MEDIA INDUSTRY CENSUS REVEALS DOUBLE FIGURE EMPLOYED

THE FIRST ever census of the media industry in the UK has revealed that almost twice the number of people work in the industry than was previously thought.
Original estimates on the number of people working in the industry, which were put at some 60,000 people, have had to be substantially revised when the census found that almost 116,000 people were working in the industry.
The census carried out on May 19 2000, which is a snapshot in time, surveyed people working in television, radio, cable, satellite, video, commercials, business-to-business, film and interactive media content creation, but not performers or musicians.
The census received 615 responses from companies covering an estimated 50 per cent of the workforce, 41,000 of those working on that day were freelances. It is estimated that there may be up to 20,000 more freelancers who were inactive on that day.
One of the first initiatives from the Skillset & DCMS Audio-Visual Industries Training Group (AVITG), the census will be carried out every year to assist labour market planning which has often been hampered due to lack of reliable data.
Over half the industry works in London where ethnic minorities make up nearly one quarter of the population, but only nine per cent of employees and 7.7 per cent of freelancers in the audio-visual industries were from ethnic minorities.
Dinah Caine, Chief Executive of Skillset, said: “We had one hundred per cent response rate from broadcasters, which is excellent. The ethnic minority figures are a concern and I think everyone in the industry is aware of this. Initiatives are being set up to address this problem. The Cultural Diversity Network has recently been established by the major broadcasters and the BSAC’s inquiry into ethnic minority representation in the film industry is due to report shortly. Skillset is also working hard to help address this issue in its funding of courses and new entrants programmes, which all have stringent targets for ethnic recruitment.”
Janet Anderson, Minister for Tourism, Film and Broadcast, said: “The results reiterate the growing importance of the creative industries to the UK’s economy. In future, the census will be an important tool in helping the creative sector to identify its skills shortages so that they can be addressed.”
Other key findings were that women on average represented only one-third of those employed across all occupational groups.
Roger Laughton, Chair of the AVITG, said: “Carrying out such an ambitious project in an industry where there’s been very little solid research before is always going to be a learning process and I think the real benefit will be when we can track changes in the labour force year after year.”
The annual census hopes to build on the coverage of the film industry in future years.
The full AVITG report will be published in Spring 2001.
(CMcL)