Plugging the Data Gap: Freelance Workers in the Creative Industries: The lack of data on the self-employed and freelance workforce is a particularly severe problem for the creative industries, which are disproportionately made up of freelancers.

The Covid-19 crisis has highlighted the lack of available data on the self-employed and freelance workforce, and this gap is particularly acute in the Creative Industries. Although well documented nationally this gap became apparent to us at a local level during mapping exercises carried out by the Creative Informatics project and the Clwstwr project, both part of the AHRC Creative Clusters programme.

We began to map the geographical spread and economic activities of the Creative Industries in the South East Scotland area and in Wales respectively in order to build a picture of our creative communities. However, it quickly became clear that there were substantial challenges in obtaining publicly available, complete and reliable data.

In this article we describe some of the issues that are creating barriers to full understanding of the Creative Industries workforce, especially the self-employed and freelancers, and we suggest some possible routes towards addressing this problem. This matters at both a local and national level for planning and providing appropriate support and allocation of resources.