The outgoing Channel 4 chairman Terry Burns has said he struggles to see how the broadcaster’s 7pm news bulletin would survive at its current length in a primetime slot if the channel were privatised.
“It is no secret that as an economic proposition Channel 4 [News] doesn’t really do terribly well,” Burns told the Voice of the Listener and viewer conference in London. “You can see this by the absence of adverts in the breaks.
“I struggle to see any alternative ownership that would be able to put on an hour-long news programme at that point in the day and of the quality it is.”
It was revealed in September that the government is considering the privatisation of Channel 4 after a civil servant was photographed in Whitehall carrying a document laying out options for the state-owned but commercially funded broadcaster.
Burns’ comments echo those of David Abraham, Channel 4 chief executive, who said last month that “asset strippers” looking at Channel 4 as an investment would cut back drastically on news and current affairs programming such as Dispatches.
Burns said uncertainty over Channel 4’s future had been disruptive to the channel’s ongoing operations.
He said: “It is a very disruptive process. People’s attention is distracted. Advertisers begin to worry about what is going on, programme makers start to worry about what it is going on.”
However, the former Treasury mandarin said a Channel 4 sell-off would not be especially appealing to the government from a financial perspective as it would raise far less than offloading other assets owned by the state.
The broadcaster is valued at around £1bn, but that figure would be reduced significantly if a private Channel 4 retained its public service remit. John Whittingdale, the culture secretary, is on the record saying that if the channel were sold the remit would remain in place, meaning any new owner would have continue meeting commitments to cater for minority audiences and take risks.
Burns has proposed that if the channel is to be taken out of public ownership, it should be turned into a non-profit organisation to avoid commercial pressures that would undermine the quality of programming. He said he had long considered the proposal as a way of dealing with previous debates about whether the channel should be privatised.
His six-year stint as chairman of Channel 4 comes to an end in January after ministers rejected a suggestion by the regulator Ofcom that he stay on for another year after the end of his second term.
