Creative Industries Statistics

The creative industries contribution to the economy accounted for 2.89% of Gross Value Added (GVA) in 2009 an increase of 0.07% on 2008 in relative terms but in absolute terms GVA decreased by 1% from £36.6bn to £36.3bn. The biggest contribution to UK GVA from the creative industries came from publishing with 0.92%, then advertising with 0.55% and TV and radio with 0.38% (figures from the Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS)). The sector accounted for 10.6% of UK exports in 2009 of which publishing and TV and radio accounted for the greatest exports of services with 3.1% and 2.6% respectively. There were 106,700 creative businesses in the UK in 2011, up to 5.1% from 4.9% in 2009 and 108,820 creative local units, an increase from 4.2% in 2009 to 4.3%. The biggest contribution to the number of businesses came from music and visual performing arts with 30,460 or 1.46% of enterprises and 1.21% of local units in 2011. Advertising accounted for 16,101 businesses or 0.77% of UK total and design 14,720 or 0.71%. Creative businesses employed 1.5m people directly or in a creative role in another industry. It amounts to 5.14% of UK employment. It is a small increase on 2008 when the number was 1.44m or 4.99% of UK employment. The music and visual and performing arts were the largest employers in the creative industries sector with 300,000 employees in 2009 or 1% of UK employment. Next came advertising with 0.92% of employment and 268254 people employed, then publishing with 0.84% and 243,809 people.

Creative Businesses in the UK

The number of businesses in the creative industries in the UK grew from 125,300 in 2007 to 157,400 in 2008. The sub-sector with the largest number of new businesses was the software, computer games and electronic publishing category which increased by 18,200 additional businesses from 56,800 in 2007 to 75,000 in 2008. Advertising, music and the visual and performing arts also had significant increases in numbers of businesses.

The increase in the number of creative businesses did not bring an similar increase in the number of people employed in the creative industries. In fact there was a significant fall in their number. The software, computer games and electronic publishing category increased their numbers by 40,700 to 681,600. The largest percentage increase was in architecture at 8%, from 120,700 to 130,100, a difference of 9,400. There were also increases in the numbers of people employed in the advertising (1%), art and antiques (6%), music and the visual and performing arts (4%) categories but these were offset by decreases in crafts (-7%), design and designer fashion (-18%), video, film and photography (-3%), publishing and radio and TV (-3%). There was an overall decrease of 7,000 in the number of people employed in the creative industries in the UK in 2008.