The UK’s Film and TV Charity has seen a drop in applications for its hardship fund since the end of the SAG-AFTRA strike, the charity’s CEO Marcus Ryder has revealed.
At its peak in September, the fund handed out over £250,000 in stop-gap grants to support film and TV workers amid the perfect storm of a cost-of-living crisis and the drying up of UK production because of the Hollywood strikes, Ryder noted during a talk at the British Screen Forum Conference held in London yesterday (November 22).
In April, the fund handed out around £30,000 in grants. This rose to £55,000 in July, with the SAG-AFTRA strike commencing on July 14. In August, this figure hit £173,000.
The 118-day SAG-AFTRA strike ended on November 9. “We saw an almost immediate drop in applications for the hardship fund,” said Ryder.
However, he noted that industry workers are still financially “in crisis”, and the hardship fund figure hasn’t returned to pre-strike levels. “The new normal is looking more like £70,000-£80,000 [per month], a 150% [to] 200% increase on where we were this time last year.”
The grant offers one-off payments of up to £750 for eligible applicants struggling owing to a lack of work. Industry donations to the fund have come from BBC, Channel 5, ITV, Channel 4, Banijay, Hartswood Films, Prime Video and Warner Bros Discovery.
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