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UK creative industries minister Chris Bryant has said he would like to see less dependency on freelancers within the film and TV industries, with more people under full-time employment.
“I’m not sure if it’s really good for industry in the end if so many people are freelancers,” Byrant told the cross-party culture, media and sport committee during a session this morning (July 8) examining the creative industries sector plan.
“In the end, if so many people are just freelancers, it doesn’t provide you with continuity, there ends up with a bit of a skills problem.”
He noted: “I meet people all the time who say to me lots of people who are freelancers in film, in screen, have had no work for the past 18 months. Insecurities about whether there might be different arrangements [with the] United States of America have contributed to that. We need to make sure we have a resilient sector in the UK.
”I would like us, in the course of this 10-year period, to get to a place where fewer people in the sector are working freelance are more people have secure ideas of their employment.”
Bryant was also answering questions on the government’s response last week to the committee’s reccomendations following its far-reaching inquiry into UK film and high-end TV. The committee’s MPs highlighted only two out of the 35 recommendations the committee had put forward have been fully accepted, with almost half rejected, and the rest deferred or delayed.
One measure that was outright rejected was the introduction of a streamer levy. Bryant reiterated: “While we’re not going to go for a streaming levy, I do want to make sure public service broadcasters can compete with Netflix and everybody else on quality as well as getting audiences.”
Labour MP Bryant lamented the rejection from the then-Conservative government of an idea for the UK’S public sevice broadcasters (PSBs) to combine to create a unified streaming platform.
“I have a deep regret of something that happened 12 or 13 years ago, when it would have been ideal if the British PSBs and perhaps others had been able to combine to create a streaming service that would have knocked every other streaming service into a cocked hat. It was knocked down by the government and never came to pass.”
Bryant said one body that was happy with the sector plan was the BFI. “When I spoke to the BFI, I think they were the most happy of all the sectors, and they said – I hope I’m not breaking confidence – but they said in the meeting there is nothing that we asked for that we didn’t get.”
In the creative industries sector plan and the response to the film and high-end TV inquiry, the government has not committed to any further changes to tax reliefs, but has also not entirely ruled them out at future budgets, with industry calls for both an enhanced high-end TV (HETV) tax credit for a certain level of UK production and a 25% tax relief for the prints & advertising (P&A) costs of films claiming the Independent Film Tax Credit.
Bryant refused to be drawn in on which tax relief enhancement he is most likely to back, however did comment on the proposed p&a relief: “I’m very painfully aware it’s one thing to make a film and another to get it in front of eyes and make a living out of it.”
He commented on The Thursday Murder Club, Chris Columbus’ adaptation of Richard Osman novel for Netflix, which filmed last year in the UK and stars Helen Mirren, Pierce Brosnan, Ben Kingsley and Celia Imrie.
“There’s a film of The Thursday Murder Club, and there’s an issue,” noted Bryant. “A lot of people have engaged in that, including several of the actors I know because they said to me, they want it to have a cinema release, but it’s only going to have a cinema release in a small number of cinemas.”
Bryant threw his weight behind the economic significance of cinemas, stating: “If you have a cinema on your high street, it’s one of the surest signs your high street is going to flourish.”
Creative Content Exchange
Earlier in the day, Peter Bazalgette and Shriti Vadera, co-chairs of the Creative Industries Taskforce, which was set up by the government in December to help shape the plan, were joined on a panel by Creative UK chief executive Caroline Norbury to dig into the sector plan further.
One area they were challenged on was the plan’s ambition to create a Creative Content Exchange, with Vadera accepting that there is some “ambiguity” that needs to be “cleared up” over how it would run.
The plan positions it as a “trusted marketplace for selling, buying, licensing, and enabling permitted access to digitised cultural and creative assets. This new marketplace will open up new revenue streams and allow content owners to commercialise and financialise their assets while providing data users with ease of access. In this way, the CCE will help fuel the next wave of creative innovation while facilitating the development of high-value AI models.”
Vadera said: “It’s not a risk-free idea, it’s therefore still conceptual. There should be a technical platform, some of them already exist, that can house safely and protected a lot of multimedia different types of content with the content, copyright owner having complete control of what happens to it, housed safely in a platform, and there is a front end facilitation mechanism that allows that value to be discovered in a marketplace,” comparing its potential to “the London Stock Exchange”.
She added the plan is not for it to be a statutory licensing model or a government body, however exactly who will be responsible for it has not been identified.
Another area in the sector plan that needs firming up is the issue of a long-term funding plan for the Creative Industries Independent Standards Authority (CIISA), which is backed on a voluntary basis bt industry.
“Industry needs to step up, a lot of them have, there are a lot of backers for the need for CIISA now and people have put their money where their mouth is,” said Norbury. “Others haven’t… My sense is domestic broadcasters, theatre companies etc have been very supportive at backing CIISA. The challenge is more to do with how we engage with international, multi-national companies, particularly the Americans who do not have the same sort of culture of getting in the room together to try to sort out these issues.”
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