Olivia Colman, John Nettles and Joanne Harris are among dozens of high-profile artists calling for a portion of gadget sales revenue in the UK to go into a fund for performers and creators.

In a letter in Tuesday's Times newspaper, they claim a centralised "Smart Fund" could generate up to £300m per year for the UK's creative sector.

The levy would be between 1% and 3% of the overall price of a device.

However, critics say it would amount to "a new tax" on consumers.

It would apply to everything that can "store and download creative content".

This includes laptops, PCs and smartphones, said a group of artist industry organisations behind the idea.

There are no official proposals for such a scheme, but the artist Yinka Shonibare described it as "a no-brainer".

"Currently there isn't any effective way for creators to be recompensed when their work is downloaded and stored by audiences," he said.

However, Tech UK, a network for the country's tech sector, said it sounded like a "new tax" on consumers.

"It is an arbitrary tax on consumers that is hugely bureaucratic to manage, and with no transparency on how funds are disbursed and spent," said a spokeswoman.

"Shoppers buying a new phone or laptop might have a lot of questions about why they should have to pay such additional charges, when they already pay a significant amount of VAT."

Those of us who were around in the 1980s will remember the slogan "Home Taping Is Killing Music", used by the British record industry in a long-running campaign against what it regarded as piracy, and in favour of a levy on cassette tapes.

This latest campaign for a Smart Fund is more subtle, making no mention of piracy, and suggesting that artists, tech companies and government can unite around the idea of a simple one-off levy on gadgets to support the creative industries.

"We're just about the only country in the world that doesn't have some kind of private copying remuneration scheme," said one proponent of the idea.

With the tech companies not exactly popular and the government keen to find some easy way of helping the arts, the idea may find more political weight behind it this time.

But the tech industry will lobby hard to convince ministers that this is just the kind of bureaucratic European scheme that the UK is now free to ignore.

• Mobile phones

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