1
Communications and Digital Committee
Uncorrected oral evidence: BBC Charter Renewal
Tuesday 9 June 2026
2.15 pm
Members present: Baroness Keeley (The Chair); Baroness Caine of Kentish Town; Baroness Fleet; Lord Kirkhope of Harrogate; Lord McNally; Baroness Owen of Alderley Edge; Lord Storey; Lord Tarassenko.
Evidence Session No. 3 Heard in Public Questions 38 - 49
Witnesses
I: Philippa Childs, Deputy General Secretary and Head of Bectu, Prospect; Jack Gamble, Director, Campaign for the Arts; Lisa Opie, Chair, ScreenSkills; Ed Shedd, Chair, Create Central.
USE OF THE TRANSCRIPT
17
Philippa Childs, Jack Gamble, Lisa Opie and Ed Shedd.
Q38 The Chair: Good afternoon and welcome to this meeting of the Communications and Digital Committee. Today we continue our work on the BBC charter review. In this session we will be focusing on the role that the BBC plays in supporting the UK’s creative sector and how its next charter can enable it to do that more effectively. I would like to welcome our panel and thank them for joining us. We look forward to hearing your thoughts in today’s discussion. Before we move on to questions, could I ask each of you to introduce yourselves and the organisations you represent?
Ed Shedd: My name is Ed Shedd. You are allowed to chuckle at that name if you would like. I am the chair of Create Central. We are a public private body reporting to the Mayor of the West Midlands. We are an industry-led network and equity funder for the creative sector, and our role is to turbocharge investment into the West Midlands creative sector.
Lisa Opie: My name is Lisa Opie and I am the chair of ScreenSkills. ScreenSkills is an industry-funded organisation. We have about 220,000 registered users and many thousands of beneficiaries. We are industry led and industry funded, and we support skills development across the creative sector.
Philippa Childs: Good afternoon. I am Philippa Childs. I use the title head of Bectu, but Bectu is part of a bigger union, Prospect. I am a deputy general secretary of the bigger union. We just kept the Bectu brand because it is pretty well known in the industry. I think that was the rationale when we merged. Bectu represents members who work directly for the BBC, but also lots of freelancers who work as crew across the industries.
Jack Gamble: I am Jack Gamble. I am the director of the Campaign for the Arts. We are a charity that champions the arts and culture for and with the public. We have recently been doing some research into the role of our public service broadcasters generally and the BBC specifically in supporting the arts and public access to them.
The Chair: Thank you all. It is worth saying that, with the mix of questions we have today, it might be that they play to the experience of some of you or not on different questions. Do not feel pushed to answer anything if it is not in your area of work.
What role does the BBC play in sustaining the UK’s creative economy and how effectively has it fulfilled that role under the current charter? That is my first question.
Ed Shedd: I am very happy to start. To put it in context, the West Midlands is now, as of 2026, the fastest-growing region for TV production in the country. That is due in no small part to the partnerships that we identified when we established ourselves in 2020 with the BBC. Over the course of two MOUs in 2021 and 2025, the BBC has moved a lot of production to the West Midlands, trebled commissioning spend, initially bringing in important near-continuous TV productions in the form of “MasterChef” and “Silent Witness”, and then bringing many more, such as “Peaky Blinders”, “Hairdresser Mysteries”, “The Detection Club” and “Chocolate Wars”. More importantly, or just as importantly, it has also been committed to strengthening the creative capability in the region, be that via apprenticeships, the investment of BBC Studioworks in the pre-production and post-production supply chain, and the Tea Factory, which will open in 2028.
There is great economic value that has been delivered from the BBC to the West Midlands, but just as importantly it has given us the opportunity to tell our own story of creative renewal and become a magnet for investment. We went on a fantastic trade mission to India at the end of February and we were able to convince Yash Raj, the big Bollywood studio, to base itself in Birmingham, West Midlands, to film its productions there. We just would not have been able to do that without the partnership and support of the BBC.
In summary, I would say that the BBC’s greatest value is not simply in the programmes that it commissions but its ability to—and these three words I think are really important—create the conditions in which creative economies can grow but also, importantly, continue to be self-sustaining.
Jack Gamble: The BBC is such a familiar part of daily life in the UK that it is easy to take it for granted. It is hard to overstate, I think, how much depends on it and therefore how much is at stake at this charter review. This is the first time, as you will know, that Ministers have reviewed the BBC’s purposes and funding in more than a decade, and what they do and do not do will be crucial not only for the BBC but for the entire creative industries, for UK culture and for our whole society. That is because the BBC is far more than just a broadcaster. It is the UK’s largest cultural organisation. It supports artists, creative and cultural organisations and all of us through the content, services and investment it provides, and through what that all adds up to, which is a richer, shared culture in which we all belong. Even in this more fragmented age it is worth noting that it still connects millions of us to music, to comedy, to drama, to all the arts and, through the arts, to one another.
Under this charter, the BBC has been fulfilling that role effectively, and in our report, A Stage for the Nation, we have outlined some of the ways in which we think that is the case. That is despite some serious and mounting pressures on the BBC and, in particular, the BBC’s declining public funding, which I think does urgently need looking at: 94% of us use the BBC each month, but now only 80% of households contribute via the licence fee. We do risk losing the considerable benefits that the BBC provides without a bold rethinking now of that funding model built from first principles. I think that the early indications are that the Government understand that problem, but we are concerned that the solutions that they have proposed so far are not ambitious enough to meet the challenges we face.
Philippa Childs: Our view is that the BBC acts as a central infrastructure for the UK creative industries, anchoring skills, commissioning and SMEs across the ecosystem. We also agree that under the current charter it has maintained strong delivery. It has added £6.7 billion to the UK economy in 2024-25 and analysis showed the multiplier effect: that, for every £1 it has spent, it generates £3.49 in the wider economy. The BBC has supported 1,200 apprentices in 2025, up from 350 in 2020, exceeding its charter commitment. The economic benefit of apprentices who have completed their apprenticeships since 2021 is £293 million. The BBC is the largest investor in skills. For every one BBC job, it creates 1.7 additional jobs. The reach of the BBC in the development of the wider creative workforce is clear. We did a survey recently of our members and 83% said that the BBC is very important to the health and sustainability of the UK’s creative industries.
Lisa Opie: I would add to that that the BBC plays a unique role in what is an incredibly successful and vibrant creative sector, which we should all feel incredibly proud of. It is a success story globally, and I think that the BBC has underpinned that. We have lots of business that comes from streamers and from broadcasters around the world, but what the BBC uniquely does is sustain a workforce. I think that there are around 850 Pact independent production companies in the UK, and the BBC’s sustainable, continued support of that sector is vital. It offers, as Philippa says, entry-point jobs and training in role. It is the cornerstone of our sector and really important as such.
The Chair: Thank you all. I will come to Lord Tarassenko.
Q39 Lord Tarassenko: My question follows on from what you have said. I think that all four of you have more or less talked about economic growth. I will quote from what Ed said: the BBC creates the conditions for economic growth, if I am quoting you correctly. The Green Paper wants to go a little bit further by creating a new, distinct purpose for the BBC, focusing on driving growth across the UK and supporting the creative economy. It sounds as though you would support that proposal, but what do you see as the major pluses? Are there any negatives? Are there any risks as well associated with it?
Ed Shedd: We would definitely support it. We have talked about the pluses, and the impact on the wider set of companies cannot be underestimated. We actually have over 15,000 creative companies operating already in the West Midlands, but the ability to tell our story outside and to gain investment only really came because the BBC helps us to magnify our voice.
I suppose the risk to giving the BBC that purpose is that it is not properly funded to do that. It becomes another “to do” on a big “to do” list and one misses the fact that we all need to work in partnership with the entirety of the sector. The BBC is a brilliant catalyst, but it is a catalyst and public and private bodies need to work together with, in my case, the West Midlands region and, in others, different stakeholders.
In thinking about the distinct purpose that we want to ascribe to the BBC, we also need to think about, for example, what we are asking of the streamers and of other organisations to work in partnership to build that creative economy and, importantly—because I know the Treasury always has this discussion—to make the increments that you see in a particular region like the West Midlands additive to the whole of the UK GDP, rather than just shifting activity from one place to the next.
Philippa Childs: We would support adding a growth focus purpose, but only as an extension of its existing public purposes and not as a replacement. A public purpose for growth would amplify regional economic development, skills investment, accountability and alignment with the industrial strategy. However, we do worry that it risks mission drift and a shift towards commercially exportable content and distorted commissioning incentives. It is a careful balance is what we are saying, and we would agree that it can only do those things if it is properly resourced.
Lisa Opie: I guess I would add to that that we would support that, too. I think that the BBC has been a significant part of the creative economy. Historically, we have grown from commissioning production companies that have retained their rights and exported the value of those rights globally. The BBC should continue to commission British producers around Britain in all parts of Britain. I think that is critically important to the creative economy.
I very much agree with Ed that doing that alone is not right. It cannot be solely accountable for the creative economy. It is so much bigger than that. There are many other parts, and the commercial entities that work within it are critical, too. For me, the broader point about supporting independent production is an important one and an important contribution. What it does it needs to do in collaboration and not alone; otherwise we end up with duplication. We end up with not using our funding effectively because we are duplicating the efforts of others. I think that a partnership is critical.
I worked at BBC Studios and supported the move of factual production out of the BBC and into the commercial sector. I think that it is right that the BBC achieves as much commercial value as it can globally and exports its content and British content to the world, and it should continue to do that. I feel that it is right that it should be a part of what we ask it to do. The world has changed over the course of the last few decades. As I said earlier, we are a global sector, not just a local one, and the BBC should reflect that in support.
Jack Gamble: I am sorry to be the odd one out, but we would actually not support this addition of a distinct public purpose around economic growth and supporting the creative economy. The reasons for that are, first, supporting the creative economy is already in the BBC’s public purposes and we think that the wording of it in the fourth purpose—to reflect, represent and serve the diverse communities of all the United Kingdom’s nations and regions and, in doing so, support the creative economy—is the right way round. In other words, a people first approach we think is the right way round.
Secondly, the BBC is already driving growth considerably across the UK with its current public purposes. I think that Philippa mentioned the figures. The estimate is approximately £5 billion to the economy each year. At best, adding this would make no real difference, but at worst it could risk the BBC’s performance, including economically. If you look at some of the successful things the BBC does, let us just take as an example the drama series “Blue Lights”, which the BBC estimates has added about £20 million to the economy in Northern Ireland over its first two series. It is clear that that programme is the result of the BBC taking seriously its public purpose around original, distinctive content and its duty to represent the regions and nations of the UK. It is through it doing that that we have seen a successful programme that has contributed economically.
My fear would be that if we introduced a new public purpose specifically around growth it could change the calculus so that, for example in that case, instead of a programme that had two scriptwriters who had had more experience in investigative journalism than they had in prime-time drama at the point of commissioning or the idea of a programme deeply rooted in Northern Ireland and in Belfast specifically—I think that the creative team have described Belfast as a main character in the programme—the risk would be that we get what are perceived to be more exportable programmes that are, in fact, more generic in the service of commercial goals. I do not doubt for a moment the importance of economic growth, but I think that part of why the BBC is contributing so much to the economic growth of the creative industries is through backing projects artistically, taking artistic risks, and backing people in communities.
Q40 Lord Tarassenko: I have two follow-ups, one generic and one specific. It is almost a bottle half empty argument; the other way around, I think that the other three members of the panel were bottle half full. It is happening, I think that everybody acknowledges that, but by making it more prominent you are not saying do it to the detriment of other things. You are, in fact, acknowledging that it is happening, whereas most people might not realise that the BBC is actually doing already quite a lot to grow the economy in this country. By making it a distinct purpose, then everybody who reads the BBC charter will be aware of this particular activity, whereas I would say the general public probably are not aware. The bottle half full argument is yes, it is happening; let us make it more prominent and give it more encouragement.
Do come back if you want, but what I want to come back to is partnerships, because they have been mentioned, I think, by pretty much everybody. I presume that is on the positive side with other public service broadcasters maybe. How would you see that happen and are there any partnerships that the BBC should not enter into?
Lisa Opie: I do not mind going first on partnerships. Absolutely, working with other public service broadcasters I think is important. I think that the BBC’s approach and focus around creative clusters is incredibly valuable, and doing that in partnership with the wider sector is important, too. Creating strong ecosystems outside of London where you can have critical mass and have the skills that you need to drive success is important. The BBC cannot do that, I would argue, all on its own. If you look at the example of Bristol, the Natural History Unit may have started it but now it is a success story with companies like Plimsoll and Silverback also exporting content, brilliant natural history content, to the world. It is that acknowledgement, as Ed said, that the BBC can be a catalyst but it is not the only part of the sector.
I would encourage it to work alongside ITV and Channel 4 to make sure that what it does around the country has more impact and clout than it would if it was on its own. For me, that goes in supporting skills, too, because it is a critical part of that ecosystem. You need the workforce there that supports that ambition. The BBC cannot do that on its own because you need the skills transversally that are critically important and not just ones that would sit solely within the BBC.
Ed Shedd: Again, bringing it back to a West Midlands example just to set this in context, because of the momentum we have in the region, creative and digital is now an important high-growth sector for the West Midlands. Over the course of the growth plan for the West Midlands for the next 10 years, we are looking to increase creative and digital jobs by 100,000 and add £17 billion to the economy. The BBC’s contribution to that is £282 million gross value added, with 2,000 to 3,000 jobs directly attributable to the BBC investment. It will probably drive about 225 more creative businesses off the back of its own initiatives and that will probably give us 7,500 to 10,000 jobs. The BBC is a fantastic catalyst and on its own can probably help us to deliver 10% of our growth plan. By the BBC working with the political leaders of the region—from a regional perspective it is important to have the Mayor working with the BBC—and the BBC working with the other broadcasters, including the streamers, with skills institutions like the one that Lisa represents, and where we are already working as the BBC, ScreenSkills and Create Central partnership effectively, I think that allows us to be able to take advantage of not just what the BBC does directly, but also what it does indirectly through partnerships.
Finally, to answer your question as to whether there are any partnerships that we do not think the BBC should be getting into, I truly think that where we are at the moment is moving from a world where the BBC has traditionally felt its sole purpose is to provide, for instance, training to the industry to just encouraging the BBC to work more in partnership. I think that the only real factor you need to take into account is the sheer operational logistics. If you suddenly try to go from doing things on your own to 1,000 partners, it does not work. It is quite a broad church of partners that it should be asked to and can and would naturally want to work with.
The Chair: We need to leave this in a minute but, Jack and Philippa, do you have anything you want to add to that?
Philippa Childs: I do not think I want to add anything to that.
Jack Gamble: Just briefly in response, I am obviously all in favour of acknowledging and celebrating the BBC’s economic contribution, but it is important when we are thinking about the public purposes of the BBC that they should be the things that we decide as a society the BBC is for and they should therefore inform how decisions are made in the BBC and how the BBC is held to account, including by parliamentarians.
I would suggest that the public purposes the BBC has now are broadly ones that we would say are purposes with inherent value and inherent good to them; supporting learning for people of all ages, for example. I think that many people would consider economic growth to be more of a means to an end, and I think that people would also want to acknowledge that there are limitations in looking at this in terms of growth. As you know, growth is measured in GDP. That is strictly a measure of market transactions and it fails to capture some important stuff, such as who is benefiting from economic growth and human thriving as opposed to mere economic output. I think that economic growth is clearly important. I do not think that it should pass the test of being considered a core public purpose.
Q41 Lord Tarassenko: I have a very short follow-up just for Lisa, which is to do with the fact that you are a director of Microbit.org.
Lisa Opie: Yes.
Lord Tarassenko: To me, that is a wonderful product. Jack has just mentioned supporting learning across all ages. Supporting learning by AI is hugely important for the country and driving the economic growth agenda as part of it. Should you not be doing more with Micro:bit?
Lisa Opie: Micro:bit is an amazing organisation. If you do not know, it is a very simple device that enables children to learn how to code, to enable them to have the best digital future they can possibly have. I think that it is critically important. We have given away 68 million around the world. Absolutely, working with the BBC in partnership was part of the very beginning of Micro:bit and it continues to be a supporter going forward. I think that is really important.
I would make a point on AI more broadly. We are going to talk about skills challenges. AI will bring us real challenges. There is no doubt that it is moving rapidly and exponentially, and our workforce needs the skills to enable it to rise to that challenge. For the BBC to be the sole solution in that would not be right. It will be the market that defines processes, practices, tools that work best for the sector. That needs guidance and alignment from an organisation like ScreenSkills. It needs collaboration from the BBC, but it cannot happen in tiny little different pockets around the country. It needs bringing together.
The BBC plays an important part, absolutely, with Micro:bit. It was an instigator. It was the catalyst. It is the anchor tenant, which I think is a great phrase to describe it, but not everything.
The Chair: Thank you. We will move to Lord Kirkhope’s question.
Q42 Lord Kirkhope of Harrogate: Good afternoon. I am going to press you a bit further. I was interested to hear what Jack just said about the overall responsibilities for the economy, as it were, as far as the BBC is concerned. I will just read this brief question and then I want to delve a bit. To what extent has the BBC’s move towards greater production and investment outside London in the current charter period translated into stronger creative economies in the nations and regions?
I have to tell you—and I am going to ask you to answer this—I find it extremely difficult when I am looking at the various parameters here to make judgments as to whether or not the BBC has created greater economies through its involvement in the regions or what the basis is for these assumptions of its involvement. I find it difficult to look at the whole question of the M25 as being the arbiter as to whether or not the BBC is performing. If you take the M25 and a considerable amount of Hertfordshire and other parts, as a north-easterner myself I would regard that part of Britain as being pretty well around a cosmopolitan area of London and its suburbs, so I think that this is a pretty bad basis to start with.
Jack mentioned, for instance, Northern Ireland and the successful things there. Looking at the spend and the involvement of the BBC, even in its own admission it has not actually increased at all over the last three or four years. There may have been significant things. The castle in Scotland for “The Traitors” programme, the mere fact that a few cameras and production facilities are placed in Scotland for a short time at a castle is then taken into account in the regional contribution, where I do not think it should be. I want to know really what it is all about. Congratulations to the West Midlands. I am sure that it is very important. Congratulations to Salford, a considerable media city and so on; everything is there. Commiserations to parts of the north-east of England, parts of the south-west of England, other parts of England that, in my view, get very little attention at all because the criteria are set in such a way that it does not specify a broader approach.
Is it really going to work? Should the BBC’s commitment be spread and should it be spread better? Who should determine how it is calculated? Is it calculated on the amount of expenditure? Is it calculated on the number of representations that exist, companies that have registered offices in Birmingham or, indeed, anywhere else but may in fact have most of their staff and facilities in the south-east of England? I think that has been the case in a number of examples. Can I please have your views on that to start with? I just want to know what you think looking at the Green Paper, which is actually going to be talking more about this economic benefit and more diversification of the BBC. Is it really true?
Ed Shedd: In one respect, I completely agree with you. The reason why we set up Create Central in 2019 was because we did not feel we were getting our fair share of the investment or support. I want to argue quite strongly that the BBC can do much more. If we get the definition of what we are asking it to do right, I think that it will do much more. From a regional perspective, you end up saying you cannot ask the BBC to grow everywhere with the same things all at the same time. You do need to have some priority regions, and I would say that is probably between six to eight, maybe 10 around the country that are properly geographically dispersed.
How can you prove that the BBC is actually doing what we are saying it is doing currently? Well, I would come back to the facts and figures I have in front of me within the West Midlands. Fazeley Street, which is a street in Digbeth in Birmingham, had tens of people working in TV in 2020. We now have 1,000 people working there, and we are tracking to get 2,500 people working there. Is it just that they take a picture of the bullring and that is a Birmingham production? I totally agree that should not be the case. We have focused on making certain that we have continuous production within the region. That is why we fought so hard for “MasterChef” and “Silent Witness” because they are 40 to 45 weeks of production a year. They help build the supply chain. Yes, there is still more to do, especially around the supply chain, but you can see facts and figures there that do prove that they are helping to grow a stronger regional economy.
Philippa Childs: We cannot deny that the BBC spends more than any other PSB outside of London and there have been huge success stories. I agree with you in some ways in that I can only go by what our members are telling us, and that is that if you are a freelancer and you work in the nations and regions, you are much more likely to be struggling to get work than if you are in London and the south-east. We do hear those stories about “The Traitors” as you describe, where a big production moves to Scotland, yet lots of the crew who are working on that production are not necessarily from Scotland. That is a real challenge and a problem, and I think that is something that the BBC still needs to work on to make sure that the people in the local economy are benefiting from the work and that we are not having that situation that because things are greenlit so late the crew just travel from London and the south-east to work on them.
Lisa Opie: I would add that at ScreenSkills over the last two years we have done two major pieces of work to identify the make-up of our workforce. In 2025, with 4Skills and Ampere, we looked at the workforce across the UK. Where are they? What skills do they have? What gaps do they have? You cannot support an infrastructure broadly if you do not understand the skills you have to deliver the product at the end of the day.
I agree with Ed that spreading too thin and expecting to be everywhere and asking the BBC to be everywhere is just not realistic. Success is when you build an ecosystem that has the skills to support that activity. I spent five years working in video games. If you look at those clusters of activity for video games, Guildford and Leamington Spa—or Silicon Spa as it is called—are real clusters for healthy production where companies can base themselves because they know they have the skills they need to support that activity. They create commercial hubs. I think that the BBC’s focus on the clusters and building skills in those areas is a way of building out greater success.
Lord Kirkhope of Harrogate: To go back very briefly, this is fine but it almost underlines the point I am trying to get at here. That is that we all know broadcasting is much more flexible now. In the old days, TV studios had to be plonked in one place. If you were lucky, you used film cameras for your news gathering and so on. Now you can go anywhere and broadcast from anywhere and you do not need the scope of facilities that you used to have. So I just feel that this is not honest. My point is that these criteria seem to me not to be straightforward and honest, and I would like to see honesty here when we look at this question of how we disperse it regionally.
The Chair: I think that might be a question for the BBC as much as anybody.
Lord Kirkhope of Harrogate: Yes. Okay. Thank you very much for that anyway.
Q43 The Chair: Yes. There is perhaps a point before we leave this for this panel. The Green Paper has further interventions to strengthen the BBC’s role in what we are talking about: further production quotas, targets for basing senior commissioning staff outside London, and devolving budgets or decision-making. Could each panel member perhaps tell us quickly what measures the Government should be prioritising in that list? I take the point in the last debate that this is very complex and Lord Kirkhope has reservations about that, but it is just your take on what the Government should be prioritising.
Ed Shedd: I will be brief on this. Yes, more commissioning authority and spend in the region, but yes also to more outcome-based measures. I think that this plays to your honesty point: the number of creative businesses that are growing, long-term jobs created and sustained, the number of freelancer positions created and sustained, skills into jobs programmes, not just training, the number of independent production companies and whether they are increasing. You have measures around innovation. You definitely have measures around IP creation because that is one of the things that we want to export around the world. There is a big focus on workforce growth. I do accept that you can film everywhere, but when you have a cluster you need a workforce that has the appropriate amount of junior through to senior level experience and has the appropriate level of training in all the different things that you need to do to make programmes. A portfolio of measures is absolutely the key.
Jack Gamble: I would say that undoubtedly there has been a historic issue of opportunities being concentrated in London and the south-east that cannot be changed overnight, but I think that the BBC has made a real commitment towards trying to move more investment outside of London and the south-east. There are not only fantastic success stories but causal factors that can be identified and have been identified by researchers, such as the fact that that investment then creates local talent pools, leads to more inward investment, and leads to more local firms starting up. I think that there was some research by PwC that estimated that a 15% increase in the BBC’s local footprint effectively doubles the growth rate of the surrounding creative industries over time. Clearly, that investment is contingent on the BBC having it to give, and maybe we will come later to that challenge of how we are going to stem the decline in the public funding that the BBC has to distribute around the country.
In terms of what the Government can do on this, last week you had Jane Tranter from Bad Wolf on the panel giving evidence. I think that what she was saying about how it is no good having, for example, local commissioners if you do not also have the local capacity to make things happen, the local pipeline to continually replace people as they retire and so on in those places, is crucial. It speaks to what Philippa was saying about “The Traitors” in Scotland as well. That will take time and it will take investment. It is not just about honesty; it is also about how we enable those things.
The Chair: Philippa and Lisa, we are running out of time for this question before we move on.
Philippa Childs: That is fine.
Lisa Opie: All I would say is that we have a freelance workforce and therefore, to the earlier point, it is about sustainability. I agree with moving commissioning locally as much as you possibly can, but it needs the ecosystem.
The Chair: Thanks. We are moving on to skills and workforce challenges with Baroness Owen.
Q44 Baroness Owen of Alderley Edge: Yes. What are the main skills and workforce challenges facing the UK’s creative industries? How well is the BBC meeting its current obligations to support the highly skilled media workforce?
Lisa Opie: As I said previously, we have done some significant research over the last couple of years and there are significant challenges for the workforce. We should not underplay that. Provision for skills is patchy and disparate, I would argue. Some of the challenges include things that you will know and recognise, whether that is technology and AI and the pace of change and whether we have a workforce who have the literacy required to make those changes. It is about mid-career development, as you would expect. It is about a freelance workforce and therefore the need to create sustainable career paths for people.
I think that there are real challenges for us. What that requires, given the success that we have had to date, I would argue that what brings international businesses to commission UK production companies is because we have the skills to deliver something world-class. In order to support those skills, we need to make sure that we are joined up in our approach of how we deliver that training across the UK. At the moment, that is not entirely joined up all the time. What ScreenSkills uniquely does is to represent and talk to and have as beneficiaries and supporters companies that range from the massive number of small creative businesses that make up the dominant force within our creative sector, through to training providers, through to streamers, through to broadcasters. What we seek to do is to align that opportunity so if you want to come and work in the creative sector you understand how you can move into it. We need that consistency. The UK is not an enormous country and what we need to do is to align the skills that people need to have entry.
One of our other challenges is accessibility. We still need to make sure that we attract people from all different backgrounds into our sector. It is incredibly important. In order to do that, they need to be able to go somewhere that they trust they can access information and they understand that the standards of what they are learning is coherent and aligned across the UK. ScreenSkills as an organisation can deliver that in a way that the BBC on its own could not. We would really like to continue to work in an even more committed manner with the BBC to make that happen and we would like to see the BBC open up the BBC Academy—because it makes a significant contribution through the academy to the freelance workforce—so that we can use the assets it has invested in to the benefit of the whole sector. The BBC employs fixed staff, but the dominant part of the sector is freelance.
Q45 Baroness Owen of Alderley Edge: How well is the BBC meeting its obligations for the highly skilled media workforce?
Lisa Opie: I think that through the academy it does some excellent work for its own workforce and it is critically important. It also provides funding. We have talked already about Create Central as a brilliant example of where the BBC has been the starting point, the catalyst for bringing together ScreenSkills, Create Central and the combined authority to begin to think about how we better support the workforce in the Midlands. I think that it does really well when it intervenes. I just think that what we need is that partnership that allows us to make sure that we support the entire workforce rather than the workforce that is totally dedicated to the BBC. I think that what it has done with apprenticeships has been really important, too, and I am pleased to see that it has supported that number of apprenticeships.
Philippa Childs: Just to reinforce the point about freelance precarity, I think that is the biggest challenge. All of us who work across film and TV recognise that freelance precarity is a real problem in filling the skills bucket at one end and them leaking out at the other.
Where we are at the moment is particularly challenging. In TV production, the success of freelancers has peaks and troughs under normal circumstances, but over the last couple of years there has been a real crisis for all sorts of reasons, funding of the BBC and the challenges that other broadcasters have also faced. For me, that is the biggest challenge and we need to make sure that the freelance workforce is properly supported and we do something about what happens when the intermittent nature of work is problematic.
In that respect, the BBC has been a positive leader in supporting its own freelancers, but also in contributing and in fact being pretty instrumental in setting up something called Action for Freelancers, which is a project that recognises all the challenges that freelancers currently face and is trying to make some changes incrementally to support the workforce. I would very much say that the BBC has been awake to those challenges.
The other point I want to make is that lots of our members learned their skills at the BBC. They would say that the BBC provided them with lots of opportunities; they learnt their skills. Our worry is that as budgets become more tight, that will be more and more problematic for the whole industry going forward.
Q46 Baroness Owen of Alderley Edge: Lisa, you spoke about the international investment coming in because of the huge quantity of highly skilled people here. Philippa, do you see our skills as being sustainable enough for the future or do you think that there will be a gap that might impact that international investment?
Philippa Childs: That is what concerns us because whenever there is a downturn in the industry we see people leaving. Anecdotally, lots of people who I know and have worked with and who have been union activists have taken that step to diversify or leave the industry altogether. Inevitably, that impacts diversity. If you are a working-class person who works in the industry and you do not have any financial support outside of work, then inevitably those people end up leaving the industry. It is those challenges that we all need to be concerned about and think about how we can keep those skills, upskill people, and make sure that they can stay in the industry going forward.
Lisa Opie: Can I just say one more thing on skills? One of the initiatives that the BBC has supported us with brilliantly has been the ScreenSkills training passport. Two years ago we piloted the training passport, which effectively means that if you are a freelancer or joining an independent production company for three months, you do one piece of training and that piece of training stays with you in your digital passport and you take it to your next role. When I first worked at the BBC, you would employ somebody on a six-month contract and they would spend the first three weeks doing training bespoke to the BBC. So, having a training passport you can take with you is critically important. We did our pilot initially with BBC Studios, with ITV, with Sky, and we are now rolling that out and have managed to support multiple production companies and beneficiaries. That joined-up approach and partnership saves funding for independent production companies, which know that the training that somebody has had is fit for purpose. It simplifies our sector. It enables people to be mobile within it. I think that is the initiative that supports our skills infrastructure in a tangible way. I agree with everything that Philippa has just said about the freelance nature and challenge.
Ed Shedd: I think that the passport is a brilliant thing because it allows you to understand what skills you need individually and corporately and then to make certain that we do not miss out on training in more traditional technologies and skills and not going for the newer, more innovative ones. A data-led approach that then translates into a readily usable skills passport is very helpful.
The Chair: We are sticking with skills and workforce development in the next question from Baroness Caine.
Q47 Baroness Caine of Kentish Town: Before I progress with my questions, I should declare my interest as having previously been CEO of the precursor organisation to ScreenSkills.
In a sense, the questions we were just asking then were about the BBC and what it is doing at the moment in relation to its current obligations, and you have already glissaded very nicely into my question, which is to do with the Green Paper, what it suggests, and the future of the BBC in relation to skills and workforce development. It specifically talks about changes to training targets and partnership working, which you have all emphasised greatly. Do you see those as simply the only things that would be the right priorities for skills and training development in the next charter or do you think that the Government should take a broader and different approach?
Lisa Opie: I think that is a very clear focus and there should be an obligation to support the workforce going forward. Once again, I would say that the BBC cannot do that on its own. Therefore, that needs to be clear partnerships. I think that a clear partnership and commitment to ScreenSkills as a convenor of the sector is important.
The BBC does do a very effective job. As I said earlier, I think that supporting apprenticeships, that entry point that Philippa pointed to, that you come into the BBC often as your first job and then you go on to have a career that goes well beyond the BBC, is critically important. There should be an obligation on the BBC to continue to support its workforce and to work in collaboration in supporting the broader sector.
I think that there are challenges. When I think of what the BBC has done with apprenticeships—and I know we are not here necessarily to talk about those—there are existing challenges with making apprenticeships work within the creative sector. We are sad to see level 3s go when you look at how brilliantly the NextGen Skills Academy and UAL, for example, have supported level 3s. It is a shame to see level 7s restricted. Overarchingly, it would be brilliant to see apprenticeships be able to be used for career path development in a more modularised way, and it would be great to see the lifelong learning entitlement cover creative industries, too.
There is much more to be done that does not necessarily sit solely at the door of the BBC, but the BBC working in partnership to support the workforce remains a critical part of what it needs to do going forward.
Jack Gamble: In terms of partnership working and emerging talent, I think that the BBC is already doing an enormous amount in both those areas. In our report, for example, we talk about how during the pandemic the BBC partnered with cultural organisations around the country to provide platforms and opportunities for people to reach audiences at a time where they could not. We also talk extensively about the various different skills development programmes that exist, from BBC Introducing to “Young Musician” and these other schemes that make quite a big difference for both developing and platforming emerging talent.
On the targets point, the Government are saying that options could include adjusting the ambition of BBC targets on training and apprenticeships. That will require investment and you cannot task the BBC with being a primary engine of the UK’s creative economy while simultaneously eroding its financial foundation in the way that is happening. The elephant in the room here is that as we speak the BBC is implementing 2,000 job losses, the biggest downsizing in 15 years; 10% of its employees are at risk from that. Yet we are also talking and the Government are talking about how the BBC is a crucial solution to all these problems, including driving economic growth in the creative industries. I think that something has to change there.
Q48 Baroness Caine of Kentish Town: Just to come back on that and to clarify, I think that the Chair was indicating earlier that the House of Commons Select Committee is looking at the issues that relate to the key questions that you are referring to in terms of funding and so on. Because we are not allowed to overlap, we are focusing on the issues that relate to particular chapters to do with growth and skills.
Another point would be that, of course, if you do not invest in skills and talent, then the costs of the production workforce go up. Effectively, the price of production goes up. So there is a balance to be struck here between having the right skills in place and costs in relation to the BBC, if that is helpful, Jack, as context. Philippa, do you want to add anything?
Philippa Childs: The only thing I really wanted to add was that from our perspective we would have been happier had the Green Paper placed more emphasis on mid-career development as well, upskilling freelancers and supporting long-term careers, not just at entry level. We would prefer if there was a bit more of that.
Lisa Opie: Yes, and there are some great examples of where the BBC has supported. ScreenSkills does Leaders of Tomorrow through our high-end television fund, and Make a Move is something we support within productions to enable production companies to promote people and give them the skills that they need for that mid-career development. All those things are incredibly important. It is why it needs alignment. Through ScreenSkills, we will spend in the region of £20 million in the next 12 months that we have raised voluntarily from the independent sector, broadcasters and streamers to support skills. Bringing the power and the might of both the BBC and that investment together is critical because, as you say, it creates a virtuous circle rather than one with everything sitting disparately and separately.
Ed Shedd: The only thing I would add, again from a West Midlands perspective and I suspect from a regional perspective writ large, is that the sector does not have a training problem; it rather has a workforce pipeline problem. I think that some of the measures in the Green Paper are quite effective in that what we define as success is how many people enter, remain and progress, so to that point about mid-level skills programmes. It is about how many people enter, remain and progress, not simply about how many people you have trained. Historically, it has been about how many people we have trained. Actually, you want them to stay in a sustainable way within the workforce.
Q49 Baroness Caine of Kentish Town: Thank you. Just to further drill into this, basically for the first time ever—and industrially compared to other sectors this is unusual—the creative industries, through the Creative Industries Policy and Evidence Centre, has just published the first skills audit across the creative industries, which identifies both new entrants gaps and, as you say, mid-term and other emphases. In your view, in relation to developing strategies in this area, does the link between being clear about supply and demand need improving? Should that be used as a base guide to inform partnerships and creative clusters as to their plans? Relating to those clusters, could you comment on the BBC’s proposals for establishing these new regional skills hubs and an indie training guarantee? In your view, how can people effectively work best and the BBC work best with partners rather than reinventing wheels?
The Chair: The challenge will be that we are into the last couple of minutes of this Committee.
Lisa Opie: I can talk fast. I am sure you will know that two years ago the BFI pulled together a task force to look specifically at the creative industries’ skills challenges and identified as part of that work the real need for a convening body to make sure that we are not duplicating, replicating, or adding confusion for our beneficiaries. That is what ScreenSkills sees its role to be. Over the last two years we have commissioned major research that shows us the make-up of the workforce, shows where those gaps are, that we are lacking leadership and management training, that tech is a real issue going forward, that mid-career is something we need to focus on, and it geographically explains where that workforce is and how we can best support them. We would support skills hubs. We think that training should happen locally; it should not happen in London. It should happen where the business happens and needs that support and those people to create sustainable careers for individuals. However, it needs to happen in a way that is aligned.
I think that having skills delivered locally in those creative clusters is critical, but let us align that activity so that it is the same activity and has the same standards and the same accessibility regardless of where you live in the UK. That would be the quick answer.
Ed Shedd: Very quickly from me, I totally agree. I think that the skills accelerator programme in the West Midlands, which is ScreenSkills, BBC and Creative Central, works really well.
The Chair: Thank you. Do you have any points to add, Philippa or Jack?
Philippa Childs: Not from me.
Jack Gamble: I would say that the design of this needs three things. First, evidence led. You mentioned the creative tech skills, which is brilliant. I think that identifying in particular local places what is needed locally is key. Secondly, I think that it needs to be sensitive to the working conditions and patterns of people; for example, allowing freelancers to upskill between gigs without sacrificing income. Thirdly, I think that it needs to be integrated with the wider creative ecosystem and the strategies of public bodies working in and around the creative industries.
The Chair: Excellent. We have covered a great deal of ground there, so thank you very much. It is wonderful to hear some of these success stories. I know we have a long way to go and the funding issue is, of course, supremely important, but let us just look at how we might be advising the BBC when we have finished our part of the inquiry. As Baroness Caine said, the Commons is doing a different job on this, and we are picking out certain elements. You have really helped us to explore in what we have done today, so thank you very much.