Arts and Creative Industries: Freelancers and Self-employed Workers

Question for Short Debate

Asked by

To ask His Majesty’s Government what support they intend to give to freelancers and other self-employed workers in the arts and creative industries; and what assessment they have made of the case for a Commissioner for freelancers.

My Lords, this is an interestingly timed debate, not least because of yesterday’s announcement of the Creative Industries Sector Vision, about which I will say something later on. As theatre critic Lyn Gardner said earlier this month in the Stage:

“It is time to make more noise, more usefully, to support freelance creatives”.

We have received some excellent, detailed briefings listing the many and varying concerns of freelancers. As the Authors’ Licensing and Collecting Society says,

“For a long time, freelancers have faced systemic challenges relating to their work. There are multiple areas where focused government engagement would improve the situation of UK freelancers”.

I will try to go through some of those concerns and I look forward to the contributions from all those who have signed up to this debate. However, I say now that we also need a much longer debate on the whole area of atypical work, which over the last few decades has become less atypical.

Although freelancers make up 15% of the workforce, they represent about 32% of the creative industries, rising to 70% for the visual arts and 70% for theatre, while 80% of musicians are freelancers. I declare an interest as a self-employed artist, while my wife is a journalist who has worked both as staff on newspapers and as a freelancer.

The Arts Council says that:

“Without talented artists, technicians, designers, curators, producers, writers and other practitioners, our buildings, fields, streets, shelves, walls would be sorely lacking in creativity and culture.”

Freelancers, particularly in the arts, have been described as the backbone of the landscape. This is a particularly apt metaphor, with its sense of the strength and necessity of the sector but also its vulnerability. The pandemic very much highlighted that, with many workers forced out of the sector—a terrible waste of skills—because of patchy support that the Government provided at the time. Equity says that 40% of members received no support from the Government’s self-employment income support scheme and 47% of artists missed out, while many musicians did not qualify for support. In the event, I hope that that mistake would not be made a second time.

A major argument in favour of the appointment of a freelance commissioner is the lack of good data about a workforce of a diverse nature. As ALCS says,

“a dedicated commissioner would help to relay expert information and feed into government policies that will impact this valuable proportion of the workforce”.

One of the clichés of the freelance world for the wider public has been the tacit acceptance of the trade-off between freedom and security. Yet, if the trend in all work is towards more flexible working arrangements, something that many workers are demanding, is that trade-off acceptable any more in the modern world? Freelancers have very few of the employment rights and protections that standard employees have. The Independent Society of Musicians and BECTU ask that shared parental leave and statutory sick pay are extended to the self-employed. BECTU asks that Section 44 of the Employment Rights Act 1996 be extended to strengthen protection for health and safety. Job sharing, term-time working, career breaks and sabbaticals are other areas that BECTU believes should be looked at. Without effective protection, there is the concern that bullying and harassment will remain unaddressed because of the imbalance of power between freelancer and client. ISM’s second Dignity at Work report found that 88% of self-employed musicians did not report the discrimination they suffered, even when this was sexual harassment, often for fear of losing work.

My Lords, it is an immense pleasure to follow the noble Earl, Lord Clancarty, and to have the privilege of being the first to congratulate him on introducing this Question with such skill, knowledge, empathy and thoroughness.

In the short time I have, I will focus on one of the things he said: the way in which what we still think of as atypical jobs are ceasing to be atypical. I look at my children, who range in ages from five to 21, and I do not think that any of them will ever have a job as we understood that word in the 20th century. They are likely to go through life constantly reskilling and freelancing, and adapting to a rapidly accelerating technological revolution. We should not be frightened of that. I know that there is a great sense that AI will put everyone out of work, but that same argument has been made about almost every technological advance since the Industrial Revolution—and yet the number of jobs keeps growing. What it will do is fragment the labour market further; we will become more and more specialised as we are freed up from the current jobs we do to find much more niche employments.

The Government have been very slow to adapt to the consequences of that. We still have a set of labour rules, social security rules and pension rules that are designed for mass workforces, going back to Chamberlain’s Holidays with Pay Act 1938. However, that is not the world that our children are growing up in; it literally belongs to another century. Instead of looking at freelancers as some subset, we need to start thinking about whether this will be the future of the entire workforce and about how we need to change our fiscal and employment rules—starting with the abolition of IR35, which is the bane of every freelancer. I declare my interest as a freelance journalist.

I hope that one thing that will come out of this is that we do not end up with only state employees being outside this benign revolution. It is not a revolution we should fear; it is one that will create more wealth and liberate more talent, and Ministers should not stand in its way.

My Lords, we are indebted to the noble Earl, Lord Clancarty, for securing this extremely important and timely debate. I declare my interests as set out in the register, particularly as an author and a rights holder.

I want to focus on two elements: remuneration and benefits. Recent research has shown a worrying drop of 60% in real-term income from writing over the past 15 years for writers and 85% of actors earn under £10,000 per annum, with 72% taking on second jobs outside entertainment to support themselves. Visual artists, shockingly, report earning an average of £2.60 an hour when they deliver work or projects for public institutions. This is unsustainable and it is reflected across the industry. The lack of secure income is the most common reason for one-third of the workforce considering leaving the sector.

Yet, in 45 other countries creative workers are better supported by receiving payments to compensate them when their work is downloaded or stored for free through schemes called private copy levies. I am reliably informed that an amendment redressing this will be brought forward to the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Bill, and I hope that the Minister will respond positively to this proposal.

This brings me to my second element, and I will wrap up quickly. Significant reduction in support for the arts from local and central government over the last 13 years has reduced opportunities among freelancers and the self-employed within the industries. These cuts are causing undue losses of secure jobs at long-established institutions such as the Oldham Coliseum, which has closed, and the English National Opera, which is moving from its London base.

I could say much more, but I conclude with this: these issues need a comprehensive approach across government departments so that we remain world-leading. But this must not be at the expense of remuneration or a decent standard of living for those working in the creative industries. The working models are there; I hope the Government have the common sense to adopt them.

My Lords, when you find yourself in a debate with only two minutes to speak, the only thing you can do is dive straight in. The one thing I would say here is, when it comes to training and supporting people in these structures, on-the-job training is not going to work if you have a varied employment structure that moves around the country. Whenever we have devised something of late, we have said: “Let’s go for an apprenticeship or let’s go for work-based training”. It is incredibly difficult for this group to access training in a growing field that has great growth potential.

How do you have an apprenticeship when most of the people doing the job are not going to be working in the same place or under the same contract in six months’ time? It is incredibly difficult to do. The T-level, for which I hope we will get a better structure, has requirements for on-the-job training. When the Minister replies, will he say how we are going to start addressing this? A model that has been terribly fashionable in government circles, across many parties, is becoming increasingly unuseful for training the next generation. We have started to do things such as saying that level 4 training is going to get more support, but if you go into the sectors which are growing it is not going to work. When the Minister replies—or even if he has to write—can he give me some idea of what you do to get support for people doing an apprenticeship, an apprenticeship-type course or a level 3 course if they have varied contracts and the people who are doing it cannot provide that support? It is a question that should have been answered already.

My Lords, I must declare my interest as a freelance composer and broadcaster. Freelancers are, as we have heard from my noble friend Lord Clancarty, the backbone of the UK’s art forms in the cultural industries, which raise £109 billion. Without them, film and television production would quite simply collapse so, as I think the Government recognise, we must nurture them. I welcome the new paper that the Government have come up with. Yet Covid, Brexit’s effect on EU touring, particularly in cabotage, and the drawing in of the economy have meant a terrible lack of security for this sector. Despite the Chancellor’s generous help during the pandemic, many freelancers fell through the net, especially the disabled. Could the Minister and his colleagues look at this in case, God forbid, there is a repetition of the pandemic so that we are in a better place should that happen?

In doing so, the Minister will doubtless talk to his esteemed colleague, the noble Baroness, Lady Barran. On Monday, she said in reply to me that there is a problem in getting recruits for training musicians and for teaching. This impacts on schools because it is where the next generation will come from—the next players in our orchestra and the next teachers in our schools. We need to make sure that we nurture them. After all, if we cannot, we will be encouraging migration, because we will have to import teachers and musicians for our orchestras from abroad. That surely runs counter to the Government’s policy.

My Lords, I declare my interests as a publisher, producer and freelancer, as per the register. Boiling my contribution down to two minutes, I would like to make the following points, bearing in mind that the world of publishing may be more gentlemanly and gentlewomanly than other sectors.

Researching for this debate, I found that over the last three years my firms have used 29 different creative freelancers from around the world over 144 projects. As a creative freelancer, I have been contracted five times on five different projects, again worldwide. The conclusion is that the market is growing and global; it is a totally free and self-regulating market, where the creative freelancers set their Ts and Cs depending on their desire for the work, what the market will bear and how they choose to build their client relationships. Their clients choose either to accept these terms or not, and I see no reason at all for third parties to intervene in these private arrangements.

The disadvantage of being a creative freelancer is having to deal with that which is the very opposite of creativity: administration, form-filling and dealing with bureaucracies, whether private or public. The Question asks how the Government can help creative freelancers. The answer is: by demanding from them as little as possible. The best single way to help the UK’s freelance self-employed is to reform, or ideally abandon, IR 35 and stop nailing us through unfair NICs and other welfare policies and irregularities.

My Lords, this is indeed an important issue and I am grateful to colleagues at Freelancers Make Theatre Work for their excellent research and briefing, which I recommend to the Minister.

Freelancing in the live performing arts is a deeply precarious existence, as we have heard. Pay is typically low and conditions often poor. The pandemic had a terrible effect on the freelance workforce: many could not access any financial support and consequently left the industry or went, if they could, to the slightly safer and better paid haven of film and television. We now have a skills shortage which is already having a serious impact on organisations of every scale, but particularly on small producing companies such as OperaUpClose, newly included in Arts Council England’s national portfolio and of which my daughter—with long experience as a freelance opera singer—is artistic director and chief executive.

Companies such as OperaUpClose are where much of our most innovative and exciting work is happening and they are entirely dependent on freelancers to deliver that work. OperaUpClose, with a wide-ranging and ambitious programme, has just three permanent employees, who between them carry all creative, managerial and administrative responsibilities, including for fundraising and for all the onerous reporting requirements—far too onerous, in my view—that go with being an Arts Council England client. They operate with small budgets and compete for the services of performers, directors, designers, stage managers, writers and others in a market where those people need either to take the best-paid work or to take far too much work just to survive. This is an existential threat to the whole performing arts sector.

My question for the Minister, which I make no apology for stealing directly from my friends at Freelancers Make Theatre Work, is: what have His Majesty’s Government done, and what more will they now do, to address the serious challenges facing freelancers in the performing arts? Without them, there is no performing arts industry.

My Lords, the creative industries rely more heavily on freelancers than any other sector and that leads to greater precarity compared to the wider UK workforce. I want to highlight how this impacts on two groups: disabled artists and freelancers with parental responsibilities.

The number of working mothers freelancing in the sector increased by 79% between 2008 and 2016, but 2020 saw a 51% fall in female freelancers against a 5% decline for men. Even without Covid, the freelance infrastructure penalises working mothers and parents. Freelance women who experience pregnancy discrimination have fewer protections and less support. They rarely enjoy maternity cover and return to work more quickly after childbirth. Self-employed parents cannot access shared parental leave and pay, as the current system provides maternity allowance only for self-employed mothers, a system described by one woman as

“the worst administrative burden I’ve ever encountered”.

It is not surprising, then, that the sector average gender pay gap for creative freelancers is 37.4%.

I turn to the issue of disabilities. Freelance incomes inevitably fluctuate, but if a disabled artist’s income briefly exceeds the threshold for a given benefit, they risk losing that benefit and destabilising a carefully negotiated support package that is vital to housing, living costs and daily assistance. There is a discriminatory policy gap, in that the unpredictable income that is integral to freelancing is at odds with the stability required to maintain disability benefits. Will the Government consider a grace period for disabled freelancers when income briefly exceeds thresholds, so that benefits are not immediately cut? At the very least, better guidance is needed on how freelance income affects benefits so that intermittent income does not disrupt the entirety of a delicately balanced support package.

Freelancing is often described as offering flexibility and choice, but in many creative careers it is the only option. This reinforces demographic barriers and inequalities, limiting the diversity of the creative workforce and therefore the perspectives that we see on stage and screen. The Government need to do more to address the distinctive needs of this sector. Without it, we are all the poorer.