Written evidence submitted by Film and TV Charity

Response to Culture, Media and Sport Committee Inquiry into British Film and High-End TV

September 2023

1. Introduction and summary

The Film and TV Charity supports workers behind the scenes in UK film and TV, providing a range of services from financial grants to advice and guidance. We also work with the industry to improve working practices to increase the wellbeing of workers employed in or engaged by the industry. https://filmtvcharity.org.uk/about-us/

Given our remit, our research is focused on the industry workforce. We are concerned especially with mental, social and financial wellbeing, and the influence that identity and demography have upon the experience and needs of those working in the industry. Our principal research output is a biennial survey of the mental health of film and TV workers, known as Looking Glass (published in 2019, 2021 and 2022).[1]

Our findings, from this and other research, are relevant to the following question canvased in the inquiry: “What can the industry and Government do to ensure British film and high-end television can adapt for the future?” In particular, they bear on the sub-question about how to ensure a strong skills pipeline and retention. They also relate indirectly to the questions of whether current tax credits are fit for purpose, and how to ensure the industry is supporting inclusivity and sustainability.

Our submission is that poor mental health and experiences of bullying, harassment and discrimination among those working in film and High-End TV are demonstrably contributing to problems of worker retention – especially older, more experienced workers and those from marginalised and underrepresented backgrounds. We hope that the Committee will seek to persuade DCMS to use all of the levers at its disposal to implement policies which will address these concerns around mental health. Our Whole Picture Toolkit for mentally healthy productions is our own response and we would recommend the committee advocates adoption among productions as a condition of eligibility for tax breaks.

2. Key points from our research

• Bullying, harassment and discrimination (BHD) are a major problem for the UK industry. Looking Glass 22 (https://filmtvcharity.org.uk/leading-change/looking-glass-report-2022/) found that of those who’d been bullied in the past year, 25% left the job they were working on at the time and 52% had considered leaving the industry (p.7). It also showed (p.11) that:
• 33% of respondents experienced bullying behaviour at work during the past year.
• 24% of Black and Global Majority respondents experienced racial harassment or discrimination at work during the past year.
• 12% of respondents experienced sexual harassment or discrimination at work during the past year (16% of those who identify as female or non-binary).
• 19% of respondents who considered themselves to live with a disability or long-term health condition experienced harassment or discrimination at work during the past year because of their Disabled status.

• A third of those who had been racially or sexually harassed or discriminated against in the past year had considered leaving the industry. Half of those who experienced disability harassment or discrimination considered leaving too (LG22, p.7).

• Of those responsible for managing others, around a third said they’d received a report of BHD in the past year, but almost half said they didn’t feel they had the skills or experience to deal with it (LG22, p.3)

• Only 11% believe that the industry is a mentally healthy place to work (LG22, p.3). It has problems with culture (how we treat others), conditions (e.g. pay and hours) and capability (training and accountability) – as well as an inbuilt precariousness given the high proportion of freelancers among the workforce (this includes so-called “PAYE freelancers”, on temporary contracts, as well as those registered as Self-Employed). 60% of respondents said that they had considered leaving the industry in the past year due to concerns about their mental wellbeing.

• Factors most closely associated with poor mental health were loneliness, culture and career development problems.[2] Measures to address inclusivity often address loneliness at work and workplace culture as well.

• The Charity’s Whole Picture Toolkit takes a human-centred approach to the ways of working on production and helps ensure that productions are inclusive, healthy places to work. A few simple actions to set the tone on a production can save time, money and prevent conflict later down the line. (See https://filmtvcharity.org.uk/leading-change/the-whole-picture-toolkit/ and section 3 below.)

• The Charity also runs a free, confidential 24/7 webchat and telephone Support Line which is available to everyone in working in the film and TV industry (https://filmtvcharity.org.uk/your-support/24-hour-support-line). The Support Line offers an immediate response to those in need, and quick, efficient referrals to appropriate specialist services, including counselling. It is run in partnership with Heath Assured, one of the UK's leading providers of counselling and legal advice.

• CIISA (Creative Industries Independent Standards Authority) has the potential to intervene in individual cases, act as a deterrent, campaign at governmental level and set out good practice in terms of workplace conflict-resolution in the UK industry. We support CIISA, as an important part of a multi-aspect solution. We also think it is important to address the culture problem through positive, preventive and early interventions that gradually shift the needle on what is and isn’t acceptable behaviour in the workplace.

• The need for mandatory leadership and management training for all line managers was identified in the LG21 as vital. Senior leaders are key in setting the culture of work on a production. Improved line management was the intervention most popular intervention with respondents in LG22 (p.3).

• Moreover, as indicated by the statistics on managers’ capability for handling reports of bullying and harassment, making this type training much more widely available – or even mandatory – could represent a fairly easy win. Our own ‘Mental Health Training Guidance for Employers’ framework, delivered in partnership with ScreenSkills, is intended to support employers and freelance managers in thinking continuously about what mental health training their team or organisation needs (https://www.screenskills.com/industry/mental-health-training-guidance-for-employers/). ScreenSkills' e-module on Tackling Bullying and Harassment at Work should be regarded as necessary but not sufficient introductory training on the subject (https://www.screenskills.com/online-learning/learning-modules/tackling-harassment-and-bullying-at-work/). We also recommend the training offered by BIFA on this subject, and any other model that involves role-playing scenarios in small groups. Finally, as per the BFI/BAFTA guidance, all companies should have an anti-bullying policy and all managers should be made familiar with it.

3. How to improve industry standards and retain more staff: The Whole Picture Toolkit

Having identified the problem of poor mental health among film and TV workers, the Charity developed an intervention called the Whole Picture Programme, which ran on a fixed-term basis for two years to address the immediate mental health crisis and is now succeeded by a long-term and sustainable approach to embedding better mental health practices in the industry.

A key part of this programme was the development of our Whole Picture Toolkit, which is a user-friendly guide to addressing workplace issues along the production value chain from development to post-production:

https://filmtvcharity.org.uk/leading-change/the-whole-picture-toolkit/

We have a team at the Charity promoting uptake of the Toolkit with commissioners, production companies and individual productions.

Ours is one approach to the issues. Other organisations have developed their own proposals, focused on caring, diversity, reporting of poor behaviour etc. In the Toolkit we link to several organisations delivering innovative ideas for change.

There are significant academic contributions on these issues, for example from Christa van Raalte and Richard Wallis at Bournemouth University and Doris Eikhof at Glasgow University, and important work is being done by unions such as BECTU. The work of CIISA promises to be important, and specific initiatives such as BIFA’s BHD training offer useful practical remedies.

In short, there is plenty of advice available on how to make the industry’s working practices more worker-friendly. With more uptake, the industry could lower its attrition of older, more experienced workers as well as those from marginalised and underrepresented communities, which would be good for the workers concerned, and for the productivity and training needs of the industry.

4. Retention: evidence from our Absent Friends report (2022)

Our Looking Glass survey and academic work such as that of the previously mentioned team at Bournemouth University,[3] has identified a range of factors leading to high attrition, such as:

• Very long and often unsociable hours of work
• The difficulty of combining work with caring responsibilities, such as caring for children
• The precarity of freelance work
• The need for freelancers to cover their own holidays, sick leave, pensions, etc
• The prevalence of bullying, harassment and discrimination in the workplace.
• Informal recruitment, leading to a lack of normal HR standards.
• Poor mental health arising from the above.

Research has shown that women[4] are particularly affected by attrition pressures and tend to leave the industry younger than men.

As well as leakage of existing workers, there are systemic barriers to achieving a workforce that is fully representative of the diversity of the UK’s population. For example, in Absent Friends, we estimate that to correct fully for racial and ethnic under-representation, the film and TV industry would need to employ an additional 38,000 workers from the Black and Global Majority.[5] Informal recruitment is part of the reason for this under-representation, with the industry recruiting from a narrow and established network on an affinity basis, rather than reaching out in an unbiased way to the whole potential workforce.

Other factors are the expectation for tertiary qualifications and the tendency towards patchy and low-paid project work at the beginning of people’s careers. These tilt the industry toward those with social and financial capital, making it harder for people from less advantaged socio-economic backgrounds to break in, except in those film and TV occupations that are by nature blue collar.

This evidence of the industry’s age skew is summarised in our 2022 report Absent Friends:

https://filmtvcharity.org.uk/leading-change/absent-friends-report/[6]

In Absent Friends, we compare the age distribution of the film and TV workforce to that of the whole UK workforce to estimate the size of the missing complement of older workers.

We produced two estimates. The first, based on redistributing the ages of the current size of the workforce, was 23,500. The higher estimate, based on expanding the workforce, was 35,000.

These are substantial proportions of the total size of the film and TV workforce, which is a little over 200,000.

In conclusion, we suggested in Absent Friends that a substantial part of the industry’s future need for skilled labour could be met by better retention of the already experienced staff the industry has.

The Charity itself seeks to support retention by among other means providing hardship-focused “Stop Gap” grants, designed to meet short-term crisis needs and help people stay in the industry who might otherwise have had to leave.

Contact

Thank you for your consideration. We would welcome the opportunity to discuss further with the Committee the issues raised in this submission.

For any further enquiries please contact:

Marcus Ryder, CEO 

Rupert Jones-Lee, Head of Research and Impact

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