ITV announces new £80m Diversity Commissioning FundOFFICIAL PRESS RELEASENEWS PROVIDED BY ITV Press Centre TV today announced plans to reserve £80m of its content commissioning budget over the next three years to drive change towards racial equity and disability equity. Of this amount, at least £20m will be reserved for content made by Black, Asian and minority ethnic-led and disabled-led production companies. ITV has also created a new £500k development fund to develop ideas that will qualify for the Diversity Commissioning Fund. To qualify for the fund, productions must meet either the first criteria, or two of the remaining criteria: Diverse company ownership or leadership – senior individuals in company ownership or leadership roles (including through co-production partnerships) involved in shaping creative or operational strategy within the production company (e.g. Managing Director, Creative Director) must be Black, Asian or minority ethnic and/or disabled. Commenting on the announcement, ITV CEO, Carolyn McCall, said: “Today’s announcement builds on ITV’s Diversity Acceleration Plan. We want to keep up the momentum and drive more progress at ITV and across the industry, so that our audiences can see their broad range of experiences and perspectives reflected in our content.” Ade Rawcliffe, ITV’s Group Director of Diversity and Inclusion, explained the new initiative: “ITV is committed to creating content by, with, and for everyone, connecting and reflecting modern audiences. We want more people of colour and disabled people to be able to tell their stories and get opportunities in senior production roles. With this reserve fund, we’re working to speed up progress in a sustainable way, and play our part to change the structure of the industry.” Marcus Ryder at the Sir Lenny Henry Centre for Media Diversity said: “ITV dedicating programme finance for television productions that meet set criteria to positively increase diversity and inclusion is an important development. The LHC is happy to have been consulted in the process, and if implemented fully we see this as a vital policy tool in any broadcaster’s efforts to increase representation of underrepresented groups in production.” [end] AboutNotes to Editors: ITV has 14.2% off-screen and 17.5% on-screen representation of Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic creatives, and 4.5% off-screen and 9.6% on-screen representation of disabled creatives. On-screen and off-screen data is collected via Diamond, an industry-wide data collection system for monitoring and reporting diversity in broadcasting. These figures are from the latest Diamond report (The Fifth Cut: Diamond at 5, published March 2022) and relate to programmes broadcast between 1 August 2020 and 31 July 2021 based on 192,859 completed Diamond diversity forms from people working or appearing on these programmes. Further detail on ITV’s Development Fund criteria Production companies must meet at least one of the following:
Source ITV Press Centre
March 18, 2022 6:00am ET by ITV Press Centre |