CIISA Prospectus

Our creative industries are a true success story for the UK, continuing to grow and thrive both nationally and across the globe. They are a beacon of world-leading innovation and creativity and a cornerstone of UK economic growth, employing over two million people and generating over £100 billion in economic value.  This growth is testament to the incredible talent and experience of every creative industry professional who remain one of the most important assets for the sector. It is therefore vital that the sector continues to build and develop world-leading, safe and inclusive working environments for our creative workforce to grow and thrive. 

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CIISA funding model
Frequently Asked Questions

Updated version July 2025

CIISA is as a cross-industry backed authority for preventing and tackling harmful behaviour, including bullying and harassment, across the creative industries.

CIISA represents the agreed steps that leaders, individuals, and organisations from across the creative industries have asked for – and committed to taking – to ensure we collectively uphold and improve standards of behaviour through independent accountability and learning.

But this can only be effective if CIISA is properly funded.

Funding ensures CIISA is properly resourced to support and protect the creative industries by:

  • Setting Standards: Creation of a single set of Standards for safe and inclusive working environments in the creative industries that draws on existing best practice and legal requirements.
  • Embedding Best Practice: Supporting the creative industries to embed best practice through guidance, training & organisational assessments. Developing professional skills via CIISA approved accreditation schemes.
  • Sharing Insight: Building insight & themes from our work. Publishing thematic insight reports on what’s working (and what isn’t) and making recommendations for change.
  • Providing Support: Access to an independent, confidential reporting service, where those working in the creative industries (and organisations) can report concerns and get support on how to resolve those.
  • Resolving Concerns: Providing a dispute resolution service for individual cases where no other route is available. Carrying out independent investigations in serious and complex cases on request from an organisation, or where no other process exists. Carrying out Culture Reviews to help organisations learn and take action to improve.

Trust is a significant factor in ensuring CIISA can carry out its duties effectively and independently. As an industry-funded authority, we recognise the significant importance of maintaining and demonstrating independence from those who contribute to our funding.

To do that, CIISA carried out extensive research and engagement to make sure there is a clear separation between funding and carrying out its operational services independently and impartially.

As a result, CIISA has adopted a two-company funding model via the creation of two entities:  CIISA and The CIISA Board of Finance (CIISABOF).

CIISABOF is a separate company that collects and distributes CIISA’s funding to CIISA in line with its annual resource requirements. This arms-length arrangement helps guarantee CIISA’s independence.

CIISABOF has its own Board and Chair acting independently from CIISA. CIISA and CIISABOF will correspond with each other through transparent and defined governance processes to ensure that CIISA’s Operations staff are never involved in the billing and collection process, enabling them to carry out their work independently.

CIISABOF (reg 15474729) and CIISA (reg 14615723) are companies that are limited by guarantee. Both companies have financial years that run April to March.

As we explain below, funding CIISA will not mean organisations or individuals get an exclusive service or benefit in return. Having CIISABOF acting as the collection and distribution agency for CIISA, alongside reviewing CIISA’s funding strategy and performance helps to reinforce these principles.

CIISA is a cross-industry backed authority established to act as the enabler for meeting the shared objective of setting and maintaining standards of behaviour across the creative industries.

Therefore, funding CIISA is about organisations and individuals across the creative industries giving their ongoing commitment to ensure an independent authority helps to build and uphold safe and inclusive working environments for everyone working in the creative industries, regardless of where they work.

This means CIISA is not a membership service or professional body, which would involve paying a fee to get an exclusive service, privilege, or benefit in return. Instead, your funding goes to the principle of supporting and resourcing CIISA to meet its wider objectives.

This is also important given CIISA is independent from any organisation or individual within the creative industries, and so will not offer exclusive services in return for funding.

Funding CIISA may mean that – as an organisation or individual – you may never need to use or access our service, but funding means you are showing your commitment to supporting the industry-endorsed CIISA Standards and wider objective of raising and maintaining higher standards of behaviour that benefits everybody.

Funding CIISA also ensures that our services are available to all individuals and organisations in the creative industries – you do not need to be a member or affiliate to access them.

No.  As an independent authority, it is important to ensure CIISA is able to operate independently from those who fund it.  CIISA will report to its Board and CIISABOF on how it is utilising resources and will report on progress through its Annual Impact Report.

Both CIISA’s Board and CIISABOF will take a central role in ensuring CIISA is providing value for money and is meeting its strategic objectives.

In addition, as CIISA establishes, we will appoint an independent external auditor to undertake the annual audit of the financial statements, alongside a robust audit programme to review value for money regarding its services.  Assessments of how we are performing will be made available in CIISA’s Annual Impact Report and our Statutory Accounts will be published on our website and available on Companies House.

We believe that everyone in the creative industries has responsibility for helping to ensure that our workplace culture and working environments are safe and inclusive and enable our talent to thrive.

Therefore, in consultation across the creative industries, we have built an approach to recognise that the costs for resourcing CIISA should be shared to protect the creative industries but recognising that it should be fair and proportionate – and reflective of the fact that organisations and individuals across the creative industries are different, and so the ability to fund CIISA will vary.

Our approach is also based on organisations and individuals paying an ongoing annual contribution to ensure CIISA is appropriately resourced going forward.

Using established best practice seen in other similar organisations, CIISA’s approach is based on a tiered ‘banding’ approach that provides clarity of expectation for how organisations and individuals can contribute a fair and proportionate sum that is linked to UK turnover.

This approach ensures that the minimum amount will mean no organisation or individual will pay more than a set percentage of their turnover for the year.

These design principles have underpinned our consultations with representatives from Film, TV, Theatre and Music.

  • Benchmarking against best practice – Our approach is informed by our experience of comparable best practice.
  • Ensure we have the budget required for impact – We need to recognise that the impact CIISA needs to have will require a cost, but we will work to determine the best value for money possible to safeguard fair costs.
  • The big look after the small – We want to recognise the ability to fund CIISA will vary and ensure that all players contribute proportionally through a banded approach.
  • Collaborative approach – We have been working with industry experts to understand the respective sectors and align their feedback with a model that works.
  • Fair and proportionate fee structures – Our approach also ensures that the cost of CIISA is distributed equitably and proportionately across the creative industries and ensures that CIISA always remains free at the point of use for individuals working in the creative industries who are on lower incomes.

We listened to input across all sectors when building our model.

Currently, no organisation will contribute more than 0.1% of annual UK turnover under this model, with a single banding structure so contributions remain the same regardless of sector alignment.

The funding bands are:

Band Annual UK Turnover Annual CIISA Contribution*
A £500m + £50,000
B £200m to £500m £35,000
C £100m to £200m £20,000
D £50m to £100m £12,000
E £10m to £50m £5,000
F £1m to £10m £1,000
G £250k to £1m £250
H Up to £250k Discretionary or by arrangement with a membership body

*plus VAT if applicable

Yes. The banding structure sets out the minimum annual contribution required.

As an independent authority, contributing more will not mean that an organisation or individual will get treated more favourably or differently than anybody else.

As all funding will be directed through a separate company, The CIISA Board of Finance (CIISABOF), once Operations is established, CIISA will not be aware of exactly how much anybody has contributed to CIISA in any event.

To ensure stability and long-term development, it is important that CIISA is able to secure longer-term funding commitments that align with its strategic ambitions.

Our current funding ask covers CIISA financial years 2025/26 and 2026/27.

Whilst CIISA asks for a longer-term commitment, organisations will only need to pay annually.

If you/your organisation operates in the UK only, you should use the turnover figure as given in your financial statements to assess what band you come under.

If you/your organisation operates in the UK and other geographical areas, please use the UK turnover figure as given in your financial statements, if this is a requirement for your statutory accounting.

If you are not required to give your UK turnover figure in your statutory accounting (for example, because you report on a worldwide turnover and not separate UK turnover), please use the information that you/your organisation has available that gives this figure. This could include sourcing from internal sales reporting, information held in the accounting system, figures provided on VAT returns etc. However, if it is too time consuming to produce this information, please use a reasonable estimate for UK turnover instead.

For organisations that are part of a larger corporate group: where your group prepares consolidated financial statements in the UK, assessments of UK turnover should be based on the disclosed group UK turnover in these financial statements.

If multiple entities prepare consolidated financial statements, take these from the highest
UK-based entity preparing these (subject to the issue regarding multiple brands as below).

Where your group does not prepare consolidated financial statements in the UK, you should aggregate the UK turnover from the separate financial statements of your UK subsidiaries and use this as your annual UK turnover. You may ‘net off’ intra-group turnover in this process.

For organisations that receive them, grants and donations should be included as part of turnover.

If your organisation (or brand) is owned by a parent company but operates as a significant and distinct entity within the creative industries in the UK, we ask that your organisation provides its own separate contribution based on your organisation’s individual UK turnover.

This also applies if your organisation is itself owned by a subsidiary company within a larger corporate group.

CIISA is engaging with a range of representative member bodies and trade organisations across the creative industries to establish whether they will collect contributions.

These organisations will collect primarily on behalf of individuals and organisations whose annual UK Turnover is no more than £250k (i.e., band H).

If you (or your organisation) are above band H, you should contribute to CIISA directly unless a body of which you are a member informs you otherwise.

Yes. Please contact financeboard@ciisa.org.uk for further assistance. We will aim to respond within three working days.

CIISABOF will operate on a trust-based approach, ensuring that creative industries are able to offer a transparent and equitable approach to determine what band they come under in order to set out their commitment to CIISA.

As part of CIISABOF’s development, from time-to-time CIISABOF may undertake analysis of contributions received and follow up with organisations where it appears they may not be in the correct banding.

The CIISABOF and CIISA financial years run April to March, and we aim to collect the majority of contributions in the first quarter of each financial year (April to June).

We recognise that many contributors will not have financial years that align with this.

For 2025/26 contributions:

  • Please use accounting periods ending in 2024
  • Please use draft figures if finalised figures are not yet available

Note – We will not require an additional payment or refund overpayments should your finalised numbers differ from your draft figures so as to push your organisation into a different band.

If the accounting period is greater than one year (assuming this is a one-off situation for your organisation) please use a ‘pro-rata’ turnover approach that proportionately assesses how much your UK turnover was for 12 months based on the number of months in your accounting period.

For example, if your UK turnover is £1.5m for 15 months, divide £1.5m by 15 months (which is £100,000). Then multiply £100,000 by 12 months, which means your pro-rated turnover is £1.2m.

This would put your turnover into band F, with an annual contribution of £1,000.

If the accounting period is less than one year (again assuming this is a one-off situation for your organisation), please ‘annualise’ by dividing your turnover by the number of relevant months, before then multiplying that by 12 months.

Then use the annualised figure to find the band you fall under.

Using the band annual contribution amount, then work out how much you should pay of that contribution. You can do this by dividing the annual contribution by 12 months, and then multiplying the result by the number of months in your accounting period.

For example, if your UK turnover is £9m for 8 months, divide that figure by 8 (to get £1.125m) and then multiply that figure by 12 months to get your ‘annualised’ income of £13.5m.

£13.5m UK turnover would put you in band E, which is an annual CIISA contribution of £5,000.

Then divide the annual contribution by 12 months, before multiplying again by the number of months in your accounting period (£5,000 divided by 12 = £416.67, which is then multiplied by 8 months. This means your actual contribution would be £3,333).

If it is not a one-off situation for your organisation, please contact financeboard@ciisa.org.uk for further guidance. We will aim to respond within three working days.

Your UK turnover should be assessed each year and therefore may move between bands each year.

Our banding sets out the minimum contribution needed to ensure that CIISA is appropriately resourced each year. The banding structure ensures equity and fairness across all creative organisations and industries.

Bands A-F

CIISABOF will make a Request for Payment to organisations that fall into bands A-E on a 30-day standard payment term.

For existing funders, we will issue Request for Payments in March each year.  For new funders, we will issue Requests for Payment on confirmation of support.

Bands G &H

We are establishing an online portal to collect payments from organisations that fall into bands G & H.  Should your organisation wish to contribute via bank transfer please contact financeboard@ciisa.org.uk.

Given how crucial it is to ensure CIISA has security of knowing how much funding it will have available each year, we ask that you pay the contribution as a single payment. This also ensures equity and fairness across all organisations and individuals, as well as reducing the administrative burden on CIISABOF.

We anticipate there may be inflationary increases from time to time (no more than annually).  If an increase applies, it will be implemented at the start of a new financial year (April). We will consult with organisations, always aiming to providing sufficient notice, should we anticipate increases above inflation.

A key objective for CIISA is delivering value for money and this will always be at the forefront of decision making on budget setting and funding asks.

This will be monitored as part of CIISA’s regular cycle of budget planning and financial oversight, alongside what reserves CIISA needs to retain to ensure it remains viable should there be a future shortfall in funding.

Should we see that CIISA is consistently receiving funding that is above its requirements for operation (and is above the relevant thresholds as given in CIISA’s reserves policy), we would look to engage across the creative industries to discuss potential lowering of the bands.

Both CIISA and CIISABOF currently sit outside the scope of VAT.

As a company limited by guarantee, CIISA will typically retain any surpluses for inward reinvestment to help it develop, grow, and meet its overarching objectives, or promote the objectives of the business. This includes establishing and maintaining a level of reserves that will enable and ensure CIISA can meet its obligations (as a business and employer) for a set period of time, should there be a temporary shortfall in ongoing funding.

As a relatively new organisation, we are building reserves to reach the appropriate target position. This document will be updated with the reserves policies for CIISA and CIISABOF in due course.

We plan and cost up our activities for each year through our Business Plan, which is approved by CIISA’s Board.  Our Plan carefully accounts for what resources we need to deliver these activities alongside our projected funding requirements to ensure we work within our means and deliver maximum value for money.

We regularly monitor our resource spend alongside resourcing throughout the year and work with our Board to check progress. This enables us to be proactive in adjusting any activity during the business year to take account of any changes.

We will be moving into a new operational phase in 2026/27 and may be removing logos from the CIISA website as part of this work. We are happy to display supporter logos for the remainder of the 2025/26 financial year and will provide an update in due course.

We are exploring how funders can use our logo and will implement this in the 2026/27 financial year. We ask that you do not use our logo for now.  We will provide an update in due course.

We are happy for you to share that you are a supporter on your social channels and then we will reshare.  You have probably seen that we’ve already done this with some supporters on LinkedIn.

In the first instance, please e-mail financeboard@ciisa.org.uk with your request and contact details and we will aim to respond within 3 working days.

CIISA Funding Model Frequently Asked Questions

Why does CIISA need funding and what will it be used for?

CIISA is being established as a government supported, cross-industry backed authority for addressing poor workplace behaviour across the creative industries. CIISA represents the agreed steps that leaders, individuals and organisations from across the creative industries have asked for – and committed to taking – to ensure we collectively uphold and improve standards of behaviour through independent accountability and learning.

Download

CIISA Corporate Strategy

This is our first Corporate Strategy for the Creative Industries Independent Standards Authority (CIISA) which marks an important milestone in CIISA’s development from a collective idea to realisation of much needed and wanted organisation. CIISA is being established to uphold and improve standards of behaviour across the creative industries and prevent and tackle bullying and bullying and harassment of a discriminatory nature. CIISA has been built on four foundations; vision, courage, collaboration, and innovation. 

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Unlocking Growth Through Accountability

Tackling the Cost of Workplace Conflict in the UK’s Creative Industries

We commissioned this landmark report looking into the cost of workplace conflict within the UK’s creative industries because, quite simply, before now this insight did not exist. Empowering and safeguarding the workforce is the bedrock of any credible growth strategy and this is a pivotal moment in which to take stock of every opportunity which can help drive this. Positive workplace culture is economic infrastructure that supports growth.

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Terms and Conditions for Funding Contributions

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Contact Details

For general enquiries: info@ciisa.org.uk

For all press enquiries: press@ciisa.org.uk

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legals

The purpose of the Creative Industries Independent Standards Authority (CIISA) is to uphold and improve standards of behaviour across the creative industries.

Registered address: 22 Wycombe End,  Beaconsfield, Buckinghamshire, HP9 1NB, United Kingdom

Access Statement

Whilst CIISA is not yet a live organisation, access is at the heart of who CIISA is. CIISA is committed to preventing bullying and harassment, including that of an ableist nature. If you require any information currently on the CIISA website in an alternative format, please email  info@ciisa.org.uk with your request and we will get back to you as soon as we can.

We are very happy to help and welcome queries from d/Deaf, disabled and neurodivergent people wanting to learn more about CIISA.