“Throwing money” at the “workforce crisis” in UK film and TV will “exacerbate the problem” rather than solving it, according to the former boss of Amazon in Europe.

Georgia Brown, who now chairs the UK’s Screen Sectors Skills Task Force, delivered a passionate plea for the industry to take a holistic approach to resolving the “crisis” during an appearance in front of the UK’s British Film & High-End TV Inquiry this morning, which was titled “How can the UK film industry combat its workforce crisis?”

According to Brown, the industry is now comfortably meeting a BFI-set demand to spend 1% of production budgets, or £100M ($127M), on training, but that this spending is far too fragmented.

“We know we are collectively spending more than 1% but I will keep coming back to the fact that it’s not a money question,” she added. “Throwing more money won’t solve this, it will exacerbate the problem. We need to reorganize the way we are operating to effectively deploy capital in the right areas. We are spending a significant amount on skills but collectively it’s not adding up to the sum of its parts.”

Brown quoted data from a recent investment survey as an example, which found that while the industry is desperate for more help for mid-level and senior roles, only 27% of its collective skills investment is going towards the upper echelons. Industry bodies simply hadn’t realized the need to properly resolve this until very recently, she posited.

“Those in the middle of their careers were promoted too soon during Covid and that was exacerbated by the huge impact of Covid on mental health and the ability to retain crew and knowledge,” added Brown, who ran Amazon Europe for five years, overseeing the likes of Clarkson’s Farm, Good Omens and The Grand Tour. “There is not enough investment going to the leadership side. There are a number of schemes but they are all too reactive, we need a much more holistic view.”

‘Top Boy’ director’s “unpaid” project

Backing up Brown’s point, Top Boy director Myriam Raja said it “isn’t right” that she hasn’t had any work since last June, while she writes her own feature without receiving any income.

Raja is currently working on a film in Urdu set in pre-colonial India and she said she is struggling without training or development funding. She previously directed a number of episodes of double-BAFTA-winning Top Boy Season 3.

“You still feel a lack of security [in the middle of your career],” she added. “When there are not many directors like you you feel like a sole representative and your projects get scrutinized more.”

Speaking to the same inquiry in January, Bend it Like Beckham auteur Gurinder Chadha spoke of the funding challenges pertaining to her new Christmas movie about an Indian Scrooge.

Work on taking a more holistic view has already started with the Screen Sector Task Force, Brown stressed. The body was set up as an extension of the BFI Skills Task Force last year and issued a blueprint to resolve the crisis, which included transforming skills body ScreenSkills.

New ScreenSkills boss Laura Mansfield told today’s hearing that there is a “degree of urgency” now for a “central strategic body” and more data. “We need to look at the consistency of year-on-year data that looks not just at skills gaps but where the investment is going,” she added. “The opportunity is here to inform investment decisions not just for companies and indies but also for freelancers to make decisions about where they want to devote their careers and energy.”

Bectu’s latest research found that two-thirds of freelancers in UK film and TV are out of work.

A new holistic strategy will be unveiled by ScreenSkills in September, Mansfield said. Speaking to the fragmentation issues raised by Brown, Jon Wardle, who runs the UK’s National Film & Television School, said his school gets “400 director applications and 30 sound recordist applications” per year, “and yet if I was a parent I’d be saying, ‘Go and be a sound recordist, there’s so much work out there you’ll probably never be out of a job’.”

Wardle also faced questions over the industry’s poor working class representation, which recent research found is at its lowest level for a decade. In terms of his school, he said things are improving slightly – from 12% working class course representation to 17% over the past three years – but “scholarships are key” to improving things quicker.

Brown said a “pan-sector body” would “enable us to act as one voice both to government and to outreach to enable us to improve these [working class representation] statistics.”

The UK’s British Film & High-End TV Inquiry has heard from a number of big names in the biz including Chadha, Slow Horses’ James Hawes and the CEOs of Vue and Studiocanal.