Please Stop Feeding the Insatiable Film Subsidy Monster

Our politicians seem hypnotised by the glamour of high-end shows and movies. The latest culture, media and sport select committee report regurgitates industry complaints, calling for even more subsidies. Not content with existing tax reliefs, MPs propose new relief for research, development and marketing in film, plus an audacious 5 per cent levy on British subscriber revenues from Netflix, Disney, Amazon and Apple.

The goal? To create a slush fund to support high-end “culturally British” TV production, a sub-sector supposedly in “crisis”.

Crisis? Really? Total spending in Britain’s film and high-end TV sector increased by almost a third in 2024. The runaway success of Netflix’s Adolescence — a British-American collaboration involving Brad Pitt’s Plan B Entertainment — has made it the platform’s third most watched English-language series to date. Clearly, good British drama can succeed globally without taxpayers footing yet another bill.

Yet the industry is insatiable. Through the licence fee, National Lottery, regional funds and lavish tax credits, it’s already drenched in public cash. In 2022–23 alone, film tax relief cost taxpayers £553 million, high-end TV another £1.1 billion, and there’s a new independent film tax credit too. Just this week, in fact, we learnt that Jurassic World: Dominion received £89 million from taxpayers. I’ve yet to see a single MP worry about whether subsidising Hollywood dinosaurs is good value given our fiscal struggles.

These existing incentives undeniably attract inward investment. Throw money at any sector and you’ll get more activity and some identifiable successes within it. Yet this boom is now used as justification for more subsidies. British independent TV producers complain they’re hurt by higher costs, fewer available studios and losing talent to well-funded foreign productions.

We’re thus asked to compensate them for the consequences of existing stimulus, creating a welfare state for “high-end” domestic TV producing “distinctly British stories”. It’s an absurd cycle of dependency.

Let’s leave aside that it’s government planning laws that often stop studios such as Sky Studios Elstree North from expanding. This report takes at face value the fantastical British Film Institute claim that every £1 tax relief for high-end TV and film multiplies to generate £6.44 and £8.30 in gross value-added, respectively. Yet as the Tax Foundation, a US think tank, has repeatedly highlighted, production subsidies overwhelmingly reshuffle output and resources from one industry and place to another, rather than adding new value.

Consequently, we end up funding massive tax breaks for productions that would have happened anyway, while we see more films and TV as other sectors shrink.

MPs, though, have fallen for the poverty pleading and economic fantasies. Well-known figures such as Peter Kosminsky, the Wolf Hall director, and Patrick Spence, the Mr Bates vs. The Post Office executive producer, say that meaningful and quintessentially British dramas like future Mr Bates or Adolescence will be lost if streaming services use Britain to produce shows with global, rather than national, appeal. That these shows exist and thrive already is ignored. The speculative fearmongering is unfalsifiable.

Ironically, the resulting logic closely resembles the kind of protectionism British politicians ridicule from President Trump. MPs have rightly condemned Trump’s “reckless” reciprocal tariffs, measures he believes will shield American manufacturing from global competition. Yet here MPs are endorsing precisely the same flawed economic rationale — just applied to “protecting” British TV rather than steel or aluminium.

This is what real-world industrial policy looks like, devoid of romance. As my late colleague David Boaz once quipped: when you have a picnic, you attract ants; once government opens taxpayers’ chequebook, you attract special interests.

Rather than blithely agreeing to more and more support, MPs should start questioning the overall logic. If British television production can’t survive without endless support and special levies on streaming platforms, perhaps the problem lies not with funding but the content itself.