The Government is set to proceed with plans to privatise Channel 4
(Picture: PA Wire)Plans for a £1 billion sell-off of Channel 4 prompted an furious dispute on Tuesday as ministers were accused of threatening the future of public service broadcasting.
Culture Secretary Nadine Dorries said the Government planned to privatise the channel, which was set up under Margaret Thatcher in the Eighties, to free it to compete with Netflix and Amazon.
She also claimed that income from the sale would help to boost Britain’s creative industries at the same time as giving Channel 4 the “tools and freedom to flourish” as a public service broadcaster.
But the planned sale, which had already drawn opposition from Sir David Attenborough among others, was met with a barrage of criticism from senior Tories, opposition politicians and prominent figures from the TV world.
They claimed that, contrary to Ms Dorries’s claims, the sale would undermine the channel’s ability to produce important public service programming and threaten a reduction in British-based commissioning.
The former Conservative deputy prime minister, MP Damian Green, also hit out, denouncing the plan as “unconservative”.
Liberal Democrat culture spokesman Jamie Stone added Channel 4 was “a world-renowned gem” that “the government seems hell-bent on trashing”, while Labour said the plans made “no sense”.
The proposed sale, which will require legislation, follows a consultation on the broadcaster’s future.
Ministers argue that with income for traditional broadcasters such as Channel 4, which is publicly owned but funded by advertising, in decline, new streams of revenue can be produced via a sale.
Ms Dorries insisted that despite the attacks, she wanted to preserve the “cherished place in British life” the channel held, but that its current public status was “holding it back from competing against streaming giants like Netflix and Amazon”.
“I will seek to reinvest the proceeds of the sale into levelling up the creative sector, putting money into independent production and creative skills in priority parts of the country,” she added.
Damian Collins, Tory MP and former chairman of the digital, culture, media and sport select committee, said: “Private ownership and the injection of money... could be good for making Channel 4 sustainable in the long run.”
Conservative former Cabinet minister Jeremy Hunt also said that he was “not in favour” of privatisation because Channel 4 “provides competition to the BBC” on public service broadcasting.
In a statement, the channel said it was “disappointed” that ministers had ignored the “significant public interest” concerns raised during the consultation into its future.
It added that it had presented the Government with “a real alternative to privatisation that would safeguard its future financial stability, allowing it to do significantly more for the public and creative industries”.
