| Teenager murdered near city park A murder investigation is under way on the south side of Glasgow following the death of a teenager. bbc.co.uk |
S4C claims 40% budget cut would 'call into question' future of channel Warning comes in bleak 28-page response to the Department of Media, Culture and Sport from S4C over threatened cutsWelsh-language broadcaster S4C has warned that if the government opts to slash its budget by 40% it "calls into question" the future ability of the channel to operate.S4C has today published a bleak 28-page response to the Department of Media, Culture and Sport in which it outlines the impact of cuts of either 25% or 40% to its £100m-a-year funding with potential ramifications including having to switch the service off for several hours a day.In a 40% scenario S4C says it would have a content budget of only £51m, which would be "unlikely to be sufficient to ensure delivery of the required range and quality of programming". "Such a radical reduction would create a high level of risk to the service and call into question the existence of the institution itself," the report says. The knock-on effects of such cuts would be the loss of 500 to 800 jobs in the production sector in Wales and beyond, it added.The report, called A Process of Renewal, says that even a 25% budget cut would "strike at the heart of the programme service itself". The programming budget would fall from £83m to £62m in 2014. "It is difficult to see how one could achieve this without segmenting the day and limiting S4C's own hours of transmission," the report says.Programming that would be affected would include sports rights, on which S4C spends around £5m per year, and children's output which accounts for 13.5% of all spend.Earlier today the culture secretary, Jeremy Hunt, paved the way for large-scale cuts by formally scrapping the traditional funding mechanism for S4C.S4C immediately pledged to cut 40 posts, a 25.6% reduction from the current 156 full-time staff, over the next two years. This will save £1.48m in annual salary costs. However this will be offset in the first year by a one-off redundancy cost of about £800,000.S4C's plan for next year is to cut its budget by 10%, about £10m with a £4.6m reduction in programming spend.The submission says that the BBC and S4C will also "investigate new ways of working together" to "reduce operational duplication and maximise the impact of our services", as predicted by MediaGuardian.co.uk. Plans include potentially co-locating BBC Wales and S4C at a single site.S4C said it will look at the potential for S4C to invest "on a much larger scale" in online content and become a "more active innovator" in new media.The broadcaster said it was imperative that Hunt took into account the "severe reduction" that the double-digit percentage cut the BBC recently announced in its spend on programming for S4C when considering wider savings.S4C also said that governing body S4C Authority would launch a wide-ranging strategic review into S4C's situation, which would report back no later than June next year. This would aim to provide "follow-through from the short-term cost-reduction plan that is already being formulated for the coming year".The report stresses that S4C is keen to keep as much control of the future of the channel as possible in its own hands, arguing that the review process should be "owned by the [S4C] Authority and its staff". The S4C Authority would bring in "outside expertise" only where necessary.Some observers believe that Hunt may look to dissolve the authority, which has come in for criticism in recent months following the ousting of S4C's chief executive, Iona Jones.S4C also intends to boost the amount of original content it produces for children in the UK and abroad.To boost commercial revenues S4C said it is looking at leasing the post-midnight hours to third-party broadcasters on the main channel and the whole of S4C2."The document draws attention to matters of fundamental importance to Welsh-language broadcasting which need to be considered strategically," said John Walter Jones, chairman of the S4C Authority."We have been looking at those matters highlighted in the document for some time. They reflect our concern to ensure that S4C in its entirety reflects the fundamental changes happening in broadcasting in Wales and further afield."• To contact the MediaGuardian news desk email editor@mediaguardian.co.uk or phone 020 3353 3857. For all other inquiries please call the main Guardian switchboard on 020 3353 2000.• If you are writing a comment for publication, please mark clearly "for publication".S4CTelevision industryWalesMark Sweneyguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds guardian.co.uk |
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