Welcome to this meeting of the Culture, Media and Sport Select Committee. The health of the public service broadcasters is something that we all value, so this morning we are delighted to return to the work of Channel 4. For her first meeting with us in this Parliament, we welcome Dr Alex Mahon, the chief executive of Channel 4, and for his first appearance in front of this newly formatted Committee and his final appearance as the chair of Channel 4, we are joined by Sir Ian Cheshire. A warm welcome to both of you. Before we begin, do any members want to declare any interests?

I used to work at Channel 4, and my husband still works there.

Thank you very much indeed. I will start the questions to you. I want to kick off by talking about the finances, and I will start with Alex. Channel 4 experienced a 10% decline in overall revenue in 2023. Can you talk us through the key reasons behind that? How confident are you that the figures that come out of the end of 2024 will be better?

Thank you very much for having us today. I last appeared in front of the Committee in November 2023. As you will remember, and as you have referenced, 2023 was a tough year. There was a big advertising downturn affecting all commercial broadcasters—in the end, about 10%—which was not foreseen, and it was not predicted by any of the agencies. It was only about halfway through the year that we realised the year would be very tough. That was a difficult year for us. As you know, although we had a reduction of about £100 million in revenues, we managed to save costs in the year and ended up with a deficit of £52 million. We have not released the annual report for 2024 yet. I know that the Committee appreciates that it is coming soon. It has to go through the DCMS first and be laid in Parliament, but I am pleased to say that 2024 was a much better year. Revenues were up about 1% year on year—better than our largest commercial competitor, whose revenues were down 3% in the year, so that is great news for us. We are pretty much on a flat deficit, so that is positive, and we will pretty much break even in the year, as you will see when the report comes out. If you compare that to the BBC, who also had a tough year, I think they have said that their deficit will be about £490 million. So I am really pleased that we have recovered that. Perhaps most importantly, we grew our performance with the audiences. Streaming minutes were up 15%, so that is important; more people are watching us. If you compare that to some of the global streamers, Netflix was up only 8% in the year, so to double the performance of viewing is excellent. I am really pleased that we managed to protect content investment and particularly to protect investment in the nations and regions. The amount we spent outside London went up 4%. It is things like that that show we have had a really positive recovery from a very difficult advertising year and that we have done the things that are most important to us: performed well with the audience, performed well with the young audience, and protected our investment in the nations and regions.

You are pivoting your revenue to have a target of 30% from digital advertising in 2025. In 2023 that figure was 27%, and you want it to be 30% by 2025. How do you plan to further accelerate the digital revenue growth?

We hit 30% in 2024, a year early, I am delighted to say—I should have thought about that in the first round-up—so that is great. I guess the challenge now is, when do we get to 40%, when do we get to 50%? But we are finding two important things underneath it. One is that the digital advertising market is growing. This year, predictions are for the overall television market to be just about flat but for the digital television advertising market to grow at 15%, 16%. So it is really important that we shift as much of the business as we can to digital, because that is growing and that is where viewers want to watch. Once a viewer switches to streaming, they keep that behaviour, even if they are 80 years old. Once they have switched to viewing by streaming, they don’t switch back. Our business is more and more people viewing in a streaming-on-demand manner, still with advertising. We have hit that a year early. The key things for us are, how do we ensure that we continue that momentum and that our public service content is viewed on social platforms? Increasingly, social and YouTube is where young viewers are watching.

If you have already hit your target for 2025, what is your new target?

We have not made a new number yet, that is true, but we are now heading from 30% to 50%. When do we get to 50%? I imagine it will be before 2030.

There was a significant decrease in the linear advertising revenue in 2023. Do you chart that this will continue to decline as a source of income?

Yes. I think that linear advertising will continue to be a reducing portion of our total revenues. That is right as we transition to digital. Advertisers still want to advertise, and increasingly want to advertise alongside quality content and brand-safe content. We see that on streaming, on linear and on YouTube, where advertisers want to put their money alongside programming that is high quality. It will decline as a proportion of our revenues, but the reality is that linear holds on for longer in some ways than you might expect.

Do you have a project to continue to target and sustain, or mitigate against the decline of, linear advertising, or have you decided to put all your eggs in the basket of digital?

It is a good question. We are trying to do two things. One is to switch the revenue from linear to digital while not losing any revenue that we can get. The other is to ensure that we take costs out of the linear business, so that we ensure that we can invest in the digital business. We are very much led by the viewers, that being the way they wish to view. Our Fast Forward strategy, which we announced in the past six to nine months, is about three things. One is going to digital growth as fast as we possibly can. The second is taking the cost out of the old business, the linear business, at the right pace. We closed off the smallest channels there as the first step in that. The third is ensuring that we can diversify our revenues away from advertising to other sources, whether that is our small subscription service or launching IP, which the Government has now given us the rights to do.

Will those who still enjoy your services in a linear way see any change in what they can access and how, as a result of these changes?

We have closed the very smallest channels. We had four music channels, although I am not sure if you would have been watching them—Kerrang! and other music channels. That area of small music channels is not so watched by people any more, but the main channels very much are, and people rely on and enjoy them. We are not planning to degrade the service that viewers get, but we are focusing on how we drive as much streaming growth as possible. But generally, it is the same programmes; the programmes that appear on our streaming service appear on the linear channels.

Finally, I want to ask you about the upcoming ban on junk food adverts. What impact do you think that will have on Channel 4 and your advertising revenue? Have you had an opportunity to quantify that?

I think we have said before in front of the Committee that it is in the £40 million to £50 million range, at the worst end of it from revenue. The question at the moment about the less healthy foods is how the legislation is enacted. A couple of things were very clear when it first came up. The first was that it is not really expected that this will make much calorific difference to children because, of course, children are not really watching linear television. The estimates were it would be three calories a day difference—one M&M if I remember correctly. Notwithstanding that, the purpose of the legislation was that brand spend would be excluded, and it seems that there is now some debate about whether brand spend is excluded or not. It would be massively problematic for us if brand spend was also banned. We may need some clarifying secondary legislation—

What do you mean by brand spend?

When a brand spends on, overall, what their brand is, rather than on specific products. The original intention of the legislation was to be that brand spend would be excluded, so you could advertise a doughnut brand but not with specific offers. It seems that there is now discussion about whether it is excluded or not. That would be massively problematic. It also seems now that outdoor spend is allowed and radio spend is allowed. Our position as commercial advertisers is we probably need to look a little bit more closely at the detail of how this is enacted and whether it is in line with the intention.

Good morning to both of you. Sir Ian, you are about to leave your role. How healthy a state are you leaving Channel 4 in?

In very good shape. If I could take two minutes briefly on this, looking back and looking forward, I think as a board, and certainly as the chair personally, we have had three main successes despite some pretty major headwinds in the last year. The first is holding the organisation together through the privatisation phase but then continuing to work constructively with Governments to get to the new Media Act. That creates opportunities for Channel 4, which is a good move. You have heard Alex talk about the ad downturn, and that led us to have to do some serious cost restructuring—probably the biggest in Channel 4’s history—but we carried on with the remit during that. If you look at the output over the last three years, there were some great programmes. I will let Alex do the complete roll-call of all our greatest hits, but the one event that I personally enjoyed as a Channel 4 speciality was the Paralympics, which was a fantastic two weeks of joy, with really interesting programming and great new presenters—Rose—which reached 20 million people. Channel 4’s contributions to the broader Paralympics movement is a real success. The third thing is that we have left it in better shape, to your question. We have managed to recruit five new non-execs on the board in the last period, and over the last year we have integrated them. I think we have a great, high-functioning board ready for the next phase. I ought to formally thank my board for all the work they have done. It has been a real pleasure. I think we are now at a point where we are set with some confidence. We are financially secure, as Alex has said. We have a more diversified income stream and we are, very importantly, very able to conduct our core mission. We are the platform that takes other people’s commercial money—advertising—and turns it into programming. We do that for the independent production sector, and that is in rude health now after a very difficult year in 2023. The final point I would like to really insist on is that Channel 4 is in good shape, but it needs protection. It needs protection because, although we might take public service broadcasters and the BBC for granted, we are living in a very different world. Forty years ago, Channel 4 was automatically protected because it was one of two commercial channels and it had advertisers queueing up. We now live in a world of global streamers doing things for their own purposes. We have ad-driven, algorithm-driven social media with a completely different model. And we have multiple new sources from all sorts of digital spaces. I would really stress the point that Channel 4 is a national treasure that does not cost the public a penny and it contributes to the UK, in a broader sense, being the sort of country we should be proud of. If we do not keep on regulating in this new world, and we do not have the support that we have enjoyed from the public and Government, we should not take its future existence for granted. I am very conscious of the new sustainability duty the board has, and we take it very seriously. As I hand over to my successor—and I wish them well—I think Channel 4 is in good health, but it has serious challenges and we need to look after it.

Does the regulatory system for PSBs put them at a disadvantage compared to the global streamers? If so, how do you address any disadvantages?

Let me say two words on that and I will hand over to Alex. The key element in what we see in the regulatory process, which I thoroughly endorse, is the issue of prominence. Without prominence, we will disappear into the 500th page of an electronic programme guide that no one looks at. It is mostly there in the smart connected TVs—not all—but in a world where things will increasingly be streamed through all sorts of devices, we have to think very hard about prominence in the broader context of how people are now watching content, which is very different. The second thing is that we have to be very un-naive about some of the business models that other people are following. The way that we can continue to ensure that Channel 4 can generate the ad revenue to turn into programmes is threatened by some of those ad models, because they do not necessarily want to give us the money that we need in order to create programmes. So I think there is constant vigilance. The challenge—and I will finish here—is this will continue to evolve in a world where we are being scraped by AI and we are seeing new models emerge. Forty years ago, at the launch of Channel 4, you could not have imagined the current universe. The point is not to try to fix in stone some relic of the past; it is to protect the future, and that is the crucial task.

It is sometimes easy to think, do we really require television channels any more, or public service broadcasting, because we have so much content? In fact, from a consumer perspective, there is oversupply. We have to remember that people in Britain spend about five hours a day watching video. Obviously not this group, but most people spend about five hours a day doing it. It is very different for my generation, compared to the generation afterwards: Gen Z spend about 42% of those five hours on social media platforms and another 22% on YouTube, so only 36% remains for traditional television and streaming. In that environment, public service media is perhaps more vital than it ever was before, not just because of export value and UK soft power, but particularly given the rise of misinformation and disinformation and the impact algorithmic viewing and bad actors can have on social cohesion and democratic disengagement for young people. When you ask about regulation, are we thinking about how we preserve these institutions in decline, or are we thinking about how we promote them? If we think about how we promote them, to go to Sir Ian’s point, we need to think about reach. The Media Act is very good, but we need to think about what the reach and prominence is on new platforms and what that means algorithmically. Do we want a protected or promoted position there, rather than a throttled or shadow-banned position? We need to think about impact, so we need to make sure that we can fund things properly. We have done hugely well on YouTube, and we have done hugely well with our news on TikTok, adapting how we make news for that group of viewers, which means it has thumb stopping and arresting from the first image. We had a billion views of that last year, which is incredible, but it is quite hard to earn any money from it. We also need to ensure that we maintain a position of trust and think about whether we identify things that are trusted. So, in a very long answer to your question, we need to think about how regulation goes further over time for promotion rather than preservation.

You mentioned successful output. Do you consider the series “Go Back to Where You Came From” to have been a success? Do you think it achieved what it set out to achieve?

Yes. It is quite a provocative title, and I understand some of the complexities around that title, but it was used very specifically as a provocative title, given that it is a phrase that lots of people across Britain use. If you watch the programme, you will see that we take a range of people from across the UK with a range of views about immigration and about racism, and we take them to Mogadishu and Raqqa and go through with them the journey that a lot of immigrants to this country go through. That includes what it is like to take an illegal boat trip, to try to cross the mountains between Italy and France overnight with no equipment, to be in the camps at Calais or to come across the channel. You will see that some of those quite racist opinions change dramatically in the course of the show. When people are faced by these people and see the complexity of the system, the hideous journeys they go through, the lengths they are prepared to go to, and that a lot of people are hard-working and wish to make a better life for themselves, they understand what a complex set of issues this is. In that sense, I think it was a real success. It is a complicated and complex issue, and it requires proper documentaries to explore it, but we tried to do that in a way that would engage people in those discussions. I do understand that it is a provocative title, but it was done for a reason.

From your point of view it was a success?

Yes.

Yes.

Do you think there will be a second series of it?

I am not sure. I actually do not know where we are up to on a second series. I do know that it was hugely successful in Australia, with the same provocation, and it does help—

Helps the debate.

Yes, it helps the debate, but it also helps expand the complexities of some of this—how the system, and changing this, is not simple.

We will stick with prominence and go to Natasha.

Picking up on the issues around the regulatory framework and the argument about the disadvantage between online streamers and traditional media, are we in a space where we should be thinking about these places as publishers again? I am not in control of the EPG of Channel 4, just as I am not in control of the algorithms of a social media platform any more. They are now media companies. Should we be treating them as publishers and putting them through the same structures that Channel 4 has to go through?

Clearly, we are not in charge of American legislation. However, I have made quite public my view, which is that a platform that chooses which things to rank more highly than others or present is a modern definition of a publisher, because of course that is what a publisher does., Whether that is done by an editor or it is done algorithmically, it still fulfils the same function. But we know that those global platforms are not regulated as publishers. We think that we need to consider the impact on our society in the UK of the majority of viewing being through those platforms. As you will know, we published a study earlier in the year as our third piece of work about what is it like to be Gen Z in Britain today. When we go to that 42% of consumption through social media on a daily basis, short-form consumption has four different impacts that we do not always think about. The first one is it is short, so because it is in a flow of things, you pay less attention. You have to think about this in the context of news. The second thing is that because it is short, it is very difficult to put context in, because there is not time. Most news issues are quite complicated and require context. The third thing is that because it is algorithmically served and comes to you on an automated feed, that has meant that things are getting more salacious or more dyspeptic or more noisy, and move faster. The algorithm is trained to give you the things that will be more successful. That has meant that the content that is served tends to be more to the right of centre. That is what has become, at this time, more dyspeptic and more noisy. The fourth thing, which for me is the most worrying, is that because individuals watch much of that content alone, often using headphones or on a device that feels like it is an intimate part of you, your opinions tend to become more radical over time, because you are not discussing them with anyone. No one is debating them with you; no one is disagreeing with you or socialising the discussion. The studies show that that has an impact of making your opinions further from neutral over the time. The worst examples of this, of course, as the Committee will be aware, are what is happening to young boys and, at the worst case, what is happening with real radicalisation. MI5 is investigating three times as many teenagers as they did a decade ago, and 13% of the people they are investigating in the UK are under 18. We need to think about the societal impacts of the pattern of consumption. Of course, all this content should exist, but we need to think about whether we are balancing that out with how we promote content with public service values at its core.

Ian, you made the point earlier about us not legislating or trying to catch up in incremental steps; we have to think about the whole framework so that it captures everything and innovation continues, but we can keep it in an environment that is fair and regulated. On that, Alex, you talked about your speech about Gen Z and algorithmic prominence across global media platforms. Were you thinking about news in that context, or were you thinking about all public service broadcaster content?

I appreciate that these things are difficult to regulate for—fortunately for me, that is not my job. We need to think about whether you can identify what comes from a trusted broadcaster, publisher or news organisation. That could be all kinds of content; it does not just have to be news—it is easy to think about the edge case as news. We should think about how we extend prominence to social platforms and how we do that in the UK.

Do you think that we have the powers in the Media Act to do that, or do we need new legislation?

I guess that would be a matter for Ofcom.

Are you satisfied with Ofcom’s processes for implementing the Media Act, especially on issues to do with prominence, or are there things we could be doing better or learning about?

It is really important when we come to the PSM review that we think about what the 10-year vision is for public service media. They are getting on with the Media Act, and that is great, but there is more to do. I think we need a balanced approach to regulation to make sure that we do not hinder PSB growth and that we can compete on fair terms. That extends, of course, to things like LLMs and AI, but we also need to think about the impact on SMEs across the UK and on the nations and regions. The Media Act is fine, but we need to think about “What next?” on these platforms and how regulation can help us appear there.

It is the whole ecosystem, and the ecosystem will keep evolving. We need to have a picture of the whole thing—a vision, as Alex said, of the 10-year—and to keep the regulatory agenda moving, because nothing will stay still.

Welcome, Ian and Alex. My question is about the drop in the non-advertising revenue. It was about £121 million in 2022, and it dropped to £101 million in 2023. Alex, what were the factors behind that, and how are you looking to address and stabilise that?

The main factor will be how we can grow that through our new, diversified revenues. Last year it was about 10% as well. I am trying to recall what happened in 2023 from 2022, but it was probably ongoing rights and film. I think film is included in “Other”; film in 2023 was often a result of previous years, and that was also impacted. I will check precisely so that I do not get this question wrong, and I will come back to the Committee tomorrow, but I think the difference between years may have been driven by film rights. Obviously, box office has been tremendously disturbed by the covid pandemic and other factors. I will check and come back.

Certainly, the five-year trend on non-advertising revenue is going up, and it is a key part of the strategy going forward to make sure that we can balance the revenue sources more. But year to year, we will get lumps and bumps.

Thank you. On the Media Act and the removal of the bar on content production, how has Channel 4 approached the question of whether it produces its own programmes?

As you will know, that came about in the Media Act. We still have a bit of housekeeping to put in place, because Ofcom goes out to consult on codes of practice to make sure that Channel 4 is planning to do that in a fair way with the independent sector. We have been very clear that we think it is an important right to have, to grow Channel 4’s non-advertising revenue over time, but we also need to do it in a measured manner to make sure that the 300 partners we work with, particularly independent producers and SMEs across the nations and regions, are not disrupted. There is a balance there about how fast we scale it. I would expect us to be able to talk in the next quarter, once these codes are in place, about how we do it. That will be a balance of how we build a team that can create IP for Channel 4 and what other companies we invest in. We are clearly bought up for most of 2025 and quite a lot of 2026, so it will start to make a difference from 2026 on.

There is no hidden big bang about to explode that we are not telling anyone about. Literally, the process with Ofcom of concluding the detail of having a power, but you don’t know the detail, takes a bit of time. The lag in programming will make it more so. The final thing to say is that we are not a colossal financial organisation, so we do not have £1 billion hidden behind the sofa that we were waiting to deploy. We have to plan it financially, but over 10 years this is an important strengthening of Channel 4’s sustainability.

Thank you. To that point, what additional factors need to be in place to enable that?

We will announce in the next quarter how we will do it. We need to hire some people, we need to have the codes in place with Ofcom and we need to set aside—which we have done—some investment for how we will do it, but I think all those factors are in place. It is just a question of when we begin and of doing it in partnership with the independent sector, who have had some recovery from 2023, but there are still a lot of challenges in the sector, particularly for freelancers. That is why we are careful about how fast we go.

Going back to a couple of comments earlier, you mentioned taking cost out. Is that a cost reduction or is that a reallocation?

It is a very pertinent question. We made about 100 or 150 people redundant from the business last year—it was very hard for those individuals—partly as a result of the 2023 downturn, but also as part of the requirement for us to regear for more focus on digital. We made sure we protected our investment in the nations and regions, but those jobs were skewed towards the linear side of the business, not digital. That is also because the ways we have to invest are different over time. Clearly, we need to spend more on technology; clearly, we need to spend more on systems. We also need to make sure that we are marketing our content effectively, because it is a very competitive business for marketing now. It is really about a shift in the cost base and ensuring that we can prioritise investment where we need it.

Good morning. Thinking about the transition towards becoming a public service streamer, how do you anticipate this transformation will affect your operational costs?

It is probably important to go back to the basics. Channel 4 is majority funded by advertising—90%—and it is owned, as you know, by the public. Most of the money we spend—about £600 million—goes to the independent sector. Nearly all the funding is recycled into UK SMEs. When we spend with those companies, they retain the IP. That is a very important factor in today’s modern world, because if you are a supplier to the streamers, you do not retain the IP. A few years ago, we thought we might not be able to cope with attracting great talent, but great talent—writers, directors, producers—really want to work for us because of that retention of IP. You will have heard a bit as a Committee, in your inquiries into the tax credits and high-end television and film, how that has changed. That is quite important. We also spend about 50% of our money outside London and work with about 300 suppliers a year. What we spend in programming will remain about the same. Last year, we spent about 62% of our revenues on programming. That is much higher than elsewhere. It is maybe about 10% higher than our commercial competition, and in fact quite a bit higher than some streamers. That is because we do not have to deliver a profit to anyone—we do not have to deliver a return to shareholders. Some years we lose money, and some years we make money, but in general it is about even. We do not intend to reduce what we spend on programming, which I think is absolutely critical, because we are here as an engine for British IP and an engine for innovation. It is more about what we spend on overheads. The mix will change over time. We will spend more on the technology and the infrastructure behind streaming and less over time on linear. Clearly, for us there is still quite a lot of broadcast infrastructure that we remain with until the business is 100% streaming. So it is really about an increase in costs spent on technology and perhaps some decreases in costs spent on people working in linear. That was a very long answer, sorry.

Moving to the transition from DTT to IPTV, what do you want as an organisation from that transition? What do you think the challenges for you as an organisation are potentially going to be?

Freely, as of course you will know, is a collaboration between all the PSBs to launch an IPTV-based way of accessing public service content. I think that has been a tremendous success for us, and it is a good example of how broadcasters can work together in this country. All our European peers come to ask us how we manage to work together, as competition. That is a rare British success story, although we are not yet present in the EPGs of all smart TV manufacturers. That is where we do need help sometimes, because with some of these global companies it is hard to have the power even as lots of UK broadcasters working together. Samsung is an example of where we have not yet got the smart TV representation. It is about doing more of those things. If you are asking about what happens with switch-off, for Channel 4’s audience that will probably be relevant much sooner than it would be for perhaps the BBC, because our audience is much more young-skewing, with a 24% profile of 18 to 34s on streaming. It is a younger-skewing audience than elsewhere. I imagine we will just move in line with the market there but we will find we get to majority streaming faster than others.

Having seen the physical-to-digital switch in retail and banking and other experiences, it is really important when you get to the last 20% that there is an industry/Government process that is well managed to make sure that the vulnerable and the people who have less opportunity to go for that switch are not lost in the rush to go digital. I know that that is a topic that has been discussed, but I would urge people to think collectively. Certainly from my time at BT and Barclays, we saw that certain cohorts will have issues with that, and we need to make sure we are positively looking after them.

Can I ask about Freely? It makes a lot of sense and, as you say, it took an enormous amount of energy to bring everybody together. Is that cutting through with the British public? Are you getting the sense that people identify what it is, what it does and why it is there? Do you wish you had done it a bit sooner?

Remember that the way Freely works is that when you are buying new smart TVs it is on your interface there—the smart TV interface—so we have to grow with the market as that happens. It is really pertinent to ask what more we could do together and how we as broadcasters could come together more to promote PSB. That is something we are always talking about. I think Freely is a positive step between us all and to think about as a base for how we could do more. I am not sure we should have done it sooner, because the TVs must be ready for it and it has to start to be the way that consumers are viewing. But we can see that consumers are viewing through IPTV much more nowadays and that is the growth sector.

You have all these little boxes on your smart TV, so consumers need to know what it is.

From the surveys I have seen from the Freely management, yes, they do, but I am sure there is always more we could do as to how we work together to advertise and promote that.

It would be great if you could share with us some of the data that you are getting back from Freely about the pick-up through that as a mechanism.

Yes, we can do that when we follow up.

Thank you for the question. No, we definitely do not see Channel 4 as being representative of that. As you will know, we undertook a four-year investigation into Brand, and the result of that was the “Dispatches” documentary, which I think was a really painstaking, considered and meticulous investigation and not easy for the team to do, in some ways, because they continued it within the auspices of Channel 4. I think it is positive that they did that, and I was very proud of the fact that they did so. After the investigation and the programme went out—as you will know, causing a lot of interest—we undertook our own investigation into what had happened at Channel 4 during that period when he was employed by production companies working for us. We went through everything that was on the record within Channel 4 about him and his employment at that time. The production company that was mainly responsible for “Big Brother”, Banijay, went through its own investigation. The BBC also went through its own investigation. What our investigation brought up, which we published in March 2024, was that there had been a complaint by a member of staff working at Channel 4 at the time and that that had been referred to their manager and had not gone any further. We went back and interviewed multiple people from the time, and went through all the records and tens of thousands of documents. I made a public apology to that individual and a private apology to that individual. Obviously, all the management has changed at Channel 4 since that occasion, but it was absolutely wrong that that complaint was not dealt with adequately at the time, and most horrendous for the individual that it was referred up the chain but did not go further. I have been very clear on the record that that was not the appropriate way to deal with it.

He did appear in a “Celebrity Bake Off” episode, and checks were done at the time, but the record did not come up. As you know, up until we did the “Dispatches” documentary in 2023, there was not a set of public allegations on the record and it was very difficult for the women who did have allegations to be listened to.

I said that the individual referred it to her line manager. That person referred it up, and then it was not dealt with after that. It was stopped at that stage.

The person that the line manager spoke to did not refer it to anywhere else and it did not go further. I think the key thing to think is, how have procedures changed since then? I cannot speak to procedures that were in place in 2009. I can only do the investigation and be very public about what it found—and apologise, because I believe that to have been wrong. As you will know, now we have the Speak Up facility, a big whistleblowing facility, that five years ago we ensured was put not just through paperwork but on the front of every call sheet, to mean that everyone on every production, whether they be a runner, a producer or an actor, has a clear number to call for whistleblowing. Through that, we receive a small number of complaints every year, and they are fully investigated. We have a procedure to make sure that I am notified of them on the day they come in or, if they are referred to me, they are notified to the board. That has made a difference in us being able to stop instances of bad behaviour on set.

Just to add, there is a board oversight on this, which we have had extensive discussions on, including an ethics committee—a sub-committee of the board—and we have reviewed the processes in the light of the experience. Alex, in particular, had to simultaneously be editor-in-chief approving the programme that would investigate Channel 4 and then start, as CEO, a review of processes. I think it has been a very open response to what was clearly not the right outcome at the time, but I do not think that reflects the way Channel 4 is run today.

I read that interview at the time, of course. I do not think it has been a whitewash. I think we have been really public and on the record about what happened. We published a full investigation. We have made the documentary bringing it to light in the first place and, indeed, I have done a public apology to that individual, and a private one, for what happened in 2009. But I do not think it has been easy for them to go through that, and I really do sympathise with their position.

I was going to ask you about the role of CIISA here—the Creative Industries Independent Standards Authority, as you know. Their role, as they state it, is to work with individual media organisations, enabling them to co-ordinate issues that arise across multiple broadcasters. This is a prime example. This is an individual who worked across various broadcasters, but predominantly the BBC and Channel 4. How committed is Channel 4 to supporting CIISA? To what extent would you require the production companies that you work with to abide by CIISA membership as well? You mentioned Banijay here, who have also had issues through some of the work they have delivered for the BBC over the “MasterChef” thing.

I think the key thing here is that none of us want bad behaviour across the industry, and we need multiple mechanisms in place to ensure that when it occurs, if it occurs, it is caught or can be reported very easily with no risk to the individuals involved. What we definitely saw in the Brand case, and we have seen in other cases, is that the risk to individuals is very high, so the fear of reporting is very high. As I said, we have our whistleblowing facility, Speak Up, and we have other mechanisms internally. We do have a code of conduct that we expect all suppliers to adhere to, and when they do not, we go in and investigate. It is more complicated for us, because we do not have in-house production, so they were our third parties. We also support the set-up of CIISA, and we have stepped up to our funding of that. I do understand that it is taking a bit of time. I think that that is because it is complicated to set up a new regulatory body, and it takes time for them to get precisely in place how they are going to do things, but we are very supportive of that. My view is that multiple routes make it easier for individuals to flag things.

Do you think there is more you could do on the requirements that you make of your production companies that you work with? Is there more that you can do to set out what the expected standards of behaviour are, but also what the channels for complaint and raising issues are?

I think we have made it really clear, and I talked about having whistleblowing lines on the front of every call sheet and insisting on that in every production, ensuring that we can go in and investigate when instances are raised with us. We are really clear publicly that we want to hear about those. But I think we can always look at every individual situation and ask what the learnings are from it, and that is what we tried to do on the Brand report as well.

It is very embedded in the commissioning process that Ian Katz runs. It is not a side issue. This is taken seriously.

We are planning to get to 600 roles in the nations and regions. As of today, we are at about 500, so we are well on the way, which I am delighted by. As the Committee will remember, this was part of an initiative that we set up in 2018 that we said would take the best part of a decade, to think about how the channel is represented in the nations and regions, moving away from being rather London-centric in its employment. There are three planks to that. One is, how do we move the number of roles over time? Two is, how do we spend more than 50% of the content spend outside of London? We hit 50% a few years early. Three is, how do we bring a different set of people into the industry? We have our 4Skills programme, which has reached over 125,000 schoolchildren, and we have doubled the money in that to £10 million a year, so I am really pleased with that. We have now opened up all roles to be available to people to move if they would like to relocate, and we are also prioritising all new roles to be about 75% out of London. That is how we are doing it. What I am delighted by is that when we originally did relocation, not many people wanted to do it—they have a second earner, they have kids in schools. So most of the people we hired in Leeds were new into the organisation. But now there are tens and tens of people who are much more interested in moving and leaving London maybe, or they have seen that be a real success and they are positive about going to those offices. So it is a work in progress, but it is really positive and it is changing the organisation for the better, having that representation across the UK.

Multiple nights a week, the news is co-located from Leeds. It is the only national news programme to do that. Most other news programmes that come from somewhere else are local, but we do that multiple nights a week.

The evening news. We have a big studio there that anyone from the Committee would be most welcome to come to see, and see that there are real people who work there. It is very successful. I am sure that sometimes some presenters do not live there, but it is a big operation for us and it is a core part of how we see the news representing the UK.

The Leeds space also hosts our social media team. We talk about engines for change, and it is about taking key functions like that. Five or 10 years ago, that would have been sitting in a place in Soho or King’s Cross, and it is now in Leeds. It is one of the growth areas for our business that is going to be part of the future. There is real commitment going into Leeds, and I do know that part of the world quite well.

Channel 4 is currently 58% female, 23% ethnically diverse, 15% LGBT and 25% disability. Those are very high figures.

I am just getting to that. We have just introduced class. In the most recent Ofcom report, we were at about 32% working class—the highest of the PSBs, and the only one to have gone up since the last report. I am very pleased with that, because you may remember when I started at Channel 4 in 2017, there was a report saying it was the poshest broadcaster. So that is a big switch to make, and important in the industry because it is the characteristic on which we are not representative of the population. To answer part of your question, we have switched from targets to floor levels because we beat all our targets. I think now you maintain at a certain level and try not to fall below it. That is an important thing, but that is why. Then you get into a complicated position about whether you should be setting targets that are way above general population, or should you try to maintain a more representative group. I think the key thing now is how we change that class number over time and what the target is we set for it over the next five years. Changing that is about a number of things. It is about work in schools. When I talk about 4Skills, that is about 25,000 kids a year. We are going into schools across the UK ranked by the highest percentage of free school meals. We went to over 60 schools last year, and we are talking to kids between the ages of 13 to 16, so at the point where they are making decisions. It is really important that you change the aspirations of young people—the belief that there are jobs in our industry for people from all backgrounds. It is also about how we change internal cultures and atmospheres so that people can be who they really are and not feel that they have to live up to someone else’s expectation of what it means to be in media. Class is 32%. I am pleased that working class is the best level among PSBs, but I think there is still a long way to go, because that is not representative of the general population of the UK.

Welcome, and I am glad that the threat of privatisation has gone, because that has always been a cloud when you guys have been in front of us. Picking up on a couple of things that other colleagues mentioned, we had CIISA before us in this Committee. I have been passed an FOI request. You mentioned the Speak Up facility. Because you are a publisher-broadcaster, I think that makes things—as Dame Caroline referred to—a bit tricky to quantify. This FOI said, “We can confirm that no reports were made to the Channel 4 Speak Up facility from individuals in the independent production sector covering workplace bullying in 2024.” Because this is so amorphous, because it is spread over these indies, that just makes reporting it all so difficult, and people—you alluded to this—do not want to be blacklisted, because they will never work again. They have short-term, six-month contracts. How do you ensure that bullying is properly stamped out? This Speak Up is not working, because nobody complained to it last year.

It is not correct that nobody complained to Speak Up last year. I imagine it is correct that, in a request of whether anyone complained specifically about workplace bullying in independent—

The year before: “Channel 4 holds details of 16 complaints of bullying in independent productions”—sorry, it is not just one year—“in the sector between 2019 and 2023.” So there are figures, but now it has been swallowed up.

There will have been complaints last year, if I remember off the top of my head, for different things, but not bullying—so health and safety on set, working hours or financial irregularities. There are complaints that come in through whistleblowing that are a range. It may be that, in that period—for one period in 2024—there were not any workplace bullying ones. We go in and investigate or ask that company to do an investigation. You are absolutely right to say it is complicated by them being third parties. On the other hand, there is a positive complication from that, in that if we do not see a result that is adequate, we may choose not to work with that company again. To some degree, the threat or the stick we have is perhaps greater than if it was a division within the same company. But we do go in and do that through our commissioning operations team, and start investigations. It may be that, in the period of one of those FOIs, there was no bullying but, as you can see, there were bullying allegations from a period before. We get all kinds of complaints in through that, and we go and investigate them. The rate is not super high. It is not tens and tens a year. So to your point, I think there probably still are barriers to people calling that line. In a freelance economy, I completely understand why, which is why it is important that CIISA is set up and that there is another body that people can feel less fear about reporting into.

We do inquire at board level, on a regular and routine basis, about what the nature of the function of Speak Up is, because for any—

That needs better advertising—that you can go through an independent company. Again, with Gregg Wallace, we know it happened in different production companies over different years. On the thing last autumn, we have never heard back from “MasterChef” and Banijay—[Interruption.] No, not to my knowledge; she was here a couple of weeks ago and said “soon”, but we have never seen that. To Paul’s point, the threat of privatisation has gone; levelling up has also thankfully gone. As a London MP, I always felt that was a very anti-London thing—people scrabbling for crumbs on a table, and London not allowed. There is a perception that the Leeds relocation was a little bit surface level. There is not a proper national office there. Was it just to give the impression of moving up north to stave off the threat of privatisation? At the time, levelling up was a big thing. We had Nadine Dorries here—I remember her squirming in that chair many times, and she is no more.

No, it is not a fig leaf. If the Committee happens to be in the north, we would be delighted for you to come and see our full Leeds office, with 300 or 400 people, or our full Glasgow office, which is much smaller—that is a hub. There is also our full Bristol office. In Manchester, we are moving out of our current office to get an office twice the size. We are not housing hundreds of people in a vacuum somewhere. These are full and important offices. As Sir Ian said, the engine of our digital growth, 4Studio, is very much in the Leeds office and is part of it. We are not the scale of the BBC, in terms of tens of thousands of people employed. We have fully committed to this and we are doing it properly. I am delighted that it is working, because when we did suggest it five or so years ago, there were real fears in the organisation that it could not be achieved. To achieve that kind of shift in where your staff are at the same time as achieving the strategic shift to move to digital is something that we are very proud of.

In the last Government—they kept changing; I have been through six Prime Ministers in my short life—it was rumoured that the business of the ice sculpture and all that potentially drove the privatisation. Another reaction, it looked like, from yourselves was “The Andrew Neil Show”. Is that coming back?

Just for the record, it was an ice block, not an ice sculpture.

Okay, even worse or even better, whichever way you look at it.

“The Andrew Neil Show”, I thought, was very good.

That seemed to come when that thing came. I liked it. Is it coming back?

I do not think it is coming back—Andrew has moved on to other things—but I thought the Balls and Osborne combo was excellent in it. You will know that we did UK election night, “Britain Decides”, which was a tremendous success, and we had a very wide range of people on that programme. I was really proud of us for doing election coverage that beat the other commercial channels and that everyone was switching over to. We had Nadine Dorries and Ann Widdecombe on it, we had a “The Rest is Politics” team on it, and we had Emily Maitlis. We had a very wide range of views on it, and it is important that Channel 4 represents that wide range of views. We had Fraser Nelson doing a documentary for us the other day on the benefits system. It is important that we do that range of programming. I know it is not what people always expect of us, with reference to “Go Back to Where You Came From”, but we do try to make that range of programming that reflects a whole wide range of views, and it is important that we do so.

“Channel 4 News” is award-winning, and amplifies voices you do not hear elsewhere. Do you think that with things like “HARDtalk” having gone—it was all over the papers last week—and “Dateline London”, that is a potential space you could move into?

The thing is for us always to try to adapt to where the audience is or what is not being served elsewhere. How do we adapt news to work on TikTok? How do we make the news work on YouTube? How do we go where young people are now and try to make serious, impartial news dealing with difficult topics in ways that appeal to them? I do not know about “HARDtalk”. Presumably, it has been cancelled because less people are watching. So it is important that we continue to adapt.

One of the things the “Channel 4 News” team has done a fantastic job on is working very hard on demonstrated impartiality. In the most recent scores, if you take the positive trust and the distrust, our scores are at the top of the league, ahead of the BBC because there is an element that do not trust the BBC. That is not by accident. There is a definite view that we need the breadth of opinions and we need to curate the news with fact-based evidence, and we are very serious about making sure it is a broad church.

I guess there is a worry on the whole commissioning strategy thing. You are going to go digital first, and the Fast Forward strategy says there will be a ruthless focus “on cut through with fewer, stronger new titles,” so you are going for the impact factor. It just seems a mismatch with the original Channel 4 founding principles that were to shine a light on stories unheard elsewhere. Again, I am sounding like an old fart, but I remember watching “Countdown” as a primary school child when it first appeared. It was the first show, wasn’t it? I remember all that—Paul Coia. You used to have things like “Bandung File”, “Black on Black”, “Eastern Eye” and “Unions Weekly”—okay, maybe that is an anachronism, although there is lots of workers rights legislation coming in from this new Labour Government. I feel that the diversity things you could point to now, “It’s a Sin”, “Defiance” and those things are a bit few and far between, whereas before we had sustained programming that covered that. Are those things, in a commercial screening world, gone forever?

I am not even sure if “Union World” was on Channel 4.

“Union World” sounds great.

“Unions Weekly”.

I think it was a Granada programme. However—

It was shown on your platform.

You mentioned “Defiance” there, and I do not think anyone else would have done “Defiance”.

These are one-offs, though, every few years—or “Go Back to Where You came From”. They are a little bit sensationalist, “A Place in the Sun”. Do you know what I mean?

The question is, are we doing enough specialist things? We absolutely are. We had on “Swiped: The School That Banned Smartphones”. We had that on six months ago. It has caused a massive debate among the parent groups. We are seeing so much content come out of that now about what the issues are for our young people. We had on the other day, “I Printed a Gun”. What happens if you print a plastic gun using a 3D printer? Where can you smuggle it into? What is the reality of that? We had “Undercover: Exposing the Far Right”, which, as you may remember, did undercover filming inside Reform and led to the Prime Minister, at the time, condemning the P word. We have “Hollyoaks” with a sibling sexual abuse storyline, which you might not think would be the most popular, but it is important to bring to air. There was an 800% rise in inquiries into that charity, showing that those things are happening in the UK today. Yes, we have shows like “Go Back to Where You Came From”, but we also had Michael Sheen with his “Million Pound Giveaway” last month, which is Michael Sheen wiping out the debt of people in Wales up to £1 million with his own money. It is incredible, right, dealing with that issue in society. Again, that is not going to be a really populist show, but it is an important issue to bring to light. I think that we have lots of those shows on air, but we also have modern interpretations of things that are doing well with the audience. Last year we had a lot on crime, but we did it in a really clever, Channel 4 way. We had “Merseyside Detectives”—if you have not seen that, I encourage you to go and watch it tonight—which was about what is happening with gun crime there. We had “The Push”, which dealt with that dreadful case of the woman who was pushed off Arthur’s Seat to her death in Scotland. We had “Murder Trial”, which re-enacted what it means when you are in a trial. So we have lots of clever ways into issues that impact Britain today. We do not have a “Union World”, but we have lots of other things that impact workers. If you think about what we have done in the news, we have done investigations into the Church, which has resulted in the resignation of the Archbishop of Canterbury. That story was pursued for seven years. I do not know that anyone else would have pursued that story. We have had crumbling prisons, we have had “Undercover” in the NHS, we have had investigations into deepfake porn. We are pursuing issues that are happening in the UK today that I do not know that others are pursuing. I think there is lots of that. “Defiance” was a really important show, but it was not done for being popular. It was done because it is a really important story to tell. I am not sure anyone else would have done it.

Yes, I enjoyed it—that and “It’s a Sin”. I did not want them to end; you get really sucked in. But I do feel you are less risk-taking than you used to be. I worry that, in this digital first new commissioning world, the ability of a nation to tell its story not behind paywalls—without any of that stuff—is just getting more difficult.

I think it is difficult, but I do not think it is true that we are not taking those risks. We have the second Kosminsky series of “The Undeclared War” coming up, which will deal with really important issues. Again, that is risky. It is risky for all kinds of reasons to make. We have “Groomed: A National Scandal” coming. That is risky to make. We have Ian’s favourite programme, “Isle of Sh*te”, dealing with the waste and sewage crisis. We have things that are about Britain that are done in a Channel 4 way that are not being done to be popular. They are being done because they are important issues to discuss.

We do believe in the remit being challenged, and we do go through a process of mapping, “Here is the remit. Here is the spend. Here is the viewing. Are we doing what we set out to do?” In any one year are we up or down? Quite possibly, but is the intent there to be true to that diverse remit? Absolutely, and one of the side effects of the digital world is that you can do some things, particularly around social media, that are lower cost and maybe more daring. I think there are opportunities in this new world, as well as challenges.

Would you ever go back to youth culture? When you had Stuart Cosgrove you had, “The Tube”, “The Word” and “Network 7”. It was world-leading in those things. We have not seen any music on your channel for a long time.

Ah, the Stuart Cosgrove years.

I interviewed him for my PhD.

What the modern interpretation is of that youth culture is a really good question. We focus on that through our digital first programmes. We have dealt with incel culture, we have dealt with looksmaxxing, we have dealt with drift.

Music?

Not music so much, because it is very well served by the market. It is very well served elsewhere. We are doing “UNTOLD”, which is a series that deals with particular issues that are focused on Gen Z in Britain today, and there is a lot of that on the channel.

Lastly, you mentioned Peter Kosminsky. Do you agree with his theory that the streamers are progressively wiping out stuff? Would you agree with his suggestion that there should be a 5% levy on streamers? Apparently, Pact says that there are a dozen PSB people in the pipeline waiting because there is no finance. That could unlock that.

I think what Peter has raised is an important point, which is that the price of making high-end drama has gone up. It has gone up about 50% over the last five years, and I know that Jane Featherstone came to testify to you about it. On the one hand the price has gone up, caused by many factors—strike, covid, the rise of streamers being able to fund very high-cost-per-hour programmes because they can recoup those costs globally. At the same time, the ability of public service broadcasters to get what is called co-production funding—so we fund a certain amount and we get co-production funding from other countries—has gone down. The gap in budgets used to be about 15%, and now it is about 40%, partly because of that price inflation. But there are less international co-producers to help fund that, because when the global streamers fund, they buy out all rights and they take the programme internationally. That is what has caused the gap—price inflation and the rise of streamers, meaning there are no other parties to fund these things. Our reaction to that has mainly been to make cheaper things and to work harder to work out how we fill the gap. I think he does raise really good points about what that means for UK high-end content, and about us needing that as part of the UK emotional economy—he talks about drama hitting an emotional need for people in a very different way to news. One of his suggestions is that we introduce a 5% tax on the streamers here, which is done in, I think, 17 European countries, and I think that is well worth looking at. For us, we are also making sure that we make stuff that is more cost-effective. We are delighted that producers want to work with us because they retain that IP. When producers work for streamers, they do not retain the IP. The problem with that overall is they do not get paid out in success and, therefore, they tend to take less risk. There is also a long-term undermining of the sector if they are taking less creative risk because they are not making profits in success.

On the issue of drama, I know you have a drama coming up written by Jack Thorne, who everyone is talking about at the moment because of his work on “Adolescence”. He said that everyone who worked on “Adolescence” came from a public service broadcasting background and that it is only possible for the next Michaela Coel or Jimmy McGovern “to emerge if Channel 4 and the BBC are given the muscle to make drama.”

I agree.

If you were the Government, how would you deliver that muscle for Channel 4?

I think that is a very good point. “Adolescence” is a great show and dealing with important issues in society. We have talked about much of that in our Gen Z work and what we have done on smartphones, in raising the issues of being a young person in Britain today and, in particular, findings about how they have less reliable information, there is less social cohesion and there is increasing gender divergence, which is having negative effects on society. As you will know, Jack Thorne worked on that, and Stephen Graham worked on that, and I am delighted that we have a stake in Warp, the company that was behind such a brilliant production, which is excellent. But that would have been a budget that would be hard for us to compete with. I am happy that Jack’s next project is coming to us, or Peter Kosminsky’s, but that is difficult. The positive is that a show with audacity and brilliant creative skills involved in it, and British grittiness, is so successful. I think that that shows us that the audience want those shows. In terms of the Committee, it would be about looking at the tax breaks—increasing the tax break for television drama and comedy. I think that is really important, as we have done in film. Thinking about what you do or do not want to do about streamers is important, as is ensuring that Ofcom focuses on regulation that promotes public service media, rather than preserving it through decline.

Can we come back to distribution of your content through different channels? Talk me through the economics, relatively, of something being streamed on an owned platform versus a third party, most obviously YouTube?

For us, if we put something on streaming, the amount we make per advert, if you like, the CPM—the cost per thousand, or price per thousand, from our perspective—is about the same on digital as it is on linear. That is important to understand, because if you remember from the newspaper industry—

Forgive me, I am asking about not the distinction between digital and linear but the distinction between one type of digital and third-party digital.

Yes, but it is important to understand that they are about the same, because in newspapers that did not happen. Then, if we go to YouTube, the arrangement that we have with YouTube is that we manage the sales for our own adverts into our own content when streaming on YouTube, so that is a big difference to regular YouTube. That is part of our commercial arrangement with YouTube. That means that our CPM can be significantly higher than if it were done programmatically by YouTube, and is within 10% or 20% of what it would be on our digital owned and operated platforms. The main thing for us is that it is additional reach. We check and the people who are watching our content through YouTube are extra people and it is extra reach, so that is incremental revenue to our business.

Is it done on a revenue share basis, then, with YouTube?

Yes.

Okay, and who else has that kind of arrangement?

Nobody else did it for a while, but now lots of broadcasters are very interested. I do not know about the commercial arrangements of YouTube with others, but we were the first ones to do it.

You say that is within 10% to 20%, so for a like-for-like, let’s say, half-hour, full-programme stream—

Per advert, it is within 10% to 20%.

And the same number of ads or the same number of minutes per half hour?

I do not know if it is the same number of minutes per ads, because YouTube run their ads differently in terms of where they break. I would have to check whether it is the same number.

From the point of view of your P&L, what matters is the amount of revenue per half-hour presumably, not per ad?

What matters to us is if it is cannibalising revenue or if it is additional incremental reach. The main thing for us is it is extra money and it is incremental reach that we would not otherwise get on to a platform where young people are.

One of the strengths of Channel 4 is its sales capability. We can do ad sales in a way that many organisations cannot or they have outsourced, so if you are Paramount you are dealing with Sky. The ability of us to exploit the sales team on to these platforms has been key, because without that, if I was just another content producer going out to YouTube, I would have very poor economics indeed. The ad sales capability of Channel 4 is a vital element in its make-up.

You mentioned earlier, I think, 14% growth in the year on total streaming minutes. Did you hold constant on your owned platforms, and the increment is all third parties? What is the mix? What would the number be if you just talked about owned platforms?

I think on our owned platforms it would still be about 15%. That is total growth in viewer minutes. There was no shrinkage on our owned platforms.

YouTube is only one third party. You also have all manner of social media platforms. I am particularly interested in factual content and news content. There is this issue about brand flattening, where people say, “Well, I saw it on my phone,” not, “I saw it on Channel 4 on my phone.” If you do see that as an issue, how do you try to counter that? What approaches do you have, if you do, to try to move people—you will never get them off—away from third-party platforms sometimes to owned platforms? YouTube is now maybe a semi-owned platform, so if you are really controlling the revenue and the presentation, that almost sounds like a joint venture, but maybe that is a conversation for another day. Perhaps we can just come back to how you deal with the brand thing and moving people from the less attractive to the more attractive vehicles.

Let me try to answer all those. In general, I do not think you can force people off platforms where they are comfortable for different consumption. It is a nice idea, but I do not think one can. If people are consuming on TikTok at the time in the day as suits them, they are consuming on TikTok. The big success we had there last year was this billion news views, which was massive growth for us; 58% of our social and news consumption was on TikTok, and the team worked really hard to work out how to make things work on that platform, but without earning revenue against it. What we are trying to do on all those platforms is ensure that our brand is clear and burned into the programming. Whether that is the logo burned in or the logo appearing in other ways, that is critical. It is also true to say that it was some time ago that the audience moved to searching by show. The truth is the audience go, “I want to watch that show” and they search for it. The best you can do on multiple other platforms from a marketing perspective is make sure that people are aware of your brand and where it appears. But if you want to watch “Countdown”, you are going for “Countdown”. You probably do know “Countdown” is on Channel 4 at 2.20 pm, but if you are going for things, it tends to be programme-led.

I wanted to ask you the same question that I asked the BBC when we had them two or three weeks ago. Is it really a stable equilibrium to have in tele a situation where every what we used to call broadcaster tries to have its own owned distribution channel, unlike in music, where there is not a Sony, a BMG or this, that and the other—there is Spotify? Particularly given what you have just said about people searching by show, I bet a lot of people think “Adolescence” was on the BBC. Sometimes it works the other way around. Is that stable and, if not, where is the industry going? Is Freely a bit of a half-hearted attempt to do something about it, like BritBox was a bit of a half-hearted attempt a few years ago? What happens next?

I would not call Freely a half-hearted attempt.

You surprise me, Alex.

I would call it a positive collaboration by broadcasters in this country.

It is a good step forward.

Channel 4 is very different to the BBC and I cannot comment on them, but we already distribute through multiple platforms as a partnership. Our view is, “Let’s go where the audience is.” We are on Sky, we are on YouTube, we are on TikTok; we will be on any platform as long as we can make the commercials work, where we think our brand can appear and where the audience will find us. That is a different strategy to others, but we are a more agile organisation that works with lots of partners already. That is part of our model. That is perhaps a different strategic approach, but I think it is important that we pay attention to the data of where viewers are viewing; look at being on those platforms; ensure that we show up to them with public service content; as you point out, get our brand identified where we can; and, ideally, get paid for it. That is the shift that we must go through if we want public service content to be available to viewers.

My last question is on a slightly different theme. I pay tribute to what Channel 4 does on social mobility, which I think is a great example, but when you say you are going to employ more working-class people, how can you do that unless you mean you are going to have more manual labour jobs?

Class is a really emotive thing. It is quite complicated to get the definitions right. Why do I say it is an emotive thing? Often you get a job and you are what is called socially mobile, and then you are like, “Well, what class am I now? Am I in the class that I started off at, as my mum and dad were, or am I something different?” These surveys now measure it by one generally accepted definition, which is, what was the qualification of the highest wage earner in your household when you were aged 14? Sometimes they also look at whether you got free school meals, and sometimes they look at whether you went to an independent or a fee-paying school. It is about that main wage earner in your household, and then there are classifications of what the job is—professional, modern professional. That is how it is done in the surveys, so we follow that methodology. It would be helpful if everyone followed the same methodology, because it would make this discussion easier. It is also interesting that when people fill in the class surveys, there is a higher non-disclosure rate than on other characteristics, showing that that is still a work in progress in society as to whether people feel comfortable discussing it or self-identifying.

I said that was my last question—I forgot I had one more. What is the future of Channel 4 FactCheck? In the fact-checking space, it is one of the few proper brands that pre-existed fact checking, which can itself be occasionally questionable. How are you going to bolster that sub-brand if that is part of your strategy?

We will continue with FactCheck and, as you say, it does important work. I think maybe the more worrisome thing in society is that there has been a collapse in vertical trust. Often, people simply do not trust anything that comes from an authority, a traditional broadcaster, a company or, indeed, as you will know, Government. The work is on us to think about how we make fact-checked information more easily identifiable for people across the board. That is why I have talked about whether there is a way we could have a tick mark or something that comes from broadcasters or publishers that have some regulation in place or have proper journalists or editors. The truth is that the people who look up FactCheck are already the 1% or the 2%, and the issue is how we make it easier for the general population to know if something is correct information and factual, versus opinion, misinformation or disinformation. That is why I have called for a simpler way to do that across the industry.

Has anybody answered your call?

Yes, actually. There has been plenty of input into how difficult that would be, but I am now working with a number of other broadcasters and the newspapers to see if there is a way we could make that work. I think there is broad acceptance across many elements of the media that we need to work harder to make it easier for consumers.

I hope you will keep this Committee updated as those conversations progress. Thank you.

As a person from a working-class background who worked on Channel 4, I know it is entirely possible. I wanted to go back to the idea of content on YouTube and the impact of things like AI and copyright and that conversation. What is Channel 4’s thinking on that wider debate around copyright and AI? Do you feel there is a risk in putting more Channel 4 content on these platforms without any link back to the BVOD platform from those walled-garden systems that you have to be on in these places?

Artificial intelligence is clearly absolutely critical to the future of our industry and many industries. We are excited in a positive way, like all companies, about how we can use this and how it can make us more efficient. We are very clear that our use of AI is about supporting, not replacing, human creativity and decision making. But the debate of the day, as you will know, across all the creative industries, is that we need really clear terms. The UK copyright laws are very clear, and what is happening at the moment is scraping of value from our creative industries. You know that our industry is worth £125 billion GVA a year to the UK—6% of the UK. It is growing at 1.5 times other sectors. If we continue in a world where LLMs can scrape and use that data without paying for it properly, I think we are in a dangerous position for the creative industries. We are very clear that we are opt in as an organisation. We are very clear that we think that the LLMs need to disclose what they have used and they need to pay properly for it. We need that transparency, we need that payment, and the burden should be on them, not on us. We encourage DSIT and the DCMS to work together to find out how we can make that work.

Last month, we had Tim Davie in front of us, and he told us that a number of broadcasters, including the BBC, had sent a letter to the Government responding to the consultation on AI and copyright. It said, “We think the kind of change proposed in the consultation is currently unworkable and would not achieve the Government’s aim.” This is the Government’s consultation on AI and copyright. Do you agree and did you sign that letter?

We did send letters in and possibly signed the same letter, but I would have to check—probably both. We do agree with that. I think in that letter there is option 1, 2 and 3. What we are saying is that it needs to be the opt in. We need disclosure on what has been used. We cannot have automated scraping, we cannot have referring to sources without going back to them, and we need a proper payment and licensing regime.

Last but not least, bringing up the rear, Zöe.

Ending on a high. You have already talked a bit, Ian, about the Paralympics coverage in 2024—fantastic coverage. What has been the impact for Channel 4 of broadcasting the Paralympics?

It was wonderful to see it back in the right time zone, which was very helpful, because otherwise it is quite hard to get people to watch at the wrong time of day. Before Alex talks about the impact it has had on others, I would just call out the impact Channel 4 has had on the Paralympic movement and the fact that we were being consulted by NBC, who have to do the next, American version. The innovation that went on in the coverage, and the line-ups and the way everything was covered, was a complete triumph. The feedback from the Paralympic movement has been amazing. It is a great achievement. I think we have been a positive force for good in that.

Sir Ian mentioned earlier the 20 million viewers, and there were 7 billion minutes streamed. I was really pleased that we presented all the sports. We had them all streaming simultaneously, and we did that in partnership with YouTube, which is where tech can be helpful to us. I was incredibly pleased that we worked so hard to continue to innovate. Some 90% of our on-screen talent were disabled. That is a great thing, and British viewers have got really used to seeing that, so that is a great success. It is no longer really commented on. We worked with Rose Ayling-Ellis to have the first deaf live sports presenter and explained how complicated it was to do that—she had two different interpreters working with her and a whole system that was devised. Maybe the biggest thing is thinking about the impact on UK society. We built in Wales a virtual production centre, where everything was done that you would normally do in a gallery. It was done in Wales, from Paris direct to there. That was built as the UK’s most accessible facility; in fact, we think it was probably the world’s most accessible television facility. That is great. We have left that as a legacy to Wales. In fact, we are doing a bit of Formula 1 from there, so that is great. We worked with Every Body Moves, which is about giving access to sport and exercise in the UK for people with a disability. We had a QR code that was on screen multiple times a day, and 86,000 people registered with that. That was about, “Can you go to a swimming pool or a track nearby your home that is accessible?” That is amazing for people’s ability to do sport. We also had a show on around it called “Equal Play”, which is about disabled children’s access to sport in schools across the UK, which is incredibly important, again, for social cohesion as well as health and your own fitness. What I was really proud of was those wider impacts on the UK and thinking about what the legacy is of the Paralympics in between the Paralympics every couple of years. The team did a great job, and it had real commercial success with the audience, too, so that is an excellent result for us all around.

You talked a bit about the virtual production centre in Wales. Clearly, that is a piece of learning that you have done around how to remove the barriers for disabled people working in the industry. Do you have any more reflections on how that has enabled you to understand that issue better? What are you doing to spread that understanding to other broadcasters?

We do a lot at Channel 4 to think about how we can bring these lessons to other businesses, particularly the fact that 25% of our staff are disabled. What categories are they in? What have we learned as an employer? How can we make it easier for those people to work in our organisation? And how can we give those lessons to other organisations? Clearly, there are lots of disabled people who want to work, but perhaps they need some adjustments to be able to work, whether that is physical accessibility, dealing with visual impairments or providing spaces for an interpreter to sit with you. It is those things that we try to provide as lessons to elsewhere. Clearly, part of it is about the culture of your organisation being open to you being able to disclose that you might have a disability. A lot of our work is also about using the Paralympics as a tool to explain to other employers how they ought to think about this. It is a very large percentage of the population who would like to work, but that requires us as employers to think about how we might need to adapt and make adjustments.

What would the top takeaways for you be on how you are going to use the Paralympics to improve your work as Channel 4 in this area of employing people with disabilities?

Part of it, and maybe this is a soft thing, is creating a culture where people—this is always a work in progress—feel they can express who they are or what that may mean for them. For example, we have an inclusion passport, which means that anyone who is in a job at Channel 4 can write down in a place on the system what their adjustments are to be able to work effectively. Then, if you move jobs within the organisation or elsewhere, you can take that inclusion passport with you, so you do not have to constantly explain to a manager what those things are, which might be a difficult thing for you to have to do. That is a small thing but one that can make a tremendous impact inside the organisation.

The sheer fact of the role modelling that we saw over two weeks, and that we continue to see in our other coverage, creates a cultural shift, which is incredibly hard to measure but incredibly powerful in human terms, that goes, “Isn’t that brilliant. It is completely normal. What more can we do?” Things like the tech challenge for Rose were extraordinary, but on screen you would never have seen it, because it was just seamless. So what else can we do? How can we innovate? If you are doing the right things visibly, it is a lot easier to make the culture in the organisation more progressive.

Just very quickly before you go, Sir Ian, this is your last appearance before our Committee. You are standing down later this month. Do we know yet who your successor is going to be?

No, we do not. The good news though—literally hot off the press yesterday, I think—is that the advert has been posted by DCMS. They are looking to make a submission, I think, by about 7 July, for consideration by them, No. 10 and whoever else is involved. Certainly, we have a phenomenally brilliant interim Chair, in the shape of Dawn Airey, who will carry on. She will be in place to ensure there is no gap, and I wish whoever my successor is all the best with this brilliant organisation.

Do you have any parting message that you want us to take on board? Is there anything that you wanted to leave with us that you have not had an opportunity to say already about either Channel 4 or public service broadcasting?

I would just reiterate the phrase from before, which is that these are national treasures. We have to look after them, and we have to be serious about it, because the environment we are operating in is becoming harder for the public service broadcasting operators. I think Channel 4 on its own is in great shape. Alex and the team have done a fantastic job, and I am very confident of their success in the years to come. But we need to be engaged, and we need to be on the side of the good guys, basically.

Thank you very much, Alex and Sir Ian, for your time today. It has been great to talk to you.

Thank you.

Thanks very much.