Creative Freelancers, draws on evidence from 700 freelancers and around 50 organisations that use them to demonstrate who these workers are and what they do for the fastest growing sector of the British economy.
Nearly half of the creative workers in the creative industries – 47 per cent – are freelance compared with 15 per cent across the workforce as a whole.
Recommendations to improve the working lives of the self-employed include:
- Piloting ways of providing sustainable social security for freelancers
- Providing extra support during transition to Making Tax Digital and quarterly tax returns
- Protecting freelancers’ creative workspaces against development
- Making self-employment, across all sectors, part of a ministerial brief in the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS)
- Supporting an independent UK-wide virtual hub – a business booster network – which would be a one-stop shop for business advice and facilitate peer-to-peer mentoring for creative entrepreneurs