The North’s booming screen sector has just shored up its most important long-term asset: people. Screen Alliance North has secured £2.3m in BFI National Lottery funding, extending for another three years its work to tackle skills shortages and widen access to careers across film and television throughout the North of England.
The alliance is a genuinely pan-Northern body, bringing together the Liverpool Film Office, North East Screen, Screen Manchester and Screen Yorkshire to form the BFI Skills Cluster for the North of England, originally launched in 2023. The new award is part of a wider £11.85m investment by the British Film Institute to sustain the UK’s screen-production workforce through its Skills Clusters programme.
Skills as infrastructure
It is easy to focus on studios and tax credits when discussing the screen boom, but productions don’t run on buildings alone — they run on crews. In its latest year, Screen Alliance North programmes supported more than 4,000 participants and over 6,000 students, reaching upwards of 30,000 people across three years. That pipeline of trained grips, electricians, production coordinators and runners is precisely what makes a region a credible place to film.
The strategic fit
The timing is pointed. With major facilities like Sunderland’s Crown Works and a growing slate of productions choosing the North, the binding constraint is increasingly talent, not space. Funding the skills layer ensures the region can actually staff the work it is winning — and that the economic benefit of the screen boom stays local, rather than importing crews from elsewhere.
For the North’s creative economy, £2.3m is modest money doing strategic work: keeping the doors to the industry open, and making sure the next generation of Northern screen talent has somewhere to start.
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