The annual VLV children’s conference was held on 7th November and was very well attended. Peter Duncan in his role as Chief Scout opened the conference with a plea to take the future of kid’s media and culture seriously. The conference was dominated by issues raised in Richard Deverell’s statement concerning the future of BBC children’s programmes and the impending cuts.
PACT and Save Kids’ TV were invited to outline their plans for solutions to the crisis, and media commentator Ray Snoddy responded from an independent perspective. He was concerned that tax incentives might be difficult to get past the Treasury in times of belt-tightening, but was more sanguine about the possibilities for Lottery and other forms of funding to finance the Save Kids’ TV proposition.
At VLV’s AGM conference later in the month Sir Michael Lyons Chairman of the BBC Trust indicated that the Trust was aware of the issues facing BBC Children’s and would be looking at them carefully. SKTV believes that the BBC should reconsider its budget cuts in this genre and also look at tightening its hours of transmission commitments. Ofcom has identified that Children’s BBC currently transmits significantly more hours than it is required to do according to the commitments made by the BBC, which opens the way for reductions in future.
Lewis Rudd is now the VLV’s representative in its collaboration with SKTV.
