Exclusive: Jobs bonanza as Yorkshire film industry awarded £15m to build on successes

The £15m fund, half of which will come from the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF) and half from the private sector, will be announced this morning. The funding will be available to invest in film and television production as well as in the games and digital sector.

The money provides a boost to one of the biggest success stories of Yorkshire industry in recent years. The King’s Speech, This is England, Four Lions and Wuthering Heights were all filmed in the region, which employs 113,000 people in the creative and digital industries.

The £15m fund, to be called the Yorkshire Content Fund and managed by Screen Yorkshire, will create hundreds of new jobs in the sector.

Screen Yorkshire chief executive Sally Joynson said: “The Yorkshire Content Fund marks a new era for the region’s creative businesses and for Screen Yorkshire as an organisation. These are difficult times and access to capital is still limited so to secure such a major pot of investment for the creative industries in Yorkshire and Humber is an incredible win for the region and for Screen Yorkshire.

“The fund will also create hundreds of jobs across the supply chain, which is so critical at the moment. I’m sure Yorkshire can now continue to create great content and to build on its legacy of film and TV productions such as Red Riding, The Damned United and This is England and video game production such as Broken Sword and Worms.”

The success of Screen Yorkshire and the region’s film industry led to a 16 per cent growth in the creative and digital sectors in the 10 years between 1998 and 2008 – no other region in the UK saw a greater growth in the sector.

Ms Joynson added: “It’s an exciting time to be in the creative industries in Yorkshire and Humber.”

The announcement of the fund is a rare example of good news for the film industry which has taken a battering in the past two years. The closure of the UK Film Council in 2010 led to a crisis in the industry around the funding of productions and companies.

Screen Yorkshire itself saw massive changes when it lost £750,000 annual funding it received from the UK Film Council and contracts from regional development agency Yorkshire Forward worth £10.2m. The loss led to more than half the 16 staff of Screen Yorkshire losing their jobs.

Despite the funding cuts, the announcement of the new fund comes on the back of a number of critically acclaimed recent projects which received Screen Yorkshire investment including Paddy Considine’s Tyrannosaur and Ben Wheatley’s Kill List, and Andrea Arnold’s new version of Wuthering Heights.

Charles Cecil, managing director of York-based Revolution Software and Screen Yorkshire board member, said: “The advent of ubiquitous broadband has opened up huge opportunities for video games developers to self-publish their titles.

“Yorkshire, has a large number of successful, independent developers who find themselves in a fantastic position to grasp these opportunities.

“The Yorkshire Content Fund will address this and lead to significant job creation.”

Sheffield based production company Warp Films has seen a succession of movie hits from This Is England and Four Lions and recently produced the television version of This is England.

Its managing director Mark Herbert said: “Yorkshire has virtually everything you need to produce TV and film – stunning and diverse locations, skilled and experience crew and now the new Yorkshire Content Fund.”

The Yorkshire Content Fund is officially open to applications, which can be made at www.screenyorkshire.co.uk