The pandemic in 2020, alongside the necessary public health response, created considerable challenges for the cultural sector. This chapter offers a broad overview of what happened to jobs and working hours during that year. In doing so, it tells a story of the uneven impact of the pandemic on working life in the cultural sector. It also helps to contextualise the policy responses detailed in Chapter 1, demonstrating the scale of interventions that were needed.

For some workers in Britain’s cultural industries, 2020 was a disaster. They lost jobs, income and contact with their art forms. Others witnessed new possibilities, as changing working practices and increased demand saw growth in employment opportunities. As is common to almost all general analysis of cultural employment, the uneven impact was differentiated by key demographic characteristics. Those groups already marginalised from the cultural sector were more likely to face further exclusions. The lessons from debates over the need for a more open and equitable cultural sector were given a forceful illustration in 2020. Sadly, it seems that the rush to return to ‘business as usual’ means a return to an already exclusionary and exploitative model of cultural and creative work.

The opening parts of this chapter tell the story of 2020 itself, using nationally representative data on the UK labour force. The chapter then moves to look at 2020 through to 2022, to show that even where there has been a recovery for jobs and hours worked, this has not been shared across all art forms and all workers. The chapter concludes by linking this analysis to the literature, suggesting that working practices in our cultural industries needed major reforms before the impact of the pandemic, reforms which have only become even more pressing since much of the sector reopened in 2021.

What happened to jobs and working hours in 2020?

In spring 2020, live performance venues and museums and galleries across the UK closed their doors for long periods; films and television programmes put a halt on production; and self-employed creatives experienced immense job instability. However, given the pace of change, and limited data availability, it was difficult for policy-makers and industry to understand the exact scale of the pandemic’s impact on employment within the sector.

In order to paint a clearer picture, our analysis uses Labour Force Survey (LFS) data from the Office for National Statistics (ONS). This source gives a nationally representative picture of the entire British workforce, including the sub-sectors constituting the cultural and creative industries.

In the six months following the beginning of lockdown, the UK witnessed:

• a collapse in working hours across the creative industries;
• 60,000 job losses (a 30 per cent decline) in music, performing and visual arts;
• significantly higher than average numbers of people leaving creative occupations compared to previous years (Figure 2.1).

Figure 2.1Percentage of workers leaving creative occupations, per quarter

This is clear evidence of the existence, and the scale, of a jobs crisis. We look at job losses for creative occupations, the creative industries as a whole and then specifically for the cultural sector. We also examine the impact that lockdown has had on the number of hours worked by those who continued in the sector.

Creative occupations include a wide range of job roles across the creative industries, for example writers, film-makers and game designers. They also include people doing creative roles in other industries, such as designers working in manufacturing companies.

The figure shows two things: the five-year average proportion of people leaving creative occupations in each quarter; and the proportion leaving in each quarter between Q4 (October–December) 2019 and Q3 (July–September) 2020. The comparison allows us to see how unusual the 2020 employment patterns were.

Using the ONS data set, Figure 2.1 shows that 15 per cent of people who worked in creative occupations in January–March in 2020 were no longer working in creative occupations in April–June.¹ This is significantly greater than between the same period in the previous five years, where on average we saw around 10.5 per cent of creatives leave the sector.²

We also found that the percentage of workers who left creative occupations between April and September 2020 was higher than normal, at 12.5 per cent compared with 10.5 per cent – although in this case the difference is not statistically significant. Of those who reported having left creative occupations between Quarter 1 (Q1) (January–March) and Quarter 2 (Q2) (April–June), around two-thirds (69 per cent) were now working in other occupations, while 10 per cent of those who left creative occupations were classified as unemployed.³

Creative industries

We also used the ONS data to analyse the impact of the pandemic on the creative industries as a sector, as distinct from creative occupations. The ‘creative industries’ includes those who work in what are termed ‘non-creative occupations’ within the wider sector, for example hospitality staff working in museums, but does not include those working in creative roles in other sectors (Brook, O’Brien and Taylor, 2020). For workers in the creative industries we saw a similar pattern to those in creative occupations, although the numbers who left the creative industries were smaller in both percentage terms and as a raw number. Approximately 110,000 people left the creative industries between Q1 (January–March) and Q2 (April–July) in 2020, around 8 per cent of the workforce.⁴

When we looked in more detail at specific sub-sectors in the creative industries, or occupational groups – such as publishing, architecture and crafts – we found that for most of the creative industries and most creative occupations, there were not large changes in the number of workers in 2020 (Figure 2.2).

Figure 2.2Overall size of the workforce in creative industries and occupations in all four quarters of 2020

However, the shift in numbers working in music, performing and visual arts occupations is clearly significant. The number of workers in these occupations dropped from around 200,000 in January–March 2020 to around 155,000 in April–June and then again to around 140,000 in July–September and to around 134,000 in October–December, a decline of almost 34 per cent since pre-lockdown. When we analysed it from the industry-wide perspective mentioned earlier, rather than the occupational perspective, we found similar, but smaller-scale, results. This is a particularly important finding as over the last few years the number of people working in music, performing and visual arts has increased, albeit with some variation in number from month to month (see Figure 2.3). The post-lockdown decline clearly breaks this pattern.

Figure 2.3Workers in music and performing arts, 2017–2021

The impact on working hours

Even for those sub-sectors where we didn’t find evidence of high levels of job losses, we found that since lockdown began in March 2020 creative occupations saw significant reductions in the average number of hours worked each week. Figure 2.4 shows the change in the number of hours worked by people in each of the creative occupational groups, comparing the second quarter of 2019 (April–June) with the second quarter of 2020 (April–June). This comparison is to make sure the differences observed are not just due to seasonal variations. This reveals a substantial increase in the number of people that reported working zero hours in the previous week.

Figure 2.4Distribution of hours worked, by occupational group

The data also show us that the reduction in hours did not fall evenly across the creative industries: those working in crafts, film, TV, video, radio and photography, music, performing and visual arts and design were the most severely affected. Moreover, July–September 2020 data indicates that while there was a slight reduction in the percentage of workers working zero hours in this latter part of the year, the average number of hours worked were still far below pre-lockdown levels. Thus, we can see that workers in the creative industries were hit particularly hard by the COVID-19 pandemic and lockdown. Within this segment, industries and occupations such as music and performing arts suffered most, with a collapse in the number of hours worked and large numbers of job losses.

What were the national and regional differences, and the differences between demographic groups?

In this section, again based on analysis of the ONS Labour Force Survey for the first three quarters of 2020, we dive down below the headline figures to look at the impact on different places and different groups of workers within the creative economy. Firstly, we compare the nations and regions of the UK. We then focus on disabled people; those who are younger; and those who haven’t engaged in higher education. This analysis complements work that looked at the impact on other demographic groups, such as women of colour (TUC, 2021).

The nations and regions of the UK

In 2020 there were no clear differences in trends between the four nations. Notably, almost every nation showed some level of contraction in 2020 Q2 (April to June 2020) as lockdown hit (Figure 2.5), and then a small expansion as restrictions eased and the economy reopened in Q3 (July to September 2020). This suggests that the size of the creative labour force is responsive to the type and extent of lockdown conditions.

Figure 2.5Size of the workforce in creative industries and occupations 2019–2022, by nations

The exception is Q2 in Scotland, although we should bear in mind that the sample size is much smaller than for England, and for the UK as a whole. Indeed, this is one area where we need much more detailed data to give a more comprehensive picture of the Scottish, Welsh and Northern Irish creative economies. The ONS Labour Force Survey collects data on the entire UK economy, with creative industries and occupations representing a significant, but small, proportion of the economy as a whole. Within that, England is by far the largest single national economy. The data for the creative economies outside of England therefore have to be treated with more caution as a result of the smaller sample sizes.

These smaller sample sizes mean that there is limited scope for further regional breakdowns within Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. However, we can offer a more detailed analysis of England. London and the South East dominate the geography of the creative industries in England. This holds true even if we account for these regions having larger populations. For most regions there is little evidence of large changes in numbers from the beginning of lockdown onwards. There is some evidence of a particular decline in the South East, although we should bear in mind that the uncertainty around this is large, again due to small sample sizes.

Nevertheless, the nation-level data does suggest that the creative workforce contracted and expanded in line with lockdown restrictions. In other sectors of the economy (Taylor and Florisson, 2020) it appeared that those in contractually insecure jobs, often with lower levels of education, and in lower-paid jobs, were the most vulnerable to job loss during this period.

The impact on different demographic groups

Before the pandemic, a range of academic literature was concerned that there were clear inequalities in creative jobs based on people’s demographic characteristics (see Brook, O’Brien and Taylor, 2020 for a summary). The most recent analysis, published by the AHRC Creative Industries Policy and Evidence Centre (Carey, O’Brien and Gable, 2021a, 2021b), shows the long-standing under-representation of women, disabled people, those from working-class backgrounds and people of colour in the creative sector. In terms of changes in the representation of women, disabled people and people of colour, it is too early to say if the pandemic has had any long-term consequences, although we know from TUC (2021) analysis that there has been an immediate, negative impact on employment figures.

There is fairly strong evidence that the proportion of people without degrees working in creative occupations is declining. The pandemic saw a decline in the percentage of workers in creative occupations without degrees from 37 per cent in the year before lockdown to 34 per cent in the six months post-lockdown, a difference which is statistically significant. For context, the percentage in the overall workforce without a degree is more than 60 per cent.

Figure 2.6 uses the longitudinal version of the Labour Force Survey to examine whether people who left creative employment were disproportionately drawn from certain demographic groups.⁵ The graph illustrates that while there are some differences, the relatively small sample sizes in the Labour Force Survey for each sub-group means that in most cases we cannot be confident whether these observed changes are real or due to sampling variation.

Figure 2.6Percentage of workers leaving creative occupations per quarter since lockdown

An important exception, and the one where we see the biggest difference, is among workers aged under twenty-five. More than a quarter (27 per cent) of creative workers under the age of twenty-five left the creative occupations after lockdown, compared with just 14 per cent of workers aged twenty-five and over.⁶ Before the pandemic it was also typical to see a higher turnover of workers aged under twenty-five in and out of the creative industries compared with workers of other ages. However, among under-twenty-fives, the rate of leaving since lockdown (around 15 per cent) was higher than what would typically be expected.

We can see the biggest differences in the number of hours worked. In all demographic groups the average number of hours worked decreased, and the percentage of people working no hours increased following the 2020 lockdown. However, there were also clear demographic differences in the magnitude of the changes.

There was a greater increase in the proportion of people working zero hours for people under the age of twenty-five, and for people without a degree, as compared with those over the age of twenty-five, and with a degree, respectively. For those under the age of twenty-five, over 30 per cent of workers reported working zero hours. There are also higher proportions of women working zero hours, as well as disabled workers. Of course, many of these groups were already more likely to be working zero hours pre-lockdown.

We also looked at changes in hours worked for workers in creative industries and found similar trends. In this case, we found a larger increase in the proportion of disabled workers working zero hours compared with non-disabled workers. These differences in changes in hours worked broadly reflect what we observed in the overall labour force. The exceptions are that under-twenty-fives in creative occupations and disabled people in the creative industries do appear to have greater reductions in working hours than we see in the labour force as a whole.

Although changes in formal or self-identified employment were not large, changes in the numbers of people actually working substantial hours were. To some extent this might indicate that the government support schemes were effective, in that they retained workers within the creative sector. However, it does also suggest that certain demographic groups were more vulnerable to losing their jobs in the first months of the pandemic. It is easy to see how this could lead to even greater inequalities in the sector. Additionally, it seems clear that younger workers were particularly affected. This is of particular concern regarding future inequality in the cultural and creative sector, potentially heralding a missing generation of creative and cultural workers.

The impact on freelancers

Freelancers are especially important to the creative economy, as they represent a high proportion of the workforce compared to other parts of the economy. At the end of 2019, ONS data indicated that around 15 per cent of the workforce were self-employed, but the equivalent figure was 30 per cent of all creative occupations and an astonishing 88 per cent of music, performing and visual arts occupations. Freelancers, as a subset of the self-employed, are highly over-represented in music, performing and visual arts (27 per cent of the workforce) as compared with creative occupations (9 per cent) and the workforce as a whole (3 per cent).⁷

In this section, we explore what the ONS data can tell us about the plight of freelancers. We also drill down to look at trends in three clusters of creative occupations: film, TV, radio and photography; publishing; and music, performing and visual arts. We find that the number of freelancers working in creative jobs decreased significantly during 2020. Moreover, the hours worked by those freelancers who continued to work have also seen a severe decline. Different demographic groups have suffered unevenly, with younger workers and women suffering job losses and reduction of hours at greater rates than their older and male colleagues.

As with creative occupations as a whole, freelancers in different occupations had different experiences of the impacts of the pandemic. For those in media occupations, the flow of job losses seems to have been stemmed with some evidence of recovery. For those in music, performing and visual arts, the crisis continued well into 2022.

Freelancers in all creative occupations

Figure 2.7 shows the number of freelancers working in creative occupations from the start of 2018 to the end of 2020. The grey sections surrounding the central black line in the visualisation shows the confidence intervals that are associated with sample sizes in the Labour Force Survey. We can see that at the end of 2020 the number of freelancers working in creative occupations was lower (around 156,000) than the beginning of 2018 (around 176,000). This suggests that the trend for growth in freelance employment, as part of a growing creative economy sector, stalled as a result of the pandemic. In particular, the number of freelancers in all creative occupations declined by around 38,000 from the start to the end of 2020.

Figure 2.7Number of freelancers in creative occupations, 2018–2020

We see similar trends in the numbers of hours worked. By the middle of 2020 there was a steep rise in the numbers reporting working zero hours per week in their freelance creative occupation (and an associated decline of those reporting working over 32 hours). There was some evidence of recovery in the numbers reporting working over 32 hours a week by the end of 2020.

The data from the ONS Labour Force Survey suggests that the crisis for freelancers hit different demographic groups in uneven ways. Age clearly mattered most, with the decline in numbers of freelance workers impacting less severely on the oldest, and perhaps most established, freelancers. Figure 2.8 summarises trends for different age groups, highlighting steep declines in numbers for two age groups. Freelance workers aged twenty-five to twenty-nine in creative occupations declined from around 30,000 to around 20,000 during 2020. Those aged forty to forty-nine also saw a steep decline, from around 50,000 workers to around 38,000.

Figure 2.8Numbers of freelancers in creative occupations by age, 2019 Q4–2020

For the over-fifties, the impact of lockdown, reopening and then the second lockdown was less marked. There is evidence of losses during the year that were similar in number to their younger counterparts, but this is set against evidence of a recovery by the end of the year. While the absolute numbers were similar at certain points in 2020 for the over-fifties, the overall change is less pronounced, given their greater number in the creative sector.

As with all of our analyses, there are many reasons to be cautious, not least of which are issues associated with seasonal churn in numbers and the lack of robust data on freelancers leaving, coming back in and leaving again. The small size of the twenty to twenty-four-year-old cohort also makes us cautious about drawing firm conclusions, given the size of the sample. This data does provide some indications that younger freelance creatives were poorly protected by government and sector interventions.

We now turn to differences between white freelancers and freelancers of colour. The Labour Force Survey data suggest that the number of the latter group remained stable over the course of 2020. This may be a result of there being very low numbers of freelancers of colour in creative occupations more generally, along with other factors such as age, gender and levels of qualifications. We can see this comparison in Figure 2.9.

Figure 2.9Number of freelancers in creative occupations by ethnic group, 2019 Q4–2020

As a result of small sample sizes, relating in turn to the small number of freelancers of colour in creative occupations, we cannot speculate as to whether this is driven by demographic factors, such as the age profile of those particular freelancers, or occupational factors such as their specific job. Both, however, are plausible drivers. As we have seen above, different age groups were impacted differently. As we will see below, different occupational groups also saw different patterns of job losses.

Figure 2.10 illustrates that there were differences according to gender regarding when the pandemic affected workforce presence. Female freelancers in the creative occupations were hit early on in 2020, in keeping with the seasonal decline in creative occupations and then the impact of the first lockdown. While the decline of male freelancers in creative occupations came later in 2020, the end of the year shows the possible emergence of a gender gap in the recovery for freelancers, mirroring creative economy trends seen after the 2008 recession (Skillset, 2010). Again, however, we should bear in mind the large confidence intervals associated with these numbers.

Figure 2.10Number of freelancers in creative occupations by gender, 2019 Q4–2020

Different occupations, different impacts?

In terms of specific groups of occupations, there were clear differences within the creative economy. Film and associated occupations saw lockdown declines, but by October 2020 seemed to be on a trajectory of recovery; a similar, if less pronounced, set of impacts happened within publishing occupations. By comparison, music, performing and the visual arts were at the epicentre of the crisis for freelancers, with a trend of decline continuing throughout 2020 that was not at all ameliorated by the brief reopening seen in summer 2020.

There are also important demographic differences within those sets of occupations. Where we have sample sizes robust enough for analysis, we can see pronounced gender differences – for example in publishing, which witnessed a decline in female freelancers of around 14 per cent and a rise for men of 15 per cent across the year. By comparison, there did not seem to be gender differences in music, performing and visual arts, with around 38 per cent declines for men and women alike. While low numbers mean we can’t report the changes in the size of the film and related occupations workforce by gender, the data in the ONS Labour Force Survey on the film industry is very worrying. This suggests a staggering 51 per cent fall in the number of female freelancers by the end of 2020 as compared to the start of the year, compared with a minimal 5 per cent decline for men.

The impact of the furlough scheme

As we have shown above, the COVID-19 pandemic had a profoundly negative impact on employment in key parts of the cultural sector. In this section, we consider redundancies and the government’s support for the Coronavirus Job Retention Scheme in the cultural sector. The popularly called ‘furlough’ scheme was indeed vital to protect jobs in the cultural and creative industries.⁸ However, as we saw in the previous section, high numbers of freelancers were not protected.

For this analysis we’ve used data from the Business Impact of COVID-19 Survey (BICS), a data set that, in March 2021, was renamed the Business Insights and Conditions Survey. This survey collected data every two weeks, using an online questionnaire from a sample of just under 40,000 businesses. It began in April 2020, asking questions about a range of business issues, including finances, workforce and trading confidence.⁹ The ONS classifies this data set as ‘experimental’ and there are many reasons to be cautious about it. For example, it is voluntary, depending on the goodwill of businesses to complete the survey questions. It does, however, offer a unique insight into businesses’ experiences over the pandemic period.

The ONS reports BICS findings by industrial sector. This was incredibly useful in getting a picture of the UK economy over the course of the pandemic. However, there have been limitations in terms of understanding the experience of cultural and creative industries. These limitations exist for three reasons. Firstly, cultural and creative businesses and organisations are included in two separate industrial sectors in the ONS reporting: information and communication; and arts, entertainment and recreation. This means that we don’t have a single indicator for the sector. Secondly, businesses and organisations that are not cultural and creative are also included in these two industrial sectors. An obvious example is that betting shops, golf courses and gyms are included in the ‘arts, entertainment and recreation’ category.

Figure 2.11 shows the percentage of workers furloughed across all creative industries, and in the economy overall (in a thick grey line). They are placed together on the same chart for ease of comparison. Figure 2.12 presents charts for each individual creative industry, against a backdrop showing the level of lockdown restrictions, from highest to lowest. This allows us to show the levels of the furlough relative to the levels of Covid-related restrictions.

Figure 2.11Percentage of staff furloughed by creative sector

Figure 2.12Percentage of staff furloughed by creative sector and Covid restrictions

Three sectors – performing and visual arts, museums and galleries, and film and television – are immediately striking. They are at the top of Figure 2.12, reflecting the fact they had very high proportions of furloughed staff (over 80 per cent in performing and visual arts and over 60 per cent in museums and galleries) at the beginning of the pandemic. This is a significantly higher proportion than the average across the rest of the economy, which was just over 20 per cent, despite including sectors such as hospitality, which we know were severely affected by pandemic measures.

What is also noticeable about performing and visual arts and museums and galleries is their slow return to ‘normal’. In the last waves of the BICS, when furlough was coming to an end, we can see how the performing arts had almost 30 per cent and museums and galleries had over 10 per cent of the workforce on furlough, even as pandemic restrictions were eased and ended, whereas other sectors had only 2 per cent of the workforce furloughed.

The impact of the pandemic on film and television and publishing was less dramatic than for the performing and visual arts and museums, although still on average higher than the rest of the economy, and there was a spike in furlough for film and television at the start of 2021. For publishing, as other analysis has indicated, companies did not see the same levels of impact as those industries that engage physical audiences or work on film and television sets.

Upskilling and retraining in the workforce

One way in which creative workers responded to the pandemic was to enhance their skill levels by developing their qualifications and education. During economic crises the demand for education increases (Barr and Turner, 2015). Workers spend their time strengthening their skills to get an advantage in their profession – upskilling – or, alternatively, investing in acquiring new skills that will allow them to change their occupation – reskilling. Creative workers have been upskilling, taking arts-related education courses to bolster their skills ready for a return to work.

We’re again using the ONS Labour Force Survey for this analysis. Figure 2.13 shows that in 2020, the proportion of workers enrolled on either full-time or part-time education courses (excluding for leisure purposes) was higher than in recent years. The increase in 2020 bucks a relatively steady negative trend in non-creative workers’ enrolment in education and is more marked for creative workers in ‘core’ creative occupations. We define ‘core’ creative occupations as: film, TV, video, radio and photography; museums, galleries and libraries; music, performing and visual arts; and publishing.

Figure 2.13Workers enrolled in education courses

It is important to note that this is still a small proportion of the total number of core creative workers. However, the uptick in the numbers suggests a clear response to the sector’s economic crisis.

Choice of subject

We turn now to look more closely at enrolment in arts-related education, a category that includes various creative fields: fine arts, music and performing arts, audio, visual and media production, design, crafts and general art programmes. Figure 2.14 shows that the proportion of core creative workers enrolled in arts education in 2020 (out of the workers enrolled in any education) was similar to that of 2019, if not even slightly larger. The estimates demonstrate an increase of around 5 per cent in the enrolment in arts education among core creative workers. However, the sample size is small and we should again be cautious when drawing definitive conclusions.

Figure 2.14Proportion of art education enrolments

We also estimated the number of workers enrolled in arts-related education. This is to verify that the observed increase in the fraction of workers enrolled in arts education is not simply a result of the shrinking of the cultural workforce due to job losses and workers leaving during the pandemic. Our estimates, illustrated in Figure 2.15, show that this is not the case. Even with the contraction of the workforce, the observed increase in arts education is also apparent in absolute enrolment numbers.

Figure 2.15Overall numbers of art education enrolments

In Figure 2.16, we zoom in on the four most popular study fields as they appear in the ONS coding. The bar graphs depict the distribution of studied subjects. We should keep in mind that the total number of workers enrolled in 2020 is higher than in the previous years, so small increases in proportion represent an even more pronounced increase in absolute numbers.

Figure 2.16Subject choices of all creative workers enrolled in education courses

We merge all the creative workers into one group in this graph since some of the categories contain a small number of respondents. We find no dramatic changes in the proportion of creative workers enrolled in different educational programmes. The most pronounced changes over the period are not among cultural workers enrolled in arts courses. Instead, since 2017, we can see increases in enrolments in social sciences programmes and decreases in enrolments in humanities programmes. This result indicates once again that creative workers were not turning in big numbers to other fields of study to train themselves in alternative occupations.

 Postgraduate and specialist skills

Creative workers tend to have higher levels of educational qualifications than the average worker and are more likely to attain postgraduate degrees (Oakley et al., 2017). Figure 2.17 shows the level of degree programmes that workers who study art-related subjects are enrolled in. It suggests that the impact of the pandemic has been to motivate core creative workers to extend their art-related education. Figure 2.17 shows that, consistently over time, the proportion of creative workers studying for arts-related postgraduate degrees is about double that of other workers. In 2020, for the first time since 2015, the number of core creative workers studying for an arts-related higher degree (66 per cent) surpassed that of undergraduate degrees (27 per cent).

Figure 2.17Level of qualification being studied

In October 2020 a government advert with a picture of a young ballet dancer and the headline ‘Fatima’s next job could be in cyber (she just doesn’t know it yet)’ went viral in the media, receiving a large amount of backlash. The ad was read by many as a recommendation from the government that artists change their profession, against a backdrop of concern over the future of the creative industries. The pandemic does seem to have pushed many creative workers to think about their professional future and enrol in educational programmes. However, it seems that the goal of the educational activity of those core creative workers most impacted by the pandemic was not reskilling for alternative professions but rather upskilling to reap the possible benefits of more education within creative occupations. The upskilling trends seen in 2020 continued at least to the first months of 2021.

2021: doing more with less

By the end of 2021 many parts of the economy and society had fully reopened. However, our analysis of ONS data demonstrates that the performing arts workforce still had not fully recovered. As illustrated in Figure 2.18, in terms of the size of its workforce, even at the end of 2021 the performing arts were recovering much more slowly than other sectors of the creative industries, lagging behind publishing, the screen and media sector, museums, galleries and libraries.

Figure 2.18Number of workers in different creative sectors, 2019–2022

Although music and the performing and visual arts was the second largest of these sectors before the pandemic, we can see that it lost over 40,000 workers since its peak at the end of 2019. In terms of the total number of hours worked per week, it was also still behind pre-pandemic levels, showing a sharp decline in the final half of 2021 – but notably not as sharp a decline as museums, galleries and libraries.

Fewer workers working harder

However, as we can see in Figure 2.19, levels of activity as measured by average hours worked per week recovered substantially in 2021, just tailing off again in the last three months of 2021. This essentially means that those people working in music, performing and visual arts who weren’t made redundant or didn’t leave their occupations were working harder than ever. This has significant implications for the future infrastructure of the sector and specifically for:

• Diversity – there are fewer jobs around.
• Recruitment – how can the sector attract new people to an overworked sector?
• Retention – how many more workers will choose to leave the sector?
• Burnout – how will those left behind be able to sustain these levels of work?

Figure 2.19Mean hours worked per week in music, performing and visual arts, 2019–2022

In order to take a more micro view, we use actors as a particular case study, analysing the occupational category ‘actors, entertainers and presenters’. Although the numbers are too small here and the confidence intervals too wide to draw any definitive conclusions, we can see in Figure 2.20 that this particular creative workforce decreased steadily throughout 2021, despite a positive end to 2020 as some venues reopened and the British winter ‘panto season’ took off in force.

Figure 2.20Number of actors, entertainers and presenters, 2019–2022

Conclusion: 2022 and beyond

Finally, we can reflect on the most recent data available as this book went to press. Against the backdrop of concerns of a looming global economic recession, by 2022 the cultural workforce was showing signs of an almost full recovery to pre-pandemic levels of activity. However, the appearance of ‘things going back to normal’ masks the harmful longer-term effects of the pandemic in exacerbating the cultural sector’s structural and ingrained inequalities (Brook, O’Brien and Taylor, 2020).

2022 opened with a positive trend of an increase in the number of workers in creative occupations (see Figure 2.21). We see this positive trend also in the music, performing and visual arts sector, which suffered the most from the pandemic’s impact. At the same time, the intensity of cultural work, measured by mean hours worked per week, which had been increasing since hitting an all-time low in 2020, is showing signs of coming to a plateau (see Figure 2.21). Our estimates, based on ONS data, show that the volume of activity in the core creative occupations in the second quarter of 2022 (April–June) reached a record level of 16.5 million weekly hours, which is higher than its highest level in 2019 of 16 million weekly hours.¹⁰

Figure 2.21Number of workers in the core creative occupations and mean hours worked per week in the core creative occupations

This may sound like good news for the cultural sector. However, when looking at specific socio-demographic groups, we see a rather disturbing picture. Figure 2.22 shows that both men and women working in the core creative occupations were negatively affected by the pandemic, in its first year, in a relatively similar way. However, since the second quarter of 2021 the number of men and women has taken an opposite trend. By 2022 the number of men working in core creative occupations matched its pre-pandemic level. Yet the number of women is declining and in the middle of 2022 reached a number even lower than its level during the pandemic. We must remember that the core creative occupations are an aggregated group of different occupational groups. The existing gender inequalities in specific occupations (Brook, O’Brien and Taylor, 2020) has continued, with gender inequalities in employment numbers most notable in the film, TV, video, radio and photography occupations, and apparent in the other occupations except for music, performing and visual arts.

Figure 2.22Number of workers in core creative occupations by gender

The concerns regarding a ‘lost generation’ of cultural workers appear to be justified when looking at the number of workers in the core creative occupation by age groups. Figure 2.23 shows that the number of workers in the thirty-five to fifty-three category, and to a lesser degree also the fifty-five and above category, is growing steadily since 2021, while the number of young workers (aged eighteen to thirty-four) is steady. The fact that the number of older (aged fifty-five and above) workers has even surpassed its pre-pandemic levels suggests that more established and experienced workers are replacing younger, early-career workers. Younger, early-career workers were disproportionately hit by redundancies during the pandemic, and now are not returning at the same rate as their older counterparts. As a result, we can see the first indications of a long-run ‘lost generation’ effect.

Figure 2.23Number of workers in core creative occupations by age group

We find similar results in the case of ethnicity and education. It seems that the recent increase in the number of workers reflects existing patterns of inequality; employment growth is driven by white workers and by workers with higher education levels. We also find that most of the growth in the number of workers is attributed to self-employed workers, who face more precarious working conditions compared to employed workers. The ability to participate in creative labour markets is being further concentrated in those groups who have the resources to withstand potential precarity.

Overall, this analysis, and the most recent data, reinforces the narrative of the uneven nature of the pandemic’s long-term impact. Ultimately, 2020 compounded the already existing problems of Britain’s cultural labour market. These problems are true globally, as we see in the concluding chapter, as well as within the specific case we have analysed here.

We can end this pessimistic review of the situation in the core cultural occupations on a positive note with one silver lining brought by the pandemic: we found that the number of disabled workers in the core creative occupations has grown in the aftermath of the pandemic, as shown in Figure 2.24. We believe that the expansion of opportunities for remote work, encouraged by the pandemic, has opened new and more accessible pathways for disabled people to participate in the cultural workforce. It is essential that these new opportunities, rather than the return to the unequal pre-pandemic normal, are central to both cultural policy and the cultural sector.

Figure 2.24Number of disabled workers in the core creative occupations