Comments

Every pound invested has generated five in return? I'd like some of that action, and so would a lot of investors. So why exactly do you want me to subsidise it?

* What is the Hollywood equivalent of the BFC?

Oh, and it isn't Luger, it is Browning. Far superior weapon, too.

And here is the ref: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanns_Johst

It's has always struck me as an anomaly that tax payers should be funding the film industry and furthermore you need to assess just how successful the UKFC has been over the past ten years in achieving it's original remit of creating a "sustainable UK film industry". They have in fact done little to change the ultimate problem with UK film, that of distribution and the ability to get bums on seats and profiteer from productions.

Domestic cinema is still essentially barred from US owned multiplex monopoly. Without the ability to profit the industry constitutes a never ending investment with either loss or minimal return.

I would rather our money be invested in essential services instead of being used to prop up a failing industry, which it will continue to be unless there is a grass-roots reassessment of the mechanics of the industry.

Roger, marvellous post and thanks so much for your contribution to the debate

Rhoda Klap- You're not subsiding, you're investing in great British industry that as Roger says "one of the few we have left in the UK which actually makes things" and that returns huge amount of money to the treasury and massively enriches all our lives. A world without Enduring Love, This is England, Man on Wire, The Constant Gardner, Vera Drake etc etc would be a much poorer place.

And the Hollywood equivalent of the UKFC is a massive tax credit to the industry, brought in by a Republican President and Republican Gov of California. Both of whom understand the need to support a great industry.. And now thanks to Hunt and Vaizey, all you'll be getting at your local multiplex is heavily subsidised Hollywood fare. Yesterday was a dark day for our culture!

Please all see Germany as an example of a country to which Hollywood has flocked as a consequence of impressive tax breaks. UKFC has a place in developing grass roots film. This is an unnecessary swipe for Slasher and his crew.

I’m sorry that Mr Michell feels that cutting the UK Film Council is a disastrous move. Unfortunately he doesn’t explain why. Instead, he conflates the UKFC and the British Film Industry as if they were the same thing. They’re not.

Take one example. Mr Michell says in defence of the UKFC that “a comparatively small investment of public money, both from Government and Lottery, has been repaid with handsome dividend. Indeed, every pound invested has generated five in return.” But this statistic (which requires a very generous and wide-ranging definition of “return”) applies to the UK film industry as a whole, has nothing whatsoever to do with the UK Film Council, and applies whether the UKFC is abolished or not.

On the other side, in his anxiety to attack the current Government, he overlooks the fact that the two drivers of film production in the UK – the film tax credit, and the allocation of Lottery funding to film – have been specifically retained. The Minister has made this absolutely clear - no change there.

All that the Minister has actually said is that in his view the UKFC is an over-elaborate and over-costly mechanism for disbursing Lottery funding and for implementing the Government’s policies on film. Or, as Mr Michell puts it, “the bureaucracy was sometimes daunting” and “the salaries of the higher execs raised a few eyebrows”. This last is a bit of an understatement, with four senior UKFC executives included in the infamous list of 170 public servants earning more than the Prime Minister, an inappropriate bonus structure (a 12.5% bonus for “not resigning”), lavish personal expenses (the second highest in the public sector), not to mention “gym expenses” for every member of staff, and so on.

All this indicates an organisation out of control and out of touch. Of course the Film Council delivered benefits to the health of UK film culture. With that kind of funding at its disposal, how could it not? The question which the Minister has addressed – and Mr Michell fails to consider - is whether it could be done better.

Investing in a Great British Industry - like we did with British Leyland?

If it is doing so well, surely it will get private funding?

Simon, so it is nothing like a subsidised gravy train then. At all.

Sorry Churm that 5 return on 1 invested statistic is NOT based on the industry as a whole. It's the total box office return vs the total amount invested.

There are in fact three “one-to-five” ratios commonly bandied about in connection with the UK Film Industry. As you rightly point out, one is the UKFC’s statistic that since its inception it has distributed £160 million of Lottery Funding to films which have helped to generate over £700 at the box office worldwide, a ratio of roughly one-to-five. But given that this Lottery funding was specifically allocated to film, and would have been disbursed anyway whether the UKFC existed or not, this does not count as evidence to support the retention of the Film Council. Nor is this a particularly useful statistic, because there is no relevant counterfactual – we cannot know what the box office revenues might have been if Lottery funding for production had been in the hands of (say) the BFI or the Arts Council.

Another one-to-five ratio often mentioned is based on a comparison of total expenditure on UK film production, which in 2009 was approximately £1 billion, with the recent UKFC-supported report by Oxford Economics which asserts that the UK film industry’s contribution to GDP in 2009, along with consequent tax revenues, is in excess of £5 billion – again, roughly one-to-five. As Mr Michell speaks of a “handsome dividend”, I assumed that this was his reference, especially as he uses figures from this report elsewhere in his article, and these figures do indeed apply to the UK Film Industry as a whole.

If I was wrong in my interpretation, I apologise, but I find it hard to see how global box office income can be described as a “dividend” given that most of these revenues disappear all over the world by way of sales tax on tickets, the share kept by the cinema, the costs of film prints and advertising, sales agents’ commissions, and so on. If this is what he means, I would only ask – a handsome dividend to whom?

The thing is churm (clearly you're typing away as an intern in hunts office) it's not the argument to either cut or not to cut it's the lack of any credible alternative, it's ideological with no clear plan. What we are seeing is the actions of people who have such as constricted experience of life that they have not empathy for anyone but people who live within their own tiny circle. Where is the plan. What's the replacement. Either you should speak for the government or say they don't have a plan.

@JoeSmith – You say that the problem is not whether the Film Council should be axed (though I suspect Mr Michell would disagree with you there), but instead is the fact that the Government do not have any clear plans for the future management of the functions currently carried out by the Film Council. This last is perfectly true, and Jeremy Hunt has been quite open about it. But surely we can agree that the best way to arrive at any new arrangements is through the widest possible consultation with the British film industry, and obviously you can’t have these discussions until you’ve announced the end of the existing mechanism (unless you want the debate to take place in secret behind closed doors?). And it’s in order to allow the fullest possible discussions and an orderly handover that Jeremy Hunt has allowed a full two years before the UKFC finally ceases operation. Indeed, I see from today’s Screen International that the Chairman and CEO of the Film Council are meeting with him this afternoon in order to talk about next steps.

If he was purely ideologically driven, as you suggest, then he could simply have closed it down with immediate effect.

What is most depressing about the whole situation, in my view, is that I have yet to see much coherent argument against abolition from those opposing the move. There’s certainly been a lot of hyperbole – Mike Leigh says that axing the Film Council is “like abolishing the NHS” (er, no it isn’t) – but at the same time there’s been a striking lack of evidence-based argument from the anti-abolitionists. And the more it appears that they do not understand or even know the facts the weaker their case becomes, just as false claims like suggesting that I work in Jeremy Hunt’s office (I’ve never met the man) don’t help much either.

Churm, thanks for taking part in the debate. Of course consultation is a good idea, but I think part of the problem now is a lack of trust. I understand that in the months before the GE bit Hunt and Vaizey went of their way to cultivate good relations with big cheeses in the biz, and certainly gave the impression/assurances that the biz had nothing to fear from an incoming Tory Government. Hence the shock and anger felt by many leading figures in the UK film biz that UKFC was canned without any consultation. They feel, I'm sure that they were stabbed in the back by duplicitous politicians.

When it comes to film the UK has two different sectors: a production sector which does sub-contract work almost exclusively on Hollywood productions, and a British filmmaking sector. The former is sustained by tax breaks, exchange rates and so on; with the UKFC's role being nothing more than a cheer-leader standing on the sidelines calling for Hollywood to be given even more of our tax-payers' money, whilst spinning these subsidies to the USA as somehow being a victory for Britain. The latter only exists with Lottery support disbursed by the UKFC and nineteen out of twenty UKFC films lose money.
In many ways this is very similar to the car industry. Britain contributes to the manufacture of Nissans, Hondas, Peugeots and so on, with obvious benefits to the economy. No one would call these cars British. But when it comes to actual British car-making, well the largest used to be TVR, but they too went to the wall, so now I believe it's Morgan.
There is one important difference, however, car manufacturing requires a large amount of inward investment in plant and machinery; but Hollywood purely buys services which it can just as easily buy elsewhere. What's more, with 3D post-production being hugely more complex, Hollywood is already outsourcing this to India in order to cut costs and further increase profits.
The paradox is that the UKFC's failure to champion any measures which would have benefited UK filmmaking - such as the return of exhibition quotas in both cinemas and on television, has left the UK production facilities industry with no domestic means of filling the gap.

Culling the UK Film Council is the pre-requisite of The UK Film Industry entering its most golden golden age. Why when in the 60s and 70s when British pop and rock acts took 40% of all revenue for record sales and gigs, did the UK film industry not follow suit ? Why when the hunger and talent is here do we fail to outdo Hollywood ? Well we do not have any sound stages outside of 200 acres in a tint part of the south-east. Even those are now in real danger of becoming car parks and supermarkets (except Elstree owned by the local council) because the shareholders in Pinewood Shepperton plc want the property values realised. So did UKFC lead the charge to build sound stages across The UK. No they opposed it as it threatened their control. Did they oppose Pinewood and Shepperton being literally less than 2 years from being axed as film making facilities ? No. Did they sound the alarm when the brandname Pinewood was sold to companies in Malaysia, Canada, Germany, Dominican republic and soon China, brazil and India ? Again no. So Hollywood will soon have no sound stages here to make the next big blockbusters in, Clint Eastwood's movie in 2012 and 2013 can not be made at Pinewood Studios, yet The UKFC just partied on. It would be ideal if the energy put into the campaign to save The UKFC was transfered into saving Pinewood Studios, Shepperton Studios and indeed expanding their 34 sound stages around The UK NOT outside The UK. Why did UKFC leave it all to SAVE THE BRITISH FILM INDUSTRY forced to lobby for their abolition ? Which sadly is two years hence AND they have a scorched earth policy in mind !