Dame Carolyn McCall has argued an "imbalance of power" between Phillip Schofield and a young runner made their brief affair "deeply appropriate".
The chief executive is facing questions about the broadcaster’s approach to safeguarding and complaint-handling after Phillip Schofield left as host of This Morning before subsequently parted ways with ITV and his talent agency YMU.
Carolyn was asked why she and Holy Willoughby were 'the only people' at the station not to hear about Phillip Schofield's affair at a parliamentary hearing on Wednesday.
She replied: "In every company I've ever worked my track record [shows] I’ve put people at the centre I've always treated people well. I've always wanted people to come into a place where they feel comfortable, where they can speak up where they can speak out, where they can be themselves, and where they're happy to come to work," the ITV boss replied.
"One of the reasons we asked KC to come in and look at this the whole thing is because we will always want to learn, to listen, to act. So whatever emerges from the KC inquiry, we will learn from it because there will be lessons now no organisation can do anything perfectly and we certainly are not saying we have."
She continued: "The people that have said they knew would only have heard rumours about it, if any one of the individuals you have named or referenced had come to us and said there is evidence that there is a relationship between Philip Schofield and person X, we would have, with evidence, we would have been able to launch a formal investigation because the imbalance of power, the imbalance of dynamics in that relationship makes it deeply inappropriate."
The ITV boss stated the broadcaster has "policies in place" that state this sort of relationship is inappropriate.
"We worked very, very hard for many, many months, in fact, until recently to ask people, not just Phillip referenced and person X, but people in production, if they knew something was going on," she claimed.
"And it was repeatedly denied by both individuals. But, also no one in the team ever said there was anything that they could say, in fact, most of them said we don't know what's going on."
