Examination of Witnesses (Questions 20
- 39)
THURSDAY 2 MARCH 2000
MR LESLIE
HILL, MS
KATE STROSS,
AND MR
MALCOLM WALL
20. Do you accept that as a result of the 11
o'clock regional news has become a bit of a joke in a cul-de-sac
at the end of that show?
(Mr Wall) Not at all. The regional news programmes'
audiences have suffered. The move in terms of start times for
many of them has caused a problem. What we established throughout
the country is a regional hour between 5.30 and 6.30 whereas before
there was varying output at that time. The pleasing thing is,
as the audiences have learned when our news starts, 11 of the
15 services this year have seen an uplift in their audiences,
we have continued to invest across the network in news gathering.
I can talk with some authority about what we have done at United
in the three franchises where we have spent 4.5 million on a regional
news centre in Anglia in 1998; 3.5 million on regional post-production
studios in Meridian, in HTV Bristol we have put a digital news
room in. I know that Carlton and Central have done something very
similar. There has been a heavy investment in regional news services.
We have a regular start time of six o'clock and those audiences
are starting to come back, pleasingly.
(Mr Hill) May I ask Kate Stross to clarify the reduction
in the news viewing figures over this period?
(Ms Stross) The figure you quote for the four weeks
is no doubt correct but these figures do vary very much indeed.
If, instead of looking at four weeks at the beginning of 2000
versus 1999, you had looked at the figures for the whole of the
year 2000 to date, you would see not a reduction of two million
but a reduction of 1.7 million between the delivery by the two
bulletins. If you look at the whole period since we changed the
pattern of our news bulletins, the reduction is 1.3 million. You
have to look at a longer period of time than just a particular
four weeks when in that period our overall share of peak-time
viewing has been lower than in the same period in 1999. It is
a feature of the entire schedule during the four weeks, not purely
a news issue.
Chairman
21. Even accepting what you say, the implication
is that a loss of 1.7 million viewers rather than two million
is perfectly all right. It is the extra 300,000 that is the worry.
(Ms Stross) I am not trying to say that. Our schedule
performs as a whole and the schedule as a whole has not been as
strong in the first part of 2000 as it was in the first part of
1999. That is clearly not something we are happy with at all,
but the performance of the news is in part a reflection—particularly
the performance of the news at 11—of the overall schedule
performance. That is the weakness that you are seeing.
(Mr Hill) There are 600,000 fewer people watching
both news programmes. That is also what recent figures tell us.
22. We will deal with overall audiences for
news programmes some time this morning, if there is time. We have
a whole range of statistics provided by the ITC, both on audiences
for your bulletins and audiences for the BBC bulletins, in which
the BBC have been doing a good deal better than you. Since there
has been reference to conditions laid down by the ITC when they
gave what they called qualified approval, one of the conditions
laid down by the ITC is that ITV will schedule a regular headline
service in the nearest break to 10pm on weekday evenings. How
consistently has that condition been fulfilled?
(Mr Hill) I think it has been totally fulfilled.
23. You can provide us with statistics on that,
can you?
(Ms Stross) I am sure we have some. We have certainly
put out a headline bulletin very close to ten o'clock on every
weekday night since the change.
(Mr Hill) One of the things that worries me about
that is that it may put people off watching at 11 o'clock because
they have seen the headlines at ten o'clock.
Mr Keen
24. I still switch on hoping for News at
Ten. How long do you think it would take before that habit—?
(Mr Hill) You are confirming my point that a year
is not very long to do what we have been trying to do. We never
said we would solve all this in a year. This is the biggest change
in the ITV schedule for 32 years. My wife sometimes looks for
News at Ten. A lot of people will take a lot of time to
get used to this. We still believe that we will improve our news
audiences but we have to try and get the programmes between 10
and 11 right and we have had some failures, but we are in an experimental
period. Nobody can predict exactly which programmes will be successful
and which will not.
25. Are you concerned that, because you have
to vary the 11 o'clock start for the news, that will make it more
difficult for the habit to change from 10 to 11?
(Mr Hill) That is a very interesting point because
the problem may be that if you have an advertising break some
people may decide to turn off during the advertising break and
not wait for the news. We are a commercial channel that lives
off its advertising revenue. Our advertising revenue is what buys
our quality programmes. We have to do the best we can with that.
That is a difficulty, yes.
26. We represent people but we are not really
representative of the people we represent when it comes to news,
because we have this fascination for it, or madness, as my colleagues
call it. What is the difference on a Saturday? There is not a
regular time for news on Saturdays so does that illustrate the
habit principle?
(Ms Stross) I am afraid they are not statistics that
I have in mind. Certainly the time of the news bulletins at the
weekend does move around more and I imagine that that leads to
volatility in their audience size but I do not have those statistics.
(Mr Wall) The greatest variance is inheritance and
topicality. Throughout all of this we must bear in mind that more
people watch news when there are items of national interest. It
is not just about consistent behaviour.
27. Why do ITV want to retain an aspect of public
service broadcasting?
(Mr Hill) I am very glad you raised that because it
gives me the opportunity to say that, first of all, we have a
Communications Bill coming up. We have a series of working groups
looking at exactly what we think any changes should be in terms
of regulation in this new world that we live in. We have a bottom
line on public service broadcasting and, first of all, it is the
regional service which we believe we are the best at. We do far
more than the BBC; we spend far more than the BBC; we have more
sub-regions than the BBC. The regional service is part of our
public service broadcasting remit which we believe we should continue.
We believe strongly in news, international news, national news
as well as regional news, so we are also committed to news. We
are also committed to a very high proportion of United Kingdom
home produced programmes. We believe that is what the British
audience wants. It is expensive but that is what we should be
doing. We also believe in social responsibility kinds of programmes.
We are doing a health week in March which will be interesting
and very good. It will be a perfect example of where our regional
service meshes in with our national service. That is the bottom
line. There may be other things that we want to do or not do.
We do believe that in the coming era we should not be quite pinned
down in the same way that we are now with all the very specific
things about regulation. If you look at the situation, ITV is
the most regulated; Channel 4 is next and the BBC is the least
regulated. The BBC has recently announced that it is getting rid
of its BBC Breakfast News. It seems to be able to do those things
without any kind of regulation whatsoever. If you were starting
with a fresh piece of paper, you would probably say that, given
the way the BBC is financed by the licence fee, the BBC would
be the most regulated; Channel 4 would be the next one and ITV
would be the third. It is the wrong way round at present given
the commercial requirements of ITV. All that needs looking at
but we have a bottom line on public service broadcasting which
I have described.
28. By 2004/5, do you think there should be
no regulation as to putting news on a highly profitable, commercial
programme? Would you like a dedicated news programme yourself
in the digital world?
(Ms Stross) If you go out to 2004/5, there will still
be a very substantial proportion of homes—probably around
50 per cent—that are not digital. Today we only have 30
per cent pay television homes in this country. There will still
be a very substantial proportion who receive only four or five
channels. I do not think we would argue that the obligation to
show news programmes should be removed from ITV in those circumstances.
We will see news as a continuing core of our public service commitments
beyond 2004/5.
Ms Ward
29. Mr Hill, you said a little earlier that
across the news programmes you now have a better spread of viewers
but you have less of them. Is this a new policy to go for quality
rather than quantity in audience?
(Mr Hill) No, there is no policy of that kind. As
the Chairman has reminded us, we said that we hoped that eventually
we would get more viewers for our news. That remains the position.
I have explained that in some detail so I will not repeat it.
One of the points we made before was about trying to rebalance
the audience because our audience was not reflecting the population
at large. We had a higher proportion of certain kinds of viewers
as opposed to other viewers. If we look at what is happening,
we have rebalanced the audience to some extent. We have retained
the so-called ABC1 viewers and we have increased the younger viewers.
If you look at the kinds of people watching the 11 o'clock news
and the kinds of people watching the 6.30 news, we have a better
balance than before. All we are trying to do is to maintain and
of course increase the audience for news because we try to increase
the audience for everything and, at the same time, get a reflection
of the total population watching our news. It is interesting that
we have fewer people watching both news programmes.
30. I think it is very sad that you have less
people watching both news programmes as a result of the changes
that you have made to your programming. When you came before the
Committee last year with the proposals that you put into the ITC,
these were based upon a one year trial period with the ITC. Now
you are telling us that one year is not sufficient. Will you be
going back to the ITC to ask for that review to continue much
longer than just one year?
(Mr Hill) That is not correct. The one year was never
mentioned when we were before this Committee. The one year came
later. We knew nothing about one year here. It was the ITC themselves,
I believe—they will tell you themselves if this is right
or not—who said that they would review what had happened
after a year.
31. You believe that it will take much longer
to make the changes necessary. You are basing it upon well watched
programmes before news. How many programmes in a week prior to
11 o'clock can you be sure you are going to get a high audience
that will carry over to 11 o'clock?
(Mr Hill) I cannot be sure because it depends upon
the success that we have in developing new programmes for that
slot. Because we have to attract advertising revenue, we do everything
we can to maximise our audience all the time. We will continue
to do that.
32. At the expense of news?
(Mr Hill) No. The idea is to get more audiences between
10 and 11 and to get more audiences therefore from the inheritance
that that will give to the nightly news. We need to maximise our
audiences at all times. In relation to the concern about the figures
of the number of viewers watching news, which I understand, it
is the 11 o'clock news compared with the 5.40 where the deficit
lies and the key is to get more people watching up until 11 because,
as we have seen from the various examples I have quoted, we will
then get more people watching the news as well. We will gain twice.
We will gain because we have more people between 10 and 11 and
we will gain because we have more people watching the nightly
news. That is what we are after.
33. The definition of peak-time that you give
is between 7 and 10.30. Is that correct?
(Mr Hill) Yes.
34. If that definition is accepted by the ITC,
would you not be in breach of the terms of the changes?
(Mr Wall) The definition of 7-10.30 is for the purposes
of measuring our performance and satisfying our advertising customers.
We have always abided by the wider definition of 6.00-10.30 in
discussions with both the ITC and in the commonly used measurement
of peak.
35. Last summer I had correspondence with Richard
Eyre about the timetabling of the nightly news as it suddenly
became known. When Mr Eyre and yourself were before this Committee
last time, never once did you refer to it as "nightly news".
You always referred to it as 11pm, certainly not around 11pm.
You are now saying that the nightly news that you are putting
out will not go out before 11 o'clock but after that. It may go
out at three or four minutes past. How many times in the last
six months have you been able to achieve deadlines of 11 o'clock
for news as opposed to previously with News at Ten, where
the public recognition was that it went out at ten o'clock?
(Mr Wall) All running times as published are largely
approximate. Eastenders does not go out at the same time
every day; neither does Coronation Street, because there
is live television; there is the need to put in late promotions
and the changes of the overall interstitial. We were not rigid
enough about the timing of nightly news at the start of the new
schedule. We are now determined to have it as close as possible
to 11 o'clock but because of the very way television works you
do not always get it on the button.
36. Will you be able to provide figures to the
Committee about the number of times it has actually hit 11 o'clock?
(Mr Hill) Yes. I do not think any news has gone out
before 11 o'clock since September. I do not think the ten o'clock
news always went out at exactly ten o'clock.
Chairman
37. I turned it on last night and without timing
it to the second it looked to me as though it was starting at
about four minutes past 11. Whereas of course News at Ten
did not come on precisely at ten because you had commercials and
it went over them, it did come on very soon after ten, taking
into account that there were commercials. I would like to refer
you to statements that you made about the fall in the audience
for news. While it is perfectly true that month on month comparisons
are not necessarily accurately symptomatic, nevertheless they
are useful. If you look at April of last year, which is when you
started your new schedule, news for the two main bulletins on
ITV, the audience was 10.1 million and the audience for the two
comparable BBC news bulletins was 10.5 million. The BBC was slightly
ahead but not much. The figures for January this year show that
the ITV audience was 9.1 million and the BBC audience was 12.1
million. People are wanting the news and since they are not getting
it from you in the way that they want it they are turning increasingly
to the BBC. Perhaps you could comment on that.
(Mr Hill) I do not think you can just take one month
at a time. There are certain kinds of events that take place where
people do naturally turn to the BBC. I am not going to say that
was the situation in January because I would have to check, but
I do believe you have to look at these numbers over a longer period
than picking out April, January or any other single month. We
are looking at them over a period of time.
(Ms Stross) The BBC did a major relaunch of their
6 o'clock news bulletin at approximately the same time that we
changed the schedule pattern and their audiences at 6pm have grown.
They appear to have picked up—and these, I am afraid, are
calendar year numbers—about 300,000 extra viewers at 6pm,
probably due in part to the relaunch. Interestingly, if you look
at the audiences for the nine o'clock news in the whole of 1999
versus 1998, those audiences are flat. They have not grown their
9pm audience dramatically because there was not a 10pm bulletin.
Their audiences have performed better, 1999 on 1998, than ITV's
have. I accept that.
38. The ITC have provided us with month by month
figures from April of last year to January of this year inclusive.
There is a clear and consistent difference between your bulletin
and the BBC bulletin. Your peak-hour bulletin, the 6.30 bulletin,
has every single month between April of last year and January
of this year been consistently out-performed by the BBC's six
o'clock news. For January this year it was six million for you
and 6.9 million for the BBC. The BBC are consistently out-performing
your peak-hour bulletin and the BBC are massively out-performing
your 11pm bulletin with their nine o'clock news.
(Mr Hill) The BBC six o'clock news has always been
the most popular news programme and you are confirming that that
remains the case. We believe that we will continue to do better.
The 6.30 and the News at Ten situation is pretty similar.
The figures are not very different. We hope that we will continue
to do better with the 6.30 news. It is doing better. The discrepancy
is largely between the 11 o'clock and the old 5.40.
Miss Kirkbride
39. I understand why the increase in advertising
revenue of £100 million is exciting for you but I do wonder
how much of that increase is to do with the move of News at
Ten to a later slot because clearly advertising revenue goes
up when the economy is doing well. Who wants to be a Millionaire,
I am sure, attracts a good bulk of that advertising revenue. Of
the 300,000 who get the News at Ten at slot, I wonder whether
you can extrapolate how much of that extra revenue is to do with
the change.
(Ms Stross) Our advertising revenue has been growing
more slowly than advertising revenue to television as a whole
for some years. What we found in 1997 and 1998 was that the gap
between ITV's revenue growth rate and the growth rate of total
television was broadening a lot. Instead of getting a growth rate
of about three-quarters of what the industry as a whole got, in
1997, for example, our growth rate was only 18 per cent of the
growth rate of television as a whole. What we did last year was
to pull the position back to having a growth rate in our revenue
which was again about three-quarters of the growth rate that total
television saw. You can see that we have differentially last year
improved our performance. We are still growing more slowly but
not as much more slowly as we were previously.
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