Creative industries see record year

By Brookson

The UK's creative industries have been applauded for seeing a record year in terms of performance.

According to the Department for Culture, Media and Sport, these industries saw continued growth throughout 2014. This in turn has been supported by a number of government initiatives and tax reliefs.

The latter is great news for limited companies, sole traders and umbrella company contractors as the creative industries have been considered a stronghold for these workers.

Areas that have proved to be particularly strong are music, film and video games. For example, the UK's video game industry is currently leading the European market. It is the largest games development community on the continent, with 1,902 video games companies based in the UK. Nesta's report, A Map of the UK Games Industry, published in September 2014, said the UK video games industry has the potential to bring £1.72 billion to the economy.

Commenting on the results, minister for the creative industries Ed Vaizey said: "2014 has been a fantastic year for UK music, film and video games. It’s great to see continued growth across all our creative industries with more investment going into training and production. Together the sector contributes £70bn to the UK and so a vital part of our economy. I look forward to 2015 with the expectation of even greater things to come."

Among the British film companies that have shown to be doing well are Pinewood Studios. This is good news for small businesses local to Pinewood as it has been known to use nearby firms as part of its supply chain. It talked about this at the Confederation of British Industry Annual Conference, where it encouraged other businesses to take advantage of the fact that other firms tend to cluster nearby.

To build on the success of the music industry, the government has been helping independent music companies market their products overseas with the Music Export Growth scheme. Through this, these firms can get grants of up to £50,000.

Supporting growth of the video games industry in the UK, the Government introduced the Gaming Tax Relief, which will open more opportunities for training and employment. According to a news report from Deloitte and TIGA titled Making Games in the UK Today: June 2014, this tax relief could be worth £25 million per year for the industry.

On top of this, the Creative Industries Council also launched CreatUK, which is the first industry-led strategy that aims to ensure growth and see more jobs secured both in the UK and internationally. It is also intended to help with exporting UK creativity abroad and to encourage further investment.

Speaking about CreateUK, industry co-chair of the Creative Industries Council and Vice President for EMEA at Facebook Nicola Mendelsohn said: "The sector has found a strategy and working arrangement with Government that means we are well placed to continue to secure the UK’s place as a leading global hub for the creative industries for the decades to come."

Will the Government ever truly appreciate the UK flexible work force?

By Brookson

There are an estimated 2.5M workers within the UK flexible workforce. 1.7M of these are freelancers (IPSE data) and 1.2M work through recruitment businesses. These workers are providing their services to end client businesses but are not employed by those businesses – they are typically engaged directly by recruitment business, employed by an umbrella business or are self-employed, working through their own limited company or on an unincorporated basis. The flexible workforce has been growing steadily for many years, both prior to and through the recent recession. These workers are an important part of the growth story that we are now seeing in the UK economy, allowing businesses to commit resources to new projects or additional business activity that they would not be prepared to do if they need to employ permanent staff to do so. The flexible work force is a vital element for the UK in order to gain a competitive advantage in its activity in global markets.

So, are these vital workers being properly valued by the UK Government?

My high level answer to this question would be that the flexible workforce is more valued by our Government than it has been at any time previously, but there is still some way to go before it is properly appreciated and supported.

There are three elements that I have considered to come to my high level view – the understanding of the flexible workforce by Government, the legislative decisions taken recently impacting the flexible workforce and political moves made.

The flexible workforce is undoubtedly more understood by more policy makers than it ever has been. This greater understanding can be seen in many government and government department comments and communications on self-employed and flexible workers. There is much more differentiation between the various populations of workers with their differing needs. The discussions that we have with politicians and policy makers, both at a Brookson business level and through our FCSA industry trade body, clearly show an improving understanding of and appreciation for flexible workers. There is further progress needed on this but progress in levels of understanding has been positive over recent years in my view.

Government and policy makers have also demonstrated this greater understanding in the decisions that have been taken in the legislative framework around the flexible workforce. Some action has been taken by HMRC around the low paid end schemes abusing national minimum wage, travel and subsistence expenses and salary sacrifice schemes. 

The offshore and onshoreintermediaries legislation was very precisely focussed on false self employment schemes in particular sectors and which were prevalent at the low paid end of the flexible workforce, even though the reporting requirements element to this legislation is not quite so well targeted. IR35 has been left alone despite a number of reviews by the Government through OTS and the House of Lords Select Committee – this was the right answer in my view. It lets the genuinely self employed workers at the high paid end of flexible workforce retain the stability they have had for many years. I recognise that IR35 is flawed in a number of ways but it is manageable and known and these are valuable things as the economy starts to pick up. The IR35 Forum continue to work at improving the administration of this area of enforcement and the recent decision to withdraw the Business Entity Test’s previously issued is, again in my view, another positive step. The use of limited companies by contractors has also been reviewed and validated – again, a good outcome helped by the improving understanding of the relevant policy makers. There are a number of examples of sensible decision making in the legislative environment over the last few years.

Additionally, we have seen some positive actions in political as well as legislative terms. The recent appointment of David Morris MP as the Government’s self-employed ambassador is a significant step forward. A large population of the flexible workforce are self-employed contractors and freelancers and having a Government post specifically focussed on understanding all elements of the UK’s 4.6M self-employed individuals, including the contractor and freelancer elements feels like a substantial commitment from this Government. Obviously, we will wait to see what agenda is then driven by Mr Morris and the Government under this new appointment but I would see the appointment at this stage as extremely encouraging.

If I step back and look across the various activities of the Government, Government departments and other related policy makers or regulators/enforcement organisations, I am encouraged by what I have seen over recent years. More of these individuals appear to be getting more of an understanding of the flexible workforce and, in doing so, are seemingly recognising more of the value that this section of the UK workforce brings for the UK economy.

That said, there is still a long way to go. There is still undoubtedly a lot of abuse and exploitation at the low paid end of the flexible workforce that hasn’t yet been tackled by the Government. Low paid, low skilled often vulnerable workers are still being forced unknowingly into ‘industrial’ tax avoidance schemes for the benefit of end clients, recruitment businesses and umbrella business providers. These large scale abuses need to be tackled more rigorously. In doing this, there is a real and urgent need for the Government to properly understand the umbrella market. Compliant employment businesses are a vital part of the flexible workforce supply chain, providing significant benefits and protections to flexible workers who chose to work this way. Equally, there are instances where workers are being exploited. The key here is for politicians and policy makers to spend enough time understanding the abuses and stop these from happening rather than seeing all umbrella businesses as rogues. We see an example of this in the latest union campaign around umbrella working in the construction sector. This generated a day of action around the UK. Undoubtedly, the abuse of national minimum wage in all of its forms must be stopped – HMRC have the enforcement powers necessary to do this and I would hope that they would get on and sort these abuses out. The key point here is that the umbrella way of working is not the problem here – it is abuse of the existing legislation. This needs enforcement of current laws not a stopping of umbrella working completely.

In summary, I think this Government is increasingly recognising the contribution of the flexible work force and the environment we currently have is as good as it has been for many years. There is still further progress to be made and this should be concentrated on further education of politicians and policy makers on flexible workforce to ensure they continue to make sensible policy decisions and enforcement of existing legislation to ensure the known non-compliance problems in the flexible workforce are actioned, particularly at the low paid, potentially vulnerable worker end of the workforce.

Let’s see what 2015 brings!

Things for flexible workers to look forward to in 2015

By Brookson

It looks like 2015 could be a great year for the flexible workforce, particularly after some of the successes that contractors and freelancers have seen so far this year.

With more people choosing to become self-employed, it shows that this is proving to be a preferable method of working for many. The benefits are increasing and some are finding that their businesses are becoming more profitable.

Therefore, there are certain things that self-employed workers may be able to look forward to in 2015. Here are just a few.

Growth?

There’s no guarantees that businesses will grow next year but a number of small firms are hopeful going into 2015. According to a survey by the Federation of Small Businesses (FSB) of its members, 62 per cent believe that they will see growth.

This isn’t just general optimism pushing this belief. It follows on from FSB figures on productivity, which show that this went up during the second half of 2014.

Wage rises?

The FSB noted that an increase in productivity can often be linked to wage growth. With this in mind, flexible workers may be able to command higher rates of pay.

Certain sectors are still in high demand, such as IT, so companies may be willing to pay more to hire flexible workers in these sectors. As long as contractors and freelancers have the correct skillset for the role in a sector where the right talent is tricky to come by, then they may be able to command higher rates of pay.

Business rates review

The issue of business rates has long been a troublesome subject for the self-employed and small businesses alike. However, the Conservative party has promised to investigate the current system for business rates, as was announced during the Autumn Statement on December 3rd.

While the government does say that the total amount collected from firms via business rates will not change, the system will have a full structural review.

What’s more, those using properties that have a rateable value of less than £50,000 will see the discount available to them rise by £500 to £1,500 next year. It is expected that this change will help around 500,000 companies.

A cap has been in place of how much business rates can rise by and this has been frozen at two per cent. Therefore, it will be easier for firms to plan in case their business rates rise.

The General Election

Underlining a number of promises from various political parties, including during the Autumn Statement and at the annual conferences for such parties as Labour and Conservative, is the fact that the general election is coming up next year.

Therefore, it may be wise to look over the manifestos of various political parties, see if the business-centric proposals they have put forward suit you and base your vote on that.

Search engine optimisation (SEO) for your freelance website

By: James Roberts, Brookson

If you’ve dabbled in the world of setting up your own website, you may have already heard of search engine optimisation (SEO). Although it is fundamental when producing online content, there are lots of misconceptions around regarding best SEO practice and what may seem like received wisdom one day can be obsolete the next.

It might sound like a daunting process, but here are a few tips to guide your SEO strategy. This is by no means an exhaustive list – Google is believed to use as many as 200 different criteria when it comes to ranking pages – but these key principles are a good place to start.

It’s not about the keywords

Many budding web writers assume that getting one or two keywords into every other sentence will automatically push their content up Google’s search engine results pages (SERPs). While this may have been true a few years ago, now it couldn’t be further from reality – trying too hard is actually more likely to see you penalised than rewarded.

The single most important thing you can do is produce unique, relevant and interesting content, only including keywords where they flow naturally in the context of the piece. Anything duplicated from other websites will not perform anywhere near as well as fresh content, so never just copy and paste information from your social media profiles on to landing pages.

Index and navigation

Search engines love sites that are easy to navigate and organised in logical ways. In practice, this means your freelance website needs to have short and simple URLs for every page – words from the headline connected by dashes will work much better than a long line of numbers – as well as being properly indexed.

Make sure your most important information is in HTML text format on the web page. Generally speaking, images, Java applets and other content that isn’t text tends to be ignored or even devalued by search engines, in spite of big changes to the way crawling technology scans web pages. Providing captions and alt text for images as well as transcripts for audio and video will pay dividends in the end.

Similarly, you need to pay attention to your meta-descriptions – the 150-character summaries which show up under the linked title of your site on SERPs. Wherever possible, make sure they stick to the character limit, so your site both looks professional and tells visitors exactly why they should click on your link.

Make connections

Links aren’t the be all and end all when it comes to SEO, but they constitute a great way of demonstrating not only that you are engaging with respected, useful sources to produce your own content, but also that other people view you as exactly that.

Inbound and outbound links alike are beneficial for SEO, so when writing your content consider including informative links to other sites you’re looking at – if you have a blog, for example, linking to the trusted sites that have inspired your post is a great place to start. Similarly, look for guest blogging opportunities on other sites that will allow you to link back to your own.

How Brookson can help…

We will provide all the information and support you need to develop a successful career as a freelancer, whether you are a freelance marketing consultant, graphic designer, copywriter, photographer or any other freelance professional.

From deciding which way of working suits you best or how to set up a limited company, to which expenses you can claim, how to manage your invoices sand how much to put aside for tax, we are by your side throughout, making sure you have the information you need to make the right decisions. Find out more about our all-inclusive accountancy services.