be led by Lord Freyburg. You can see the full list of of speakers here - https://whatson.parliament.uk/event/cal52065

If you also want to watch or listen live too, you can do this via Parliament Live - Parliamentlive.tv - Lords Grand Committee

The session started at 1pm and there are two other short debates scheduled first - the first is still ongoing.

Here’s the help page with info about how to view the livestream - https://www.parliament.uk/business/parliament-tv/parliament-live-help/

There’s also info about the archived footage in this link in case you want to watch it at a more convenient time.

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This is very interesting, thank you for the heads up.

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So the debate started at 3pm and lasted for an hour.

There was a strong focus on heritage crafts, especially those within the the building/historic buildings field.

Not a significant focus on micro-businesses like us, however the figures quoted by Lord Freyburg re: the contribution to the UK economy of craft were staggering - more than the fishing industry!

At the end Baroness Twycross made some interesting comments about data collection for the crafts industry and referenced this report.

Again this is key example of business like our being excluded from official data.

It refers only to the salaries of “employed” creatives and the pay gap data is telling.
“As of April 2024, for every £1.00 earned by a man employed in the included DCMS sectors, a woman earns £0.80. This means that there is a gender pay gap of 18.3%, larger than the UK overall (13.1%). This has narrowed by 1.3 percentage points from last year (19.6%), and by 2.6 percentage points from 2019 (22.9%).”

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