The appointment of Leila D’Aronville and Lizzie Crump as the Government’s Freelance Champions represents an important moment for the creative industries. Freelancers are central to the functioning and success of the sector, and Creative PEC has long called for this unique part of the creative workforce to be better represented in Government.
The Freelance Champions will support industry’s work to address the findings of Creative PEC’s Good Work Review, a major review into working conditions across the sectors, which highlighted issues with unpaid work, limited opportunities for professional development, and difficult working environments, as well as high levels of job satisfaction, flexibility and autonomy.
To support the Freelance Champions and others working in this policy space, we have put together this policy brief, which synthesises the best evidence from our extensive research into freelancers from the past decade. We have supplemented these findings with insights from our Industry Champions network of creative professionals, including from a workshop in which we explored priorities for the Freelance Champion’s first 100 days.
Our recommendations are that the Freelance Champion should:
- Strategically engage with freelancers, organisations and representative bodies in those parts of the creative industries where self-employed work is a structural feature. Creative PEC research shows that self-employed workers constitute majorities in occupations such as Artists (86%), Actors (84%), Musicians (83%), Photographers, and Audio-visual and Broadcast Equipment Operators (64%). It will therefore be important to understand the dynamics affecting these roles and their related subsectors, though it should be noted that there are high numbers (if lower proportions) of self-employed workers in other creative occupations.
- Gather evidence on the infrastructures that are developing among regional and sector-specific freelance networks. There is extensive grassroots work being done to support freelancers, and tapping into ‘what works’ should involve engagement with practitioners already at the forefront of this effort. The Freelance Champion can act as an intermediary and identify opportunities for support, thus avoiding duplicating what is already established.
- Highlight career pathways and upskilling opportunities in createch for freelancers. Our data shows that freelancers are integral to createch firms, with 49% of these employers working with freelancers. Given the focus on supporting ‘createch’ in the UK Government’s Creative Industries Sector Plan, the Freelance Champion should ensure that freelancers are better represented in conversations around creative technology, as well as working with DCMS to highlight pathways into creative technology roles. This follows the recommendations we made in our ‘Future avenues for createch’ report that we co-authored with CoSTAR Foresight Lab.
- Take an active role in ongoing developments in skills policy. Our research demonstrates that upskilling remains an area of challenge for freelancers, with 10% reporting no training in the past three months, compared to 21% of employed creative workers. As a result, there is a real need to ensure that interventions currently in development meet their needs. The Growth and Skills Levy, Skills Passports, and Lifelong Learning Entitlement need careful, continual design and should be informed by consultation directly with the freelance workforce.
- Work to implement tailored good/fair work standards for the creative freelance workforce. Self-employed creative workers are more likely to report dissatisfaction with pay compared to their employed counterparts (35% and 28% respectively), as well as ongoing issues around access to social protections. The implementation of good/fair work risks fragmentation and having a clear, centralised set of standards specific to freelancers is crucial. To this end, the Freelance Champion should use the coordinating power of the Creative Industries Council to convene trade bodies, CIISA, trade unions and other relevant organisations to develop these standards.
- Embed the perspectives of creative freelance workers from marginalised backgrounds in policy development. The creative industries remain unrepresentative across a variety of different metrics, including class, gender and ethnic diversity. The Freelance Champion should work to ensure that diverse voices inform policy development relating to freelancing, with Recommendation 13 of the DCMS and Creative Industries Council-funded Good Work Review, which argues for the appointment of sector ambassadors, being a possible model.
- Work with the ONS, DCMS, Creative PEC and industry partners to identify how data collection and analysis should be improved in order to track trends in the freelance workforce. There are longstanding challenges around capturing the freelance workforce in data, which is due to a combination of fragmented data collection and difficulty in accurately recording who is or isn’t freelance. The Freelance Champion can hold an important convening role for coordinating better collection and analysis. This will also help contribute to the development of a coherent definition for freelancers in a UK context.
You may also be interested in our State of the Nations report, Who Stays and Who Leaves? Mapping Arts, Culture and Heritage Careers, which explores how freelancers form the vital backbone of the creative industries. The report was accompanied by a sold-out event at RSA House on The Creative Freelancer’s Experience:
