Caroline Pidgeon has written to the Mayor, stressing the severity and urgency of the situation that the creative industries in London are facing during the pandemic, and urging him to lobby the government and to commit to doing all he can for the sector.
Caroline wrote:
The creative industries have already been disproportionately impacted by this pandemic. Freelancers account for approximately 72% of the industry, compared with 16% on average across other industries. As a result of this hundreds of thousands of freelancers across the sector in London have already been excluded from Government support during this pandemic. As if this was not enough, we now face the increasing prospect of permanent closures of arts and cultural venues across the capital as our Government encourages, and effectively forces, hard-working, talented and professionally trained individuals to find other work.
I hope you agree that to treat the creative industries in this way is not only unfair, but it is also deeply irresponsible. The way the Government appears to be willing to sacrifice creative industries to Covid-19 will be damaging to all of us in London. But more than this, we must realise that as we come out of this pandemic, which we will, our creative industries and arts sector will play a central role, particularly here in London.
If we allow the sector to be decimated it may never recover – this would be both an economic and social catastrophe for both our city and our country.