Brexit, 10 years on: What the vote still means for the UK’s Creative Industries

From frictionless to fragmented: Brexit’s lasting impact on the Creative Industries 

Fundamental changes for freelancers and small firms 

Brexit fundamentally changed how cross-border collaboration works in the creative industries, especially for freelancers and small firms. Brexit did not eliminate collaboration, but it shifted it from frictionless, network-based interaction to a more costly, bureaucratic, and selective system due to visas, work permits, tax compliance, and customs procedures.  

While being part of the EU allowed a creative collaboration to rely heavily on free movement of people — think of frequent border crossings for short-term/project-based work assignments for freelancers or artistic performances — now that creative collaboration still exists, but it is administratively constrained, it has to be more selective, it has to pay more to make it worthwhile, it requires more planning time, and often it becomes a less frequent interaction.  

This can have longer-term consequences on cultivating new talent and allowing the younger generation of creatives to grow and thrive. Of course, if you work in games, this might not be a problem, as it is digital work that can accommodate online collaborations. But for live performances, it is a different story. 

Freelancers and microbusinesses have fewer resources to face the Brexit disruption and costs. Complying with all the new regulations and paperwork introduced by Brexit meant more time spent on non-income-generating activities rather than dealing with the core business activity. When you are self-employed or a small business employing a few people, that means a huge cost.  

For example, from anecdotal evidence I gathered, a UK orchestra touring the EU had to employ one full-time person to deal with all the necessary requirements after Brexit (carnets for equipment, visas, navigation of 27 different national systems rather than one EU-wide regime, etc.). This cost is clearly prohibitive for a small emerging band.  

The local lens: What Brexit means for creatives in the North East 

Although the internationalisation of creative industries has remained a strength for the UK economy, the benefits and vulnerabilities are highly place-specific. Such internationalisation has become more uneven by region, subsector and firm type. Places like the North East can still benefit from global creative flows if policy, skills, university links and local clusters are deliberately strengthened.  

The North East, despite broadly voting for Brexit, is not “cut off” from international growth, but the benefits are unlikely to arrive automatically. They depend on whether local creative firms can access export support, digital trade opportunities, international clients and managerial capacity. With the end of the free movement of people, the question is whether the system supports the kinds of creative work the region actually does: project-based, freelance, digital, cultural, music, screen, design and start-up activity.  

If visa costs, bureaucracy or uncertainty make it harder to bring people in, smaller regional ecosystems may be more exposed than London-based organisations with specialist HR and legal capacity.  

The Northern Creative Corridor is an initiative aimed at connecting creative clusters across Northern England to drive regional growth in the creative industries. Led by a coalition including the RSA, Creative PEC, Arts Council England, the BBC, and several Northern Mayors, the project seeks to develop a pan-regional strategy leveraging national and devolved powers. Hence, creating connections beyond the North East is the way forward to create the regional gravitas that can rival the London hub. 

A wish list for strengthening the UK’s creative economy 

If I had three wishes to strengthen the creative industries, my first would allow free movement between the EU and the UK for artists and freelancers tomorrow. 

But if I can be bold, I would personally reverse Brexit altogether. The debate at the time centred on immigration control, when in reality the UK never exercised the powers it had when it was an EU member, and immigration has continued to rise after the referendum - but with less from the EU and more from Asia.   

Beyond the EU, many countries around the world still have lots of barriers to service trade, which is the topic of our forthcoming report. According to the OECD estimates, the cost of trading services is twice as high as that of trading goods. From different administrative procedures and regulations to barriers to the movement of people, conditions on market entry or measures affecting competition, these persistently high and fragmented barriers impact creative industries. Closer international co-operation is needed to advance negotiations on further opening up services markets and this would be in the interest of the UK given that most of our creative exports are in services. 

My third wish would be about the statistical systems' need to catch up with the increasing digitalisation of the economy that impedes the true recording of economic transactions. Export statistics are generally still stuck to a world of goods trade, where nearly the entire universe of goods is captured when it physically crosses the borders.  

But when it comes to services, and particularly the growing importance of digitally-delivered services, lots of digital transactions are elusive, they are recorded mostly using surveys, so they depend on the sampling characteristics and the assumptions made to extend the sample to the population. The absence of detailed digital trade transactions data limits our research work as well, since creative industries represent a large share of digitally delivered services. Improving our statistical capabilities to record such trade is essential for providing a true picture of the sector’s international performance. 

Looking to the next decade 

I want to believe that the UK is well-positioned to embrace many of the challenges that the future holds for creative industries, provided that the political will to keep supporting the creative industries with coherent policies is there.  

But I am also observing that when it comes to the university sector, many HEIs are slashing Humanities and Arts courses that are considered no longer economically viable. If we offer fewer degrees in English, Music or Arts, the long-term impact can be less rosy. The HE sector in the UK is probably going to shrink and reshape after the expansion it sustained for several years, but there needs to be a joined-up strategy going forward, where we look at what we offer and where.  

For example, if the North East eliminated music degrees, what would the repercussions be on the talent pipelines, and especially on the more disadvantaged sections of the student population who might not afford the means to study in a distant location? Sadly, at the moment, it does not appear to me that such a joined-up national strategy exists. 

Overall, since June 2016, the UK’s creative industries have become larger, more digital, more export-oriented and more strategically important — but also more exposed to skills shortages, uneven regional development, and intensified global competition.  

In the future, I see their economic importance growing, especially as AI and robotisation reshape the economy. This will shift the wage premiums in the job market to those workers who can demonstrate, among other things, creativity, idea generation under uncertainty and intellectual property generation, which are hard to fully automate.  

The sector is likely to become even more dependent on digital services exports, platform distribution, cross-border IP licensing and digitally enabled production. Our work on trade shows resilience in creative service exports and emphasises the importance of digital trade agreements, so future growth will probably come less from goods and more from scalable, intangible, digitally traded creative services.  

However, the next decade will be harder because maintaining such an advantage will depend on whether the UK can combine creative excellence with AI capability, digital trade policy, inclusive regional growth, better skills provision, stronger investment pipelines and more resilient freelance/microbusiness ecosystems.