Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)

My Lords, it is a great pleasure to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Caine. She made some terribly important points; they are literally about matters of life and death. I have added my name to Amendment 259, alongside the noble Lord, Lord Freyberg, and the noble Earl, Lord Clancarty. I apologise to the noble Earl for not having also signed Amendment 287; I certainly would have done so, had I caught up with it sooner. I previously backed a similar amendment from the noble Earl to an earlier Bill under the previous Government. I declare my position as beneficiary of the Authors’ Licensing and Collecting Society, with which the noble Lord, Lord Clement-Jones, is associated. I published one book last year, and I have another one coming out this year. Amendment 259 is about unionisation and collective bargaining in the arts and cultural sector, and it calls for alternative, appropriate models for the sector. I hope the Labour Government see sense and come back in support of the amendment. They believe—I hope—in the values of collective bargaining and of workers being able to get together to fight for appropriate conditions, whether it is health and safety, pay or work security. I declare another position—or, perhaps, a situation—in that, 20 years ago, I reviewed a lot of London fringe theatre on my own website. Speaking to some of the actors and the other creatives involved in those performances, I learned that the conditions under which they were employed, or hoped to get paid, were often very precarious. I very much doubt that that situation has improved. The noble Lord, Lord Freyberg, spoke about the insecurity of Covid and what followed it. The Republic of Ireland saw that situation and took a step to deal with it: it introduced the universal basic income trial, which ran from 2022-24 and paid creative workers a weekly stipend of €325 for three years. We still have not had the formal impact assessment of that, but I have heard a great many anecdotal reports about the more stability and reduced stress for creative workers. Realised from anxiety, they had time and headspace to open up new possibilities and create trajectories. They spent time researching, experimenting and taking risks and really saw the benefits in their creative practice. What we are proposing here is not going as far as a universal basic income but is a collective bargaining approach that strengthens the position of creative workers within their sectors and organisations, particularly freelancers. This would surely be a positive step at least heading in that direction. Finally, it might feel as if we are addressing something that has been an issue for a very long time. There is a very famous painting called the “Poor Poet”, done in three versions by the German painter Carl Spitzweg. It shows a garret room with a leaking roof. There is no fire or bed, only a mattress on the floor, and the poet is tucked underneath every bed covering because he cannot afford to heat his room. That has been a long-term stereotype, but it does not mean we have to continue that. More practically, in the reality of Britain in 2025, many people cannot even manage to access conditions such as that. There is a real issue—and no one else has brought this up yet—about access to the creative sector being open to a wide variety of people from a wide variety of groups in our society, not just to people who can access the bank of mum and dad when things go a bit wrong and can afford to work as an unpaid intern for years. If we are going to have a creative sector that truly harnesses the talents of all our society, opens opportunities and—if I have to put it this way—is great for the economy, then surely all the amendments in the group, but particularly the amendments on collective bargaining and the freelance commissioner, would take us some steps down that road?