The UK government has some very ambitious plans in play for its creative sector. The Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) has outlined several new strategies to grow the GDP value contributed by these domestic industries by US$63 billion and add a million more jobs by 2030.

Britain’s creative sector is an economic success story for the country, growing at more than 1.5 times the rate of the broader economy over the past decade, and generating more than US$108 billion in gross value to the country’s GDP annually. The government released a Creative Industries Sector Vision report yesterday that laid out its strategy to build on this success by providing funding for start-ups to scale up, creating new development and production facilities, and increasing support for work in video games and music.

The plan is to open up four new research and development facilities, complete with virtual production equipment, and back them with US$79 million in new investment funding. A national CoSTAR lab and three regional labs will be kitted out with state-of-the-art CGI, AR and motion-capture technology.

The UK is also investing at least US$63 million to help creative companies scale up. And DCMS has upped the budget of its Create Growth program—which focuses on building the creative industry outside of London—by 36% (from US$23 million to US$36 million) in order to help 2,000 businesses access financing and commercialize their ideas.

The government is also increasing investment in grassroots music venues, plus providing funding to London Fashion Week and the London Film Festival in 2024. And to help develop the country’s video game industry, the UK Games Fund is getting a US$6-million boost over the next two years that will bring its total value up to US$17 million.

In 2022, the UK spent a record US$7.8 billion on film and TV production, driven by generous tax reliefs, according to the government. To provide more support to this industry, the DCMS announced in March that film and TV tax reliefs would be consolidated into a single refundable expenditure credit. For children’s TV and animated series, this amounts to 39% of qualified spending.

Photo courtesy of Jovaughn Stephens, via Unsplash.