Over the next ten years, there should be fewer freelance workers in the creative industries and more people with “secure ideas” of their employment, the Minister for Creative Industries and Arts has said.
Speaking at a Culture, Media and Sport Committee meeting on 8 July, Chris Bryant MP said he understood why lots of people want to work freelance, but he was not sure it was “really good for the industry”.
Referencing his mother, who was employed by the BBC as a makeup artist, he said, “There are no makeup artists who are employees today.”
He continued, “In the end, if so many people are just freelancers, it doesn’t provide you with continuity, so there ends up being a bit of a skills problem. How do you make sure that people are trained and get ongoing training?
“So 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, and more people have more secure ideas of what of their employment is”.
Bryant was giving evidence to the committee on the Department for Culture, Media and Sport’s recently published Creative Industries sector plan, which included proposals to appoint a creative freelance champion to advocate for the sector’s freelancers.
During the meeting, he rejected suggestions that the new role was a “fob off”, adding, “We’ve got to do a lot more work on precisely what this is going to look like and how we can make it effective and proportionate to the work that we need to do.”
While the precise terms of reference for the role, including whether it is a full-time paid role or freelance, are still to be decided, Bryant confirmed it would not be a minister but “somebody with more independence” empowered to work across government departments.
Making society more freelancer-friendly
Speaking earlier in the session, Caroline Norbury, CEO of Creative England, said the role of the champion should be to address the limitations for freelancers across society in areas such as pensions and mortgages.
“We have a problem, I think generally within different government structures that we don’t have the right product suite for freelancers,” she said.
Referencing the estimated 3 million UK taxpayers, many of whom were self-employed workers or freelancers, who arbitrarily “fell through the gaps” of former Chancellor Rishi Sunak’s pandemic support schemes, Norbury said, “The problem in Covid isn’t that the Treasury didn’t want to support them. It was that they didn’t have a button to press to get money to them.
“I hope that what we will have with the freelance champion is somebody whose job it is to go in and talk to the Department of Work and Pensions about how do you create a market in which you can get insurance companies to create better pension products that work for freelancers? How can we have conversations about mortgages that are better suited to the needs of freelancers?
“This is something that isn’t just for the creative industries. This is a mode of work that is becoming more and more common.
“As a society and a community, we need to have the products that are there to recognise that job style, rather than what we have at the moment, which is a whole set of traditional ways in which people are incentivised to save or to invest in their career and so on, that just don’t work for people who actually work outside of that.”
Source: ‘I would like fewer people in the sector working freelance’ says Bryant – Arts
