Gareth Snell

I agree with my hon. Friend. Our city has children in school who are unaware of our cultural heritage, which is their cultural heritage, and who do not play with clay in the way they should. We have schools that decommissioned their kilns, despite the fact that the children’s parents and grandparents would have trained in those schools, gone into the industry and made good lives for themselves from honest, hard work in what was essentially one of the country’s earliest creative industries. My hon. Friend is also right about the pipeline of talent. The big creative companies in Stoke-on-Trent tell me that the University of Staffordshire is generating some of the highest quality, most talented graduates in the country. When it comes to computer games, technical productions and animations, the courses at the University of Staffordshire are rated as some of the best, if not the best, in the country. Only this week, three of the big digital creative bodies in Stoke-on-Trent—i-Creation, Lesniak Swann and VCCP—announced their new summer internship. That programme lines young graduates up with professionals working in the creative industry, and shows them what their job and career could be—a job and a career that has value, pride and potential economic benefits for my city, because of the nature of the work that we can bring in. The Minister will know about the litany of success stories in our city from a Westminster Hall debate that he kindly responded to a few weeks ago. I will not bore the House by repeating that list this evening. Let me simply say that when the Government consider the future of the creative industries and where the talent pool should be—I know that the Minister agrees, so I hope that he reiterates it when he winds up—we should bear in mind that if we can make it work in places such as Stoke-on-Trent, we can make it work anywhere. Young people in my city who enjoy creative education and want to go on to do wonderful things, whether in music, drama, dance, tech or ceramics and pottery, deserve the same opportunities as a child from London or any metropolitan city in the north of England. I hope that, as the new Government foster a new partnership with places such as Stoke-on-Trent, the creative industries can be central to it, so that the names we speak of in 20 or 30 years’ time, when we undoubtedly have this debate again, will be the names of those young people.