The Economic, Social, and Cultural Impact of the COVID-19 Pandemic on Independent Arts Workers in the United Kingdom: Freelancers in the Dark, Policy Timeline, 2019-2022

The policy timeline was developed as a dataset for the Freelancers in the Dark Project by Ali FitzGibbon and Laura Harris with support from Alexandra Young. Using public statements, media coverage and online reporting, it marks dates of relevance to the experience of theatre freelancers between January 2020 (when certain early reporting of COVID-19 began to emerge) and March 2022, the 2 year anniversary of the UK outbreak and lockdowns and end of the research project. The timeline was published using the open-source tool developed by knight lab. An early version was published in June 2021 and contributions invited. The final version was completed on 28 June 2022. Events are labelled according to their place of relevance: UK, England, Wales, Scotland, Northern Ireland or Global. The raw dataset (in MS Excel) can be filtered to support searches for particular changes to guidance, key campaigns from freelancers, trade unions, etc.