We need to persuade the people in power that the quality and range of children’s screen-based media matter, that funding needs to be found to replace the commercial revenue which has been lost, and a mechanism needs to be put in place as a matter of urgency for the efficient distribution of the funds and the content.
The history of the campaign so far is revealing – regulators and politicians have made all the right noises, but there has been no concrete result.
In 2006-07 Save Kids’ TV campaigned successfully for the crisis to be recognised. We pushed Ofcom to an earlier than planned review of children’s broadcasting which resulted in the October 2007 Ofcom report. This was a research-based analysis which identifies huge problems facing the UK children’ production industry and revealed that the British public are concerned about the decline in viewing choice for their kids.
Save Kids’ TV’s response to the report is a comprehensive plan to ensure children’s media continues to be funded into the future.
Ofcom’s Second Public Service Broadcasting Review was published in April 2008. The report recognised that children’s is the “canary in the coalmine” for all the other PSB genres. Digital switch-over will bring a completely new regulatory environment in which it will be very difficult to force any commercial broadcaster to stick with their public service commitments.
In response SKTV re-iterated the need for an online service which encompasses not only fully-funded programme commissions in a video-on-demand service (of drama, factual and entertainment programmes made in the UK, about, with and by UK Kids) but also allows children to interact, participate and contribute (to user-generated content) and to join in a community around the content. This radical new approach to distributing and funding kids’ media content is now at the heart of our proposal to government.
In January 2009 Ofcom issued its final report on the future of public service content which included its recommendations to the Government. While there were references to the SKTV proposal and to the need to ensure continued provision for children, the language used in the report was not definitive.
In early 2009 Save Kids’ TV was in discussion with the Dept for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) about Lord Carter’s Digital Britain Report Digital Britain, the wide -ranging Government review of digital services in the UK. The interim report (January 2009) stressed the need for plurality in children’s content provision. Save Kids’ TV was encouraged by the DCMS to submit a more defined version of our original proposition for a service for kids.
This document, was sent to the DCMS on the 30th April 2009. Save Kids’ TV subsequently lobbied for the inclusion of a children’s service in the plans to pilot public service content in the new Digital Britain Bill. But by by the time the DCMS had published the Bill at the end of 2009, there were no references to childrens content or services at all other than a brief nod towards Channel 4 (with no public money) providing a small interactive service for 10s plus.
The issue was revived in the January 2010 House of Lords Select Committee on Communications Report “The British Film and Television Industries – Decline or Opportunity?” which re-identified the 51% decrease in originated children’s programming produced in the UK in recent years. The report also quoted Colette Bowe, Chair of Ofcom, giving evidence to a House of Commons Select Committee: “we are sleepwalking into a situation where we do not have UK-generated content of a high quality for our kids. I believe that would be a very bad outcome.”
In the run-up to the 2010 General Election Save Kids’ TV met key politicians from all three main parties to try to persuade them to back provision for children’s media. The meeting with Ben Bradshaw, the then Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport on March 17th 2010 saw some real progress. Bradshaw committed to including children’s funding as one of the recipients of “digital dividend” funding. Digital dividend refers to an additional sum of money in the TV licence fee currently being used by the BBC to finance digital switchover amongst those less likely to fund it themselves, which would have been removed in 2012, but could now be retained and allocated to public service content outside the BBC – such as regional news programming – the Labour government’s first priority.
However the regional news pilots were a casualty of the Digital Economy Bill’s passage through Parliament being disrupted by the election, so that prospect now seems far-off.
An industry round-table with experts from various sectors of children’s media and officials and politicians with an interest in the campaign, took place in March 2010 and once again figures as diverse as Anne Wood, Tony Robinson, Floella Benjamin and key producers reiterated the crisis-situation faced by the children’s content industry
