Who Gets In? What the Evidence Shows About Diversity and Access in UK Film and TV
- February 12, 2025
The UK screen sector likes to describe itself as a creative meritocracy. The research doesn’t fully support that self-image — and the industry’s own regulators and funding bodies have said so plainly.
Across several independent studies commissioned by the BFI, ScreenSkills and Creative UK over the past few years, a consistent picture emerges: the UK’s film and HETV production workforce is growing fast, but it is not becoming meaningfully more representative of the population it draws from, and several of the barriers involved are structural rather than accidental.
The freelance model, and who it favours
Production work in the UK is unusually freelance-heavy. The BFI Skills Review 2022 records that 48% of people engaged in film and video production were self-employed in 2020, compared with just 14% of the UK workforce overall. Across the wider Creative Industries, freelancers make up 33% of the workforce — roughly double the figure for the UK economy as a whole.
That flexibility has real upsides, and the sector’s own research is careful to acknowledge them: freelancers can move rapidly between projects, employers can scale crew up and down as productions demand, and talented freelancers can advance quickly without waiting for someone above them to leave a staff role. But the same body of research is equally clear about the downside. Freelance status concentrates career risk, professional development and financial security in the hands of the individual — and pre-pandemic figures show that support was not being distributed evenly. Only 16% of film organisations and 32% of film production companies arranged or funded training for freelance staff in the year before the pandemic, compared with 80% and 52% respectively for payroll employees. The 2021 ScreenSkills Assessment suggests this is starting to shift, with 60% of employers planning training activity saying they intend to target freelancers — but the gap it is correcting from was substantial.
What the diversity data actually shows
The industry has invested seriously in measuring this problem over the past five years, and the numbers it has produced are specific:
- A 2020 study cited in the BFI Skills Review found that 53% of people working in UK screen industries came from what the study defined as a privileged socioeconomic background, against just 25% from a working-class background — compared with an even 38%/38% split across the UK economy as a whole.
- Only 24% of the UK public surveyed as part of the BFI’s own National Lottery funding consultation believed that opportunities to work in the screen industries are genuinely available to everyone.
- Project Diamond — the cross-broadcaster diversity data initiative run by the Creative Diversity Network — has found disabled people to be significantly under-represented in UK television production, one of the more granular findings to emerge from what is now five years of consistent, voluntary diversity reporting across every major UK broadcaster’s commissions.
- The BFI Skills Review also references Film and TV Charity research showing the workforce’s age profile is skewed unusually young: people aged 50+ make up only 20% of the screen sector workforce, against 31% across the UK economy as a whole. The same research estimates that between 24,000 and 35,000 older workers are effectively “missing” from the sector relative to a typical UK workforce age profile.
Two problems, one root cause
What connects these findings is not a single villain but a recruitment culture. The same BFI review that documents these representation gaps is explicit that they are, in part, downstream of how people get hired in the first place. Production jobs are rarely advertised in the way jobs are in most other UK industries; hiring is often informal, direct, and reliant on personal networks and recommendation. Researchers interviewing crew and hiring managers heard, repeatedly, that this kind of hiring privileges people who are already known to someone with hiring power — which structurally disadvantages anyone entering the industry without an existing connection to it, regardless of how qualified they are.
The industry’s own diversity architecture — BFI Diversity Standards attached to National Lottery funding, broadcaster diversity commitments through the Creative Diversity Network, and targeted schemes like Together TV’s Diverse Film Fund and the Creative Corridor partnership for ethnically diverse writer-producers — has made real progress on measurement and on funding specific access routes. What the BFI’s 2022 review argues is still missing is a change to the everyday, unglamorous mechanics of how a production actually fills a crew list: the difference between a role being quietly offered inside a WhatsApp group and a role being visibly, fairly open to anyone who can do the work.
Why this matters beyond fairness
The BFI review frames diversity and inclusion as inseparable from the industry’s other headline problem — the forecast shortage of 15,130 to 20,770 additional crew needed by 2025. A workforce that draws overwhelmingly from a narrow socioeconomic and demographic base is, by definition, drawing from a smaller labour pool than one that reaches the UK’s full population. In an industry now competing for a limited supply of skilled crew against record levels of production activity, the evidence suggests that closed hiring networks and skills shortages are not two separate problems — they are the same problem, seen from two different angles.
This analysis draws on the BFI Skills Review 2022, Project Diamond data published by the Creative Diversity Network, and independent research on socioeconomic background in UK screen industries. It reflects the industry evidence base that has shaped Ripple One’s approach to talent access in the UK screen sector.