Soundstages Without Crews: The UK's Studio Boom Has Outpaced Its Workforce Plan
- November 7, 2025
Between 2017 and 2021, an estimated £426 million was invested in building or expanding UK film and TV studios, delivering more than a million square feet of new stage floor space. A further 2.69 million square feet is forecast to come online by 2025. Belfast Harbour is aiming to quadruple its studio footprint. First Stage Studios has opened in Leith. New facilities have appeared in Cardiff, Leeds and Liverpool. On paper, the UK is solving its capacity problem.
Independent research commissioned alongside the BFI’s 2022 Skills Review suggests it is solving only half of it.
The spending forecast — and what it requires
Nordicity and Saffery Champness, working with ScreenSkills, modelled how much additional film and HETV production the UK could realistically attract given this new stage space, cross-checked it against forecasts from eight major global commissioning studios (including Netflix, Warner Bros. Discovery, NBCUniversal and Disney) and against global SVOD subscriber growth. The resulting range is consistent across methods: UK film and HETV production spend is forecast to reach between £7.07 billion and £7.66 billion by 2025, up from £5.64 billion in 2021.
That level of activity does not run on stage space alone. The same modelling translates spending growth directly into workforce demand, using the historical relationship between production spend and direct employment. The conclusion: crew employment needs to grow from roughly 52,300 full-time equivalents (FTEs) in 2021 to somewhere between 65,510 and 70,990 FTEs by 2025. After accounting for the crew who will leave the sector through retirement or family care responsibilities in that period, the researchers estimate a net shortfall of between 15,130 and 20,770 FTEs that the industry needs to recruit, train or attract from outside the sector by 2025 — over and above simply replacing people who leave.
The training investment gap
Here is where the research gets specific about money. The same study estimates that between £95.1 million and £104.3 million a year needs to be invested in training by 2025 to produce a workforce that can match this demand — a figure the BFI notes represents only around 1.4% of forecast 2025 production spending, and is not a new cost so much as a reflection of what the industry-wide baseline needs to be.
Against that requirement, the two centralised industry funds that currently pay for cross-sector training — the HETV Skills Fund and the Film Skills Fund, both managed by ScreenSkills and funded through industry contributions — collected £8.2 million and £1.4 million respectively in 2021/22. That is not the full picture of industry training spend, since individual studios, broadcasters and streamers also run their own schemes. But the gap between an estimated annual requirement approaching £100 million and a combined centralised fund total under £10 million is, on the BFI’s own account, one of the central findings of its review.
Capacity without crews is capacity wasted
The logic connecting these two halves of the picture is production economics, not sentiment. Every additional 20,000 sq. ft. of soundstage space is estimated to support around £15 million in annual production spending — but only if there is a crew available to staff the productions filling that space. The Nordicity/Saffery Champness research is explicit that its entire forecast is conditional: it models how much additional production the UK could attract “if the availability of skilled crews was increased to match the expected increase in soundstage space.” The implicit warning is that if crew supply does not increase in step with stage supply, the additional capacity now under construction will sit under-utilised — representing hundreds of millions of pounds in stalled private and public capital investment.
A regional case study: Scotland
Scotland offers a useful smaller-scale illustration of both the opportunity and the imbalance. The Economic Value of the Screen Sector in Scotland 2021 report found that Scotland’s screen sector generated 10,940 FTEs of employment and £627.1 million in GVA (gross value added) for the Scottish economy in that year — up from £398.6 million in production spending alone in 2019. Screen Scotland’s stated ambition is for the sector to reach £1 billion in annual production spending by 2030.
The same report’s regional breakdown shows how concentrated that activity currently is: Glasgow alone accounted for 51.9% of Scotland’s direct screen employment and 57.3% of direct GVA in 2021, driven substantially by production and development activity. Edinburgh, the Highlands and Islands, and the rest of Scotland’s regions each accounted for under 15% of direct impact individually. A national growth target of this scale — effectively doubling and then some — will not be met by continuing to draw on the same concentrated, already-stretched pool of crew based in and around Glasgow; it requires deliberately building workforce capacity in the regions where new stage space and production activity are being targeted.
The wider economic context
This is not a niche concern. The Creative Industries — of which screen production is one of the largest components — grew 54% in real terms between 2010 and 2022, against 20% growth for the UK economy as a whole, according to analysis prepared for the British Screen Forum’s submission to the CMS Committee’s inquiry into Film and HETV. Employment across the Creative Industries grew 53% over the same period, against 12% for total UK employment, and now accounts for 7.1% of all UK jobs, up from 5.2% in 2011. This is a sector that has substantially outperformed the rest of the UK economy for over a decade — which is precisely why a workforce bottleneck within it carries outsized economic consequences.
The conclusion the research points to
None of this is an argument against the current wave of studio investment — the underlying demand for UK production capacity, from both inward investment studios and the domestic industry, is real and well evidenced. The argument the research makes is narrower and more specific: physical infrastructure and human infrastructure have to be planned and funded together. A soundstage is a fixed asset that takes years to plan, finance and build. A trained camera operator, production accountant or construction crew takes years to train, too — and unlike a soundstage, that pipeline has to be actively built rather than simply granted planning permission.
This analysis draws on the Nordicity/Saffery Champness labour market forecast (2022), the BFI Skills Review 2022, the Economic Value of the Screen Sector in Scotland 2021 report, and the British Screen Forum’s submission to the CMS Committee inquiry on Film and HETV. It reflects the industry evidence base that has shaped Ripple One’s approach to closing the UK screen sector’s workforce gap.