The UK’s strong current growth performance compared with other countries must not detract from her deep–seated structural problems: namely, her low investment in skills, infrastructure and innovation. As a consequence of these problems, productivity – output per hour worked – is 17 per cent lower than the average for the rest of the G7 nations, the widest gap for over 20 years. At the same time, there is growing evidence that technological progress has created a ‘sagging middle’ in the labour market, with machines and computers replacing employees in many routine jobs in the middle of the income distribution, contributing to record increases in income inequality. And in all countries the evidence is mounting of high levels of worker dissatisfaction and disengagement with low levels of intrinsic motivation across the workforce.

The Creative Economy stands out as a shining light. One of the UK’s unsung success stories, making up almost a tenth of value added, it is deeply rooted in national history and accounts for 2.6 million jobs, making it bigger than sectors like Advanced Manufacturing, Financial Services and Construction. 1.8 million of these jobs are in creative occupations (Figure 1) – from advertising professionals to computer programmers, and from actors to video games developers – who are highly educated, skilled and drivers of innovation.

Crucially, new research from Nesta shows that in the future creative jobs will also be more resistant to automation. In Creativity vs. Robots we show that creativity is inversely related to computerisability: 87 per cent of highly creative workers are at low or no risk of automation, compared with 40 per cent of jobs in the UK workforce as a whole. At the regional level, we see that places with a higher proportion of the workforce in creative jobs, most obviously London, are also more immune to automation.

Such findings should not be surprising: they reflect the fact that machines can most successfully emulate humans when a problem is well specified in advance – that is, when performance can be straightforwardly quantified and evaluated – and when the work task environment is sufficiently simple to enable autonomous control. They will struggle when tasks are highly interpretive, geared at ‘products whose final form is not fully specified in advance’, and when work task environments are complex – a good description of most creative occupations.

Projecting forward the higher than average growth rate of creative jobs since 1997 would imply roughly one million new creative jobs by 2030. Nesta believes that to capitalise on our creative strengths, and to invest in the wellbeing of the workforce, the next government should commit the UK to achieving this. To realise this ambition, we make five sets of recommendations for policy, building on the comprehensive strategy for government we set out in 'A manifesto for the creative economy.'