Opinion: Lara Carmona – the Spring Budget 2024 and the Beautiful Game
// budget // creative industries // Creative UK // Fiscal Event // Spring Budget
How We Work Now: Learning from the Impact of COVID-19 to Build an Industry that Works for Parents and Carers is a follow-on from our scoping study Back From The Brink, which was published in March 2021.
The How We Work Now survey ran from Monday 17 May to Wednesday 30 June 2021 and around 500 parents and carers working across all areas of the UK screen sector responded.
Where Back From The Brink identified a ‘cascade effect’ experienced by parents and carers, where day to day uncertainty about work and caregiving resulted in severe psychological and economic stress, How We Work Now emphasises how urgently the screen sector needs to take action in order to make living and working in the post-COVID screen sector a viable career-long option for all.
From the analysis of responses to our How We Work Now survey this much is starkly clear – how we work now isn’t working. It isn’t working for anyone. But for parents and caregivers in the screen industries, it really isn’t working – and for those on low incomes, single parents, and those living in non-urban regions, the situation gets exponentially worse.
In order to make meaningful, impactful change that helps everyone, it is vitally important that we address the needs of those who are most vulnerable. By addressing those most excluded, we bring everybody with us, creating the greatest positive impacts for all.
How We Work Now enters an urgent and busy field of COVID-19 related research and reporting: into the creative and cultural industries workers; and among parents and carers. Two other reports crossed both those axes: Locked Down and Locked Out – TV Mums in COVID by Share My Telly Job with the University of Nottingham (2021), and Parents in Performing Arts’ COVID Report (2020). Our informal conversations with Share My Telly Job, PiPA and grassroots labour organisations in the Creative and Cultural Industries reveal the need for a regular forum in which researchers can share and compare both methodological approaches and key findings, towards establishing best practice and collectively pushing for change.
This is one of the reasons we have aligned the outcomes of How We Work Now with the work of these organisations and their associated outputs. To share this research further, and so it cannot be ignored, Raising Films have created a Dropbox folder containing a library of allied reporting, no sign-in needed.
For more information about Raising Films, visit their website
Download the Executive Summary
Image credit: On set for WITH LOVE FROM CALAIS; Annemarie Lean-Vercoe on camera, Manjinder directing her daughter, Lyla.