Tax reliefs added more than £13 billion to the UK economy

In 2019 alone, the screen sector delivered £13.48 billion to the UK economy – a significant increase from £8.6 billion in 2016 – and generated 218.790 jobs, revealed the second edition of the Screen Business report, published by the BFI. The reliefs have also helped to attract significant capital investment into the sector’s facilities and services, generating an additional £3.60 billion in tax revenue to the Exchequer.

This second edition of the Screen Business report provides a comprehensive analysis of the value of the screen sector tax reliefs to the industry and to the wider UK economy. It shows the tax reliefs have been instrumental to how UK made and developed film, high-end, children’s and animation television and video games have flourished since the reliefs were introduced.

The report’s analysis concludes before the onset of the pandemic (the last point at which full data is available), which globally brought many industries to a halt. Since then, the BFI’s latest statistics have shown a bounce-back in activity, with £1.24 billion of film and high-end television spend during the last quarter of 2020. This has only accelerated during 2021 and it is now on a trajectory to surpass pre-pandemic business levels as it closes in on £5 billion production spend solely on film and high-end television over the past 12 months.

The report underlines how the strength and resilience of the screen industries pre-pandemic has enabled the production sector to bounce back so effectively and become one of the UK’s strongest booming industries with £4.7 billion production spend on film and high-end television alone from January to September 2021. Over the three-year period of the report, direct spend on screen production in the United Kingdom has increased by 74% between 2017 and 2019 to reach £13.86 billion (£7.94 billion, 2014-2016).

The report also revealed that an estimated £1.02 million in tax relief seeded £5.11 billion in direct production spend in 2019, a 61% increase on 2016, and led to an additional £6.43 billion in GVA for the UK economy.