Re: the space sector is "worth" over £16.4bn per year, according to the document
If a seat at the Opera costs £100 [I don't have a clue but that seems like a fair median price to a nye-kulturny such as me] and if there are perhaps a million people buying tickets per year [100 per venue, 100 venues and 100 performances each year per venue] then that "brings in" a hundred million pounds per year.
My numbers are possibly conservative by at least an order of magnitude in the total. Again, I haven't a clue, really, but I'd suspect the number of venues, seats and performances are low by factors of at least two each. If so then we are talking about the region of £800,000,000 or more per annum.
Just from Opera.
Throw in multi-millions of pounds for daubs of paint on canvas every so often [often enough to keep the wealthier and more ostentatiously furnished and snootily staffed auction houses in business], the Theatres [admittedly, these may Venn-diagrammatically overlap with Opera and Pantomime] and other sources of income and "billions of pounds added to the local economies" is not too far a stretch.
It does not even matter that many of those millions of ticket-buyers mentioned above are repeat customers, the same people going to the Opera weekly, nor that those Opera-lovers may overlap with art-buying, theatre-going and other activities. All that matters is that cash is moved around.
And, as the Great Pandemic showed us last year, tens of thousands of jobs are supported by "the Arts". Most may only pay a few thousand annually per person but that still adds up to hundreds of millions pumped into the economy by thousands of people buying deep-fried Mars bars and pizzas.
The Arts may often be trite, trivial, nonsensical trash [such as an unmade bed or a can of human waste] but as a part of Life it does keep the money flowing and the people entertained.
If you include the TV and movie industry, it keeps *lots* of money flowing, even if most of it does go towards that Mouse.
The Arts may never be as important as ball-moving sporting events but collectively they do do some good.