'Nobody realised the extent of their vulnerability': Arts figures on what the government needs to do for freelancers

Speaking out: clockwise from far left, Vicky Featherstone, Chi-chi Nwanoku OBE, Rosalie Craig, Sonia Friedman and Tim Bevan

Money from the Culture Recovery Fund is starting to trickle through to institutions, but what about the freelancers who make the work that goes into them?

As employment opportunities have vanished, many have found themselves ineligible for the Self-Employment Income Support Scheme, and hard-pressed to find alternative income.

Today the Government announces a package offering overdue support to the self-employed. We asked figures across the arts what needs to be done to protect a struggling workforce that feels forgotten and overlooked.

Rosalie Craig, actor

Daniel Hambury/@stellapicsltd

This discussion about retraining isn’t a new one for us because we are always retraining. We’re always doing something. Teaching, voice-overs in the basement. You can't just rely on the one thing. I retrained during lockdown as a yoga teacher! As actors we’re used to downtime, moments when, you know, you can’t even get arrested. And so it's been on my mind for a while, but obviously, I've not needed to go off and do that before. But now… I went and retrained for two months.

[My husband, the actor Hadley Fraser] and I did apply for the self-employment income support scheme, but we weren't eligible, because we'd had two good years. It's mad. For your whole working life, you can be quite badly paid, and then you get two or three years when you think, great, I'll squirrel that money away, because I'm going to need it to live off for the future or the tax bill, whatever. And then, of course, because you've actually earned some money for once, then you're told you're not eligible, and you can't have any help. I think it was something like 36 percent of the workforce received government support.

Fundamentally, we want the government to recognise that this is a living. Even though the end product may seem like it's just magically appeared, it is something that we train to do and spend our lives doing. And the amount of money it generates, and about 137,000 jobs. It's not a hobby. I would love them to recognise the fact that we all need help. If we can't get jobs that we normally do - in cafes, in shops - what is it that we're supposed to do if we're not allowed to go back to work? We can't get Universal Credit. We can't get help. We can't get the grant. It’s a pool of people who are genuinely desperate and have nowhere to turn and if you don't have people you can borrow money off or come up quickly with a way of an idea of how to make any money whatsoever, it's dire.

Vicky Featherstone, artistic director, Royal Court Theatre

Alex Lentati

We've always known that freelancers are important and brilliant in this industry, and we're nothing without them. But I think the freelancers themselves, because they work individually coming into institutions to collaborate as artists... I don't think anybody had realised the extent of their vulnerability as a workforce. And I think that the structure of theatre and the way that it's been made has actually been predicated on that vulnerability. So I think we're in a moment of realisation, which ultimately will be good. We will all make change happen. We don't make art without the freelancer.

Of course, we recognise the amazing amount of money that has been given to us from the Treasury, in terms of the recovery funds. But the recovery fund gets some of the institutions through to the end of March. And even though there are now some employment opportunities, I think that's a red herring. The government needs to understand the importance of and the nuance of their self employed freelance economy. The welfare systems are not nuanced enough for what freelancers actually do. And the government needs to take responsibility for them as a workforce, as well as the sector taking responsibility for them. And I feel that isn’t happening.

Something like two thirds of freelancers are not eligible for the self-employment income support scheme, because people are earning 50 percent of their income, teaching or doing different things. That means they're not eligible. That has to change. I'd like to hear an acknowledgement that the welfare systems and the self-employed systems in place aren't fit for purpose, now we understand what the individual issues are, and therefore, we need to make a change in them. 100 percent of the freelance workforce should be eligible.

Tim Bevan, producer, co-founder, Working Title Films

Dave Benett

Outside of the BBC and Sky and obvious channels, the film and TV industry is more or less entirely freelancers. And it’s sort of doing alright - we’re back in production and I sort of think that if you were trying to find a great production manager right now you wouldn’t be able to, because they're all working. But live theatre, live music - that’s a disaster and we should be working out a way to protect those people. We live for these great things, and they need to be protected so that when this is over, they exist.

I understand that it’s very difficult to carve out furlough for a particular industry, but I do think there should be something, in recognition of our creative industries, which in normal life are what Britain is brilliant at. We should protect that as a nation, whether it’s with a tax credit or something else, to make sure these people can survive the next year or 18 months or how long it’s going to be.

Part of it is perception. I don’t think freelancers have felt an arm coming out [from the government], saying actually, what you do is really valuable and is about the values that this country holds dear. There’s that famous Winston Churchill quote from the Second World War, when somebody said we should close the theatres, he said no, because what are we fighting for? Culture is close to our spirit and a metaphorical hug would go a long way! A proper acknowledgement that what creatives do is really valuable, and hang in there, because we don’t want you to become a lab technician, we want you to continue to be a dancer. And of course we need to work out a way for you to make a living between now and when you can do that again, but we get it. I haven’t heard that. I’ve heard a load of piffle-waffle.

Chi-chi Nwanoku OBE, Founder and Artistic & Executive Director, Chineke! Foundation

Daniel Hambury/@stellapicsltd

Can you imagine London without the London Symphony Orchestra? Well, that’s the short answer. That’s one of our flagship UK orchestras that the country is so proud of — they are all freelancers. Most orchestras and music makers in this country are freelance. They are the people who provide the backbone of our entertainment.

[When lockdown started], if you were a PAYE musician, you got some kind of monthly payout. But if you were freelance, nothing.

Let’s face it: can people imagine a world with no music? No entertainment? What is it that everybody turns to? There are so many reasons that people turn to the arts, and I can say very confidently that it’s the arts that have kept people sane throughout lockdown.

At Chineke!, we got what we asked for in the Culture Recovery Fund. We were thrilled and grateful for what we got. We are one of the grassroots organisations that are really the movers and shakers in the classical music industry right now. And therefore, we need to be protected and supported.

I think we have to [guarantee fees for performers if events are cancelled]. That’s a no-brainer. We have to support that. Everyone has to get behind this. We need to find a way to put some pennies back in the pockets of the people that keep this country singing.

Where are the musicians going to come from? If it’s been taken out of schools, if the professionals that we have already at the moment have been cut off in their prime, what’s going to happen? There will always be a few people, but you know who it’ll be? It’ll be the privileged few. It will not represent the great, diverse culture of this country, and it won’t be relevant to our young people.

Sonia Friedman, producer

Matt Writtle

There is no work without freelancers. Without the actors, the designers, the directors, the writers and the stage management, we have no work to give to the theatres. Without the 300,000 workers in our industry, there would be nothing on the stages and no one behind the stages. There'd be nothing for people to sing, for people to say, there'd be no actors for people to direct and there'd be no directors to direct actors. They are what makes up theatre. So it's a very strange place we find ourselves in that, while the industry and various parts of the sector are being supported by the 1.5 billion, the workforce themselves, the self-employed, have not been recognised.

What I've been very clear about in my lobbying is that the way to help the freelance sector, both fiscally and mentally, is for us to get back to work. Because then we can start employing people again, and doing the job we're trained to do. But that's going to be slow. But the more that theatres are supported to get back up safely, then the sooner we can start employing the hundreds of thousands who are currently unemployed.

The most practical thing that the Government could do is to increase the rate of support for self-employed individuals in theatre — actually all sectors where they’ve been so battered — which it seems may be happening today, and to make a special case for our workers, because we do not want them to go and retrain. Many of them have trained for years, and we need these highly trained professionals with years of experience as soon as we come back. If we lose them, we can't come back.

We know that the government does recognise the importance of theatre to the Treasury, and to the economic and mental health of our country. I know they get it. What they may have not yet joined up is that the songs they listen to from the cast albums, the actors they see on Netflix shows, the Hamlets, the King Lears, the Mark Rylances in Jerusalem – that's who we're talking about. And without them, we don't have an industry. So we need to look after them until we get back.

Jude Kelly, former artistic director of the Southbank Centre in London, director of WOW foundation

Matt Writtle

This crisis has catapulted the plight of our wonderful freelance workforce into the midst of the debate about how to preserve art and culture for the future. As a sector, it’s exposed how vulnerable the amazing range of artists, technicians and makers of all kinds are in an industry that is world beating and unique on so many levels.

The Cultural Recovery Fund gives a period of stability for many institutions and organisations up and down the country, and now we need to urge each other to use that stability to maintain our workforce in its integrity. If it’s diminished or destroyed now it will take years to rebuild, and years too before parents of families with meagre incomes will ever let their children take to the arts as a profession, and that would be a similar catastrophic result as we need the voices of everyone to tell the stories of everyone.

Finally, we need to take this time to build new policies that recognise that safety nets are needed for a group of people who form more than 70 percent of the work of the creative sector and yet have suddenly found themselves with no firm ground to stand on. If you add in to that the issue of women still struggling to be given opportunity and authority, and the clear bias that the Black Lives Matter movement has revealed and the disability arts forums have exposed, then it adds up to a need for a new pact to be created with the freelance sector. I know there are many of us, myself included, who are determined to see that this happens.

Gareth Ellis-Unwin, head of film and animation at ScreenSkills and the Oscar-winning producer of The King’s Speech

Gareth Ellis-Unwin (left) with director Paul Katis
PA

Freelancers are the backbone of production in the UK’s screen industries and were working flat out in what had been a boom period pre-pandemic. They are in demand again right now as production is getting back up and running and will be critical to the economic recovery.

This is an industry with a strong future. Lockdown demonstrated there is an insatiable appetite for filmed content. Last year TV and film production spend was £3 billion and we are already bouncing back.

One of the reasons the UK is world-renowned in this sphere is because we have highly skilled, world-class talent at every level – behind the camera as well as on screen. Yet freelancers have been hurting. Many of those I count as friends and peers do not choose to be freelance, it’s a requirement of the role. Film and television are not a continuous production line like that in industries such as manufacturing or cars.

But as has been well documented, screen workers have fallen between the cracks. They don’t have an employer so they could not be furloughed. Most didn’t qualify for other help that was put in place.

The screen industries are grateful to government for the support it has offered to help productions return, which includes a quarantine exemption for international talent and the insurance backstop in the restart scheme. The workforce need thought now. If the coronavirus means a production closes down, freelancers need access to financial support and the support available should be more realistic than the current Self-Employed Income Support Scheme. If they contract Covid, there should be adequate sick pay available.

One of the biggest dangers to our industry now is a loss of talent, including those from more disadvantaged backgrounds, precisely those we have been working hard to find and nurture. The risk is they drop out because they simply don’t have the money to survive a further hiatus or decide that the lack of a financial safety net makes it too precarious to stay. Yet this is not a workforce that should be considering re-training. It is a workforce the UK needs to keep.

Industry itself is already assessing what it should do. We at the industry skills body ScreenSkills were one of the first signatories of the Coalition for Change which was set up to address working practices for freelancers in TV. It might be the right moment for a proper understanding of the value and needs of freelancers more broadly.

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