What is in the £50m for creative businesses

About £18m of nearly £50m funding for creative businesses will be available to the wider arts sector.

Announced by DCMS on Tuesday (February 1), the £50m (it's actually £47.8m) is split across three funds.

£21m will extend the Global Screen Fund, a £7m film industry scheme established to replace EU funding, and £8.4m will be given to UK Games Fund to develop British video game start ups.

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The remaining £18.4m will be used to continue the Creative Scale Up programme, a two-year, £4m DCMS pilot scheme introduced as part of the Creative Industries Sector Deal in December 2018.

The initiative gave business support and a £6,000 grant to "growth-stage" enterprises, and helped match them with local angel investors.

Its next phase will be supported by the government's Creative Industries Council, which pushed for an extension ahead of the pilot's end in 2021. 

Culture Secretary Nadine Dorries, in a recorded message for the Creative Coalition Festival on Tuesday morning, said Creative Scale Up feeds into a creative sector "vision" for growth to be published in summer.

Among environmental, international and regional levelling up objectives, Dorries said the vision will also include her own "personal priorities" around improving access to creative work for deprived communities.

200 businesses supported

More than 200 creative businesses were supported during the Creative Scale Up pilot, DCMS says.

The programme initially ran in the Greater Manchester, West Midlands and West of England combined authority areas with cohorts of scalable business ventures.

Many participants were creative rather than cultural businesses, working in areas such as marketing, tech, gaming and design, although theatres and festivals also received support.

£2.7m boost to turnover

An evaluation by the Scale Up Institute found particular successes for West Midlands participants: 79% of Creative Scale Up businesses there increased their turnover by an average of £2.7m.

65% grew their staff, on average by two employees per business.

Businesses also gained access to new investors. Twenty investor networks across the pilot regions expressed interest in supporting the creative sector, heralding further local projects.

But the institute warns such networks are less developed outside of the "golden triangle" of Oxford, Cambridge and London. 

It said regional investor networks have an "appetite" to support the creative sector but "believe there is a lack of investor-ready programmes".

"This tends to lead angels towards screen-focused and platform-based sub-sectors such as gaming and media tech ahead of other creative sub-sectors."