What's happening to the UK Cultural Production System?

In 2025, Skills England published an assessment of the creative industries.[^1] Buried in the data was a finding that deserves more attention than it has received: employers in the creative industries are reporting shortages in "creative and innovative thinking" itself. The industries that depend on creative capacity to fuel their products are saying they cannot find people with that capacity.

The finding requires context. Creative industries actually have lower overall skills gap rates than other sectors. But when creative employers do identify gaps, creative thinking appears disproportionately among them. The data comes from employer perceptions in the Employer Skills Survey, not from objective measurement, and multiple interpretations are possible. Perhaps expectations have shifted. Perhaps the word "creativity" has been stretched to mean something it cannot deliver. Perhaps the conditions that foster creative thinking have eroded to the point where fewer people enter the workforce with it intact, and those who do find it harder to sustain over a career.

I have spent the past few months investigating that third possibility. I have worked in PR and communications agencies for over a decade, and I have watched the conditions around creative work change. What I have found through this investigation suggests something structural is happening to the UK's cultural production system, and the Skills England data is one surface indicator of a deeper pattern.

Consider what else the evidence shows. According to ScreenSkills data cited in the Creative Industries Sector Plan, 65% of freelancers have reported difficulty finding work in the past year.[^2] This sits alongside the employer-reported skills shortages, producing an apparent paradox: surplus and shortage at the same time. The Music Venue Trust reports that 125 grassroots music venues closed in 2023 alone, representing 16% of the UK's grassroots venues.[^3] These are the spaces where musicians develop craft through performance, where failure is possible, and where creative capacity gets built through repetition and feedback. Once closed, they cannot be quickly rebuilt. Meanwhile, the touring circuit has contracted dramatically. UK Music data shows that artists are playing an average of 11 shows in 2024, compared to 22 in 1994.[^4] Over three decades, the opportunities to develop mastery through practice have halved.

A picture emerges from these figures, and it is not the picture painted by official industry narratives. The government's Creative Industries Sector Plan focuses on growth, global leadership, and harnessing AI.[^5] It sets targets for increased GVA, productivity, and exports. But when you examine whose voices appear in the document and whose are absent, a gap becomes visible. Worker voices are marginal and practitioner perspectives are thin, with only three unions receiving mention. The advertising sector, despite its substantial influence on how culture gets mediated and circulated, receives minimal space. Investment flows toward technology while the humans who will use that technology receive less attention. The plan measures what can be counted (output, revenue, headcount) but has no metrics for depth, meaning, or the conditions that allow good work to happen.

This gap between what gets measured and what matters is not invisible to everyone. In 2023, Creative PEC published the Good Work Review, a comprehensive assessment of job quality across the creative industries.[^6] The findings were sobering. No creative sub-sector performed well across all measures. The Film and TV Charity estimated between 23,000 and 35,000 "missing older workers" who had dropped out mid-career.[^7] Only one in ten freelancers reported receiving any training. Workers aged 25-34 showed the lowest job satisfaction of any age cohort, and were most likely to want permanent employment but unable to find it. The review made sixteen recommendations. The Sector Plan, published two years later, explicitly referenced it, pledging to "support the industry's work to deliver the Good Work Review action plan" and promising a freelance champion. In January, in the House of Lords, the government confirmed that champion has still not been appointed.[^8] A round table is scheduled. A work plan will follow. Nearly three years after the diagnosis, the system is still finalising discussions about who might advocate for the people inside it.

This is the gap I am trying to understand. The diagnosis exists but the structural explanation does not. To understand why the system keeps producing these outcomes despite good intentions requires a different kind of analysis.

The systems thinker Donella Meadows spent her career studying how complex systems produce patterns of behaviour that emerge from structure, often at odds with what the people inside them are trying to achieve.[^9] Her insight was that systems have their own logic. They optimise for goals embedded in their structure, regardless of what the people inside them believe they are doing. The way to understand why a system behaves as it does is to look at what accumulates and what depletes, what flows and what gets blocked, what reinforcing dynamics accelerate, and what balancing dynamics have weakened. Meadows also showed that not all interventions are equal. Some changes barely register while others can shift entire systems. The most powerful leverage points are often counterintuitive: not the parameters everyone debates (budgets, timelines, headcounts) but the deeper goals the system optimises for and the paradigms, the unexamined assumptions, that hold those goals in place. Policy tends to focus on parameters. This investigation is looking at paradigms.

Through that lens, I observe cultural output becoming thinner, faster, and more homogenised while the people producing it experience depletion and the creative capacity they draw on erodes. This is a structural observation about how the system is configured, not a complaint about individual work or a nostalgic claim that things were better before. The evidence on conditions and depletion is strong. Whether output is genuinely becoming thinner and more similar is harder to prove with documents alone, which is why I am treating it as a hypothesis to test through conversation with practitioners who experience the system from inside.

The creativity research helps explain the mechanism. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, who studied creative individuals across various domains for decades, argued that creativity is not a property of individuals but an interaction between three systems: the domain (accumulated knowledge and conventions), the field (gatekeepers who decide what counts), and the individual (the person producing variation).[^10] All three must function well for creativity to flourish. If the domain becomes shallow, if the field becomes distorted by pressures that reward speed over quality, individual talent alone cannot compensate. The systems that would recognise and preserve their contributions are not functioning.

Teresa Amabile's research on the conditions for creativity identifies four requirements: time for incubation, freedom from surveillance, intrinsic motivation, and psychological safety.[^11] These are not luxuries. They are the conditions under which creative thinking actually occurs. When timelines compress, when metrics and platforms create constant observation, when financial precarity undermines intrinsic motivation, when job insecurity destroys psychological safety, the capacity for creative work erodes regardless of the talent available. The Skills England finding starts to make sense. Creative thinking requires conditions. The conditions are being systematically removed.

None of this began with generative AI, though AI is part of why it matters now. The attention economy was not invented by social media or ChatGPT. In 1833, Benjamin Day discovered that a newspaper could be sold below cost if it attracted a large enough audience, then sold access to that audience to advertisers.[^12] That insight launched an industry built on extraction: capturing human attention and converting it into revenue. Each technological transition since has intensified the same logic. Radio, television, cable, the internet, social media, and now AI have each compressed timelines further, demanded more volume, and rewarded pattern-consistency over originality.

AI is accelerating dynamics that were already running. It collapses the distance between idea and output. It enables volume without proportional effort. It homogenises through pattern-matching, learning from existing data and reproducing what is statistically common. And it is affecting the people inside the system: reducing the need to cultivate research and deep work skills when answers can be offered up on a plate, shortening the creative process before craft has time to develop.

The discourse around AI has become polarised in ways that obscure this picture. Uncritical adoption treats AI as a solution to problems it is more likely to intensify. Fearful rejection abandons agency to those who will use these tools regardless. What is missing is the recognition that individuals can still choose how they relate to AI, that the efficiency gains could be reinvested in time for depth rather than funnelled into producing more volume, and that making those choices well requires AI literacy: understanding what these tools actually are, what they can and cannot do, and what the system was already doing before they arrived.

This is the investigation I am conducting. I am mapping the UK cultural production system: how meaning originates in lived experience, how it gets translated through media, how the work gets done, what infrastructure shapes the conditions, how education transmits skills and paradigms, and how AI runs through all of it as an accelerant. I am doing this work in public because the evidence I need cannot come from documents alone. Government reports tell me what policymakers measure and what they miss. They do not tell me how practitioners experience the system, whether the dynamics I am mapping match what people actually live, or where my hypotheses break down.

I want to hear from people inside the system. Freelancers, agency creatives, in-house teams, educators, commissioners, strategists, filmmakers, designers, writers. Does what I am observing match your experience? Where does it fail to account for what you see?

This research is the foundation for our first Dispatch Studios editorial program. If you follow along, you will see the work develop and the thinking tested against lived experience. I am not claiming to have answers. I am observing a pattern and asking whether others recognise it.

But I am claiming something. There is a structural explanation for the unease many people in the creative industries are feeling, and naming that structure is the first step toward agency within it. The dominant paradigm treats creative capacity as infinite, something that can always be demanded faster and in greater volume. The evidence suggests otherwise. Creative capacity is a stock that depletes when conditions erode. Protecting those conditions is a choice rather than a constraint. The efficiency gains from AI could be reinvested in time for depth rather than funnelled into more volume.

Understanding how the system works does not fix it. But it changes what becomes possible. That is what I am trying to build here. A way of seeing. And an invitation to see it together.

Notes

[^1]: Skills England, Creative Industries Sector Assessment (2025). Data on skills gaps drawn from the Employer Skills Survey.

[^2]: ScreenSkills/ScreenSafe survey data, cited in Department for Culture, Media and Sport, Creative Industries Sector Plan (June 2025), p.43.

[^3]: Music Venue Trust, cited in Creative Industries Sector Plan (June 2025), p.50.

[^4]: UK Music, cited in Creative Industries Sector Plan (June 2025), p.50.

[^5]: Department for Culture, Media and Sport, Creative Industries Sector Plan (June 2025).

[^6]: Heather Carey, Lesley Giles, and Dave O'Brien, Good Work Review: Job Quality in the Creative Industries (Creative PEC, February 2023).

[^7]: Film and TV Charity data, cited in Good Work Review (2023).

[^8]: House of Lords Hansard, Oral Question on Freelance Champion for the Creative Industries, 22 January 2026.

[^9]: Donella H. Meadows, Thinking in Systems: A Primer (Chelsea Green Publishing, 2008). See also Meadows, "Leverage Points: Places to Intervene in a System" (1999).

[^10]: Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention (Harper Collins, 1996). See also Csikszentmihalyi, "A Systems Perspective on Creativity" in Handbook of Creativity (Cambridge University Press, 1999).

[^11]: Teresa M. Amabile, "How to Kill Creativity," Harvard Business Review (September-October 1998). See also Amabile, Creativity in Context (Westview Press, 1996).

[^12]: Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants: The Epic Scramble to Get Inside Our Heads (Knopf, 2016). Wu traces the origins of the attention economy to Benjamin Day's New York Sun.