In a week of important reports for Culture, following the Hodge Report into Arts Council England, a new report Culture as Growth Infrastructure from Creative UK has landed. Essentially it makes a simple but powerful case: culture already behaves like infrastructure — we just don’t treat it that way.
Across museums, heritage sites, galleries, libraries, festivals and cultural venues, we see this every day. Cultural organisations anchor high streets. They drive footfall, tourism and local spend. They improve wellbeing, support skills, attract talent and help places feel confident about their future. And crucially, they generate economic and fiscal returns that far outweigh the investment made.
What this report does so effectively is translate what the sector knows instinctively into Treasury-ready language:
• Culture delivers preventative health benefits that reduce pressure on public services
• Public investment in culture generates strong productivity and spillover effects
• Cultural assets create “sticky” places that attract people, businesses and capital
• Blended funding models (earned income, public investment, philanthropy) are a strength, not a weakness
Yet culture remains under-recognised in national growth frameworks, infrastructure planning and access to finance — not because the value isn’t there, but because it isn’t consistently measured or embedded in appraisal systems.
For those of us working in cultural enterprise, this is where the opportunity lies.
At the Association for Cultural Enterprises, we spend a lot of time helping organisations strengthen their commercial resilience — retail, catering, admissions, partnerships, data and insight. What this report reinforces is that commercial performance and public value are not competing ideas. They are deeply connected.
If government embeds the Culture & Heritage Capital framework into mainstream decision-making — and if funders, local authorities and cultural organisations use shared evidence to tell a consistent story — culture can finally be recognised as what it already is:
➡️ A driver of growth
➡️ A preventative investment
➡️ An anchor for place-based regeneration.
This report shouldn’t sit on a shelf. It should shape how we argue for culture, how we invest in it, and how we design the next generation of cultural enterprise.
I’d strongly recommend a read — and an even stronger recommendation that we now focus on turning this thinking into action. Read the full report here.
