Privatising Channel 4 could be ‘revenge’ for Brexit coverage, suggests Tory committee chair – UK politics live

• 12.03pm BST 12:03 Channel 4 plans could be 'revenge' for Brexit coverage, suggests Conservative media committee chair
• 9.28am BST 09:28 Privatising Channel 4 'doesn't make any sense' and will cause 'great deal of damage', says Labour

12:03

Updated at 1.21pm BST

Sally Weale

Covid is continuing to cause disruption in schools in England with attendance falling again, though the number of pupils off for Covid-related reasons has eased slightly in the past fortnight.

According to the latest official statistics from the Department for Education, 179,000 pupils were off for Covid-related reasons last Thursday, compared with 202,000 two weeks earlier.

Overall attendance in state schools fell again however, down from 89.7% on March 17 to 88.6% on March 31. Though confirmed cases of Covid among pupils have fallen from 159,000 to 120,000, numbers absent due to restrictions in place to manage a school outbreak have doubled to 34,000, keeping absence rates high. Some parents may also have taken their children out of school early for the Easter holiday.

Absence rates among teachers and school leaders remain elevated at 8.7%, though there has been a slight improvement, down from 9.1% a fortnight earlier.

Paul Whiteman, general secretary of the National Association of Head Teachers, warned schools were at breaking point.

We continue to hear a sense of deep frustration from school leaders as they struggle to deal with the significant and on-going disruption caused by Covid – whilst the government removes every measure they have for controlling it.

We all assumed ‘living with Covid’ meant there would be very low case levels – this is clearly not case and absence rates remain at concerningly high-levels. School leaders feel they have been abandoned.

The ongoing risk of illness and chaos caused by staff absence, not to mention the mounting pressure of exams, SATs and Ofsted, is unsustainable. Our members and education are at breaking point.

Geoff Barton, general secretary of the Association of School and College Leaders, added:

These figures show that a fifth of schools had more than 15% of their teachers absent last week. It is very difficult to operate in these conditions.

The government’s decision to withdraw free testing in such circumstances is a retrograde step, particularly with exams a few weeks away, and we have repeatedly urged ministers to reconsider.

The government has commissioned the British Geological Survey to advise on the latest scientific evidence around fracking, as ministers consider “all possible domestic energy sources” in light of the invasion of Ukraine.

Business and Energy Secretary Kwasi Kwarteng said:

We have always been, and always will be, guided by the science on shale gas.

It remains the case that fracking in England would take years of exploration and development before commercial quantities of gas could be produced for the market, and would certainly have no effect on prices in the near term.

However, there will continue to be an ongoing demand for oil and gas over the coming decades as we transition to cheap renewable energy and new nuclear power.

In light of Putin’s criminal invasion of Ukraine, it is absolutely right that we explore all possible domestic energy sources.

However, unless the latest scientific evidence demonstrates that shale gas extraction is safe, sustainable and of minimal disturbance to those living and working nearby, the pause in England will remain in place.

DCMS select committee chair Julian Knight has questioned if the government’s plans to forge forward with the privatisation of Channel 4 are “revenge”, adding that many Tories believe the move is “payback time” for “biased coverage”.

Knight said Channel 4 could succeed if it was privatised and managed well, but it’s “a big risk” and “must be done as part of a thorough overhaul of all public service broadcasting”.

He wrote on Twitter:

It is certainly true that Channel 4 will have greater freedom to compete once privatised and if managed well it should be able to continue to innovate and crucially appeal to young audiences - a real USP in today’s broadcast landscape.

However, this is a big risk. The question has to be, do you think a restricted but brilliant small state broadcaster will part compete with the likes of Apple and Amazon or does it need to be able to borrow and grow in a way only privatisation can unlock?

In all this, it’s crucial the government protects the prominence of all public service broadcasting through the new media bill, in order to give the likes of a new privatised Channel 4 a head start.

Now, elephant in the room time – is this being done for revenge for Channel 4’s biased coverage of the likes of Brexit and personal attacks on the PM? The timing of the announcement 7pm, coinciding with Channel 4 news, was very telling …

Undoubtedly, across much of the party – there is a feeling of payback time and the word privatisation tickles the ivories of many. The money is irrelevant – equivalent to four days’ national debt interest – so it must be used to support skills in creative sectors.

So, to sum up. Privatisation – even for some wrong reasons – can work for C4 but must be part of a thorough overhaul of all public service broadcasting. If this is in the media bill I will support the government. Finally, these are my views not those of the committee more generally.

Mark Sweney

The government is pushing ahead with controversial plans to privatise Channel 4 after 40 years in public ownership, it was revealed yesterday.

There have been some questions about the proposals below the line so here’s an explainer on what you need to know about Channel 4 being sold off:

Who would buy a privatised Channel 4?

The industry player most likely to buy Channel 4, with the least regulatory hurdles, is Discovery. The big US pay-TV company, which is merging with WarnerMedia, the parent company of CNN, HBO and the Hollywood studio behind the Batman and Harry Potter franchises, expressed interest the last time the broadcaster faced privatisation in 2016.

The company, which has a mix of free and pay-TV operations, continues to be highly active in the UK market, striking a deal with BT in February to launch a pay-TV sports joint venture including BT Sport, which has rights to sports including football’s Premier League and Champions League.

However, ITV has been lobbying Whitehall about the possibility of a “national champion” takeover, designed to take the political fallout of yet another buyout of a UK “crown jewel” by a foreign owner. The issue for ITV, which said in the 00s that it would bid for Channel 4 if it was combined with another broadcaster as was mooted with Channel 5, is that it would create what amounts to a TV advertising monopoly resulting in significant competition issues.

There will also be significant interest from private equity buyers, although Channel 4’s remit would have to be changed to allow a non-trade buyer to make profits from the business.

What is likely to happen to a privatised Channel 4?

Channel 4’s remit has never been to make a profit – the money it makes is reinvested in commissioning and buying programmes from mostly British TV production companies, helping to support a key national industry.

Analysts believe that a privatised Channel 4 would face 40% to 50% cuts to its £660m programming budget – spent on content such as news and current affairs, Gogglebox and It’s a Sin – to force its model into that of a commercially-focused broadcaster.

This is likely to mean cuts to content that does not bring in much income from advertising, which Channel 4 relies on for more than 90% of its £1bn annual revenues, such as news.

Channel 4 is a key commissioner of TV content from production companies based around the UK and sees itself as a key part of the government’s levelling up ambitions outside London. Analysts believe that as many 60 TV production companies around the UK could be forced to shut if Channel 4 moved to private ownership.

Has privatisation been tried before?

Privatisation in some form has been mooted about half a dozen times since Channel 4’s launch, with the most serious push coming under David Cameron’s government in 2016. That was led by the then culture secretary John Whittingdale, who is also overseeing the government’s latest push towards privatisation. Ultimately, it was decided that the benefits of a cash windfall to the government were outweighed by the scale of the detrimental impact on the independent TV sector. In 2017, the culture secretary Karen Bradley formally ruled privatisation out, saying Channel 4 was a “precious public asset” that would “continue to be owned by the country”. Instead, the government pushed for Channel 4 to relocate significant parts of its operations and staff out of London. About 300 of its 800 staff have now moved to new “national” headquarters in Leeds, as well as “creative hubs” in Bristol and Glasgow.

Read the answers to more questions here:

Fines for breaking coronavirus laws have reportedly been issued to people who attended a leaving party for a senior official who helped shape the Government’s response to the pandemic.

The Daily Telegraph reported that some of those at the farewell event for Kate Josephs, who was director-general of the Cabinet Office’s Covid-19 taskforce, have been handed fixed-penalty notices (FPNs).

The drinks event was held in the Cabinet Office on December 17 2020 at a time when London was under Tier 3 restrictions, banning indoor socialising, PA news reports.

So far 20 fines have been issued following Scotland Yard’s investigation into alleged lockdown-busting parties in Downing Street and Whitehall.

Josephs, who is on discretionary leave from her role as chief executive of Sheffield City Council, has not commented on the Telegraph report.

In January, after news of the gathering emerged, she said she was “truly sorry” about the event.

She said:

On the evening of 17 December, I gathered with colleagues that were at work that day, with drinks, in our office in the Cabinet Office, to mark my leaving the Civil Service.

I am truly sorry that I did this and for the anger that people will feel as a result.

Sheffield City Council brought in an independent investigator to examine the situation and a cross-party committee is looking at the findings.

A council spokesman said:

The committee will need to meet again once they have had time to properly consider the contents of the investigator’s report. Until then, the committee needs to focus on its work.

Airline passengers are being warned to expect flight cancellations caused by staff shortages to continue.

More than 1,000 UK flights have been axed in recent days due to crews being off sick amid a rise in coronavirus cases.

Industry experts also said airlines and airports are struggling because of the number of job cuts made during the pandemic.

Aviation data firm Cirium said 1,143 UK flights were cancelled last week, compared with just 197 during the same period in 2019.

The vast majority of last week’s cancellations were by easyJet and British Airways.The rate of staff absences at easyJet is around double normal levels.

Some 60 of its flights scheduled for Tuesday were cancelled.

A spokeswoman for the airline said: “EasyJet will operate the vast majority of its 1,525 flights today with a small proportion cancelled in advance to give customers the ability to rebook on to alternative flights. “We are sorry for any inconvenience for affected customers.”

Peter Walker

A cross-party group of MPs and peers has joined forces with UK universities in calling for the visa scheme for Ukrainian refugees to be extended to temporary placements for students and academics.

In a letter to Priti Patel, the home secretary, the parliamentarians and Universities UK, the advocacy organisation for universities, said the scheme should provide visas and temporary places for displaced students and academics to study and carry out research.

Led by Andrew Rosindell, the Conservative MP for Romford, who is a member of the foreign affairs committee, the group also includes the leader of the Liberal Democrats, Ed Davey; David Blunkett, the Labour peer and former education secretary; and Tom Tugendhat, the Tory backbencher who chairs the foreign affairs committee.

The government has so far introduced two systems to allow Ukrainians displaced by the Russian invasion of their country to come to the UK – a scheme for family members of people already in the country, and one by which individuals or organisations can sponsor people to arrive.

The latest Home Office statistics showed that of 32,800 applications via the family scheme, 24,400 visas had been issued. With the sponsorship route, 150,000 expressed interest in sponsoring people, with 32,200 formally applying to do so, and 4,700 visas issued.

The letter argues that the amount of interest shown in the sponsorship system illustrates that many Britons are willing to help, and that the students and academics visa would help shelter more people until they are ready to return home.

Read more here:

Rowena Mason

Civil service chiefs are braced for the behaviour of top Whitehall officials to be severely criticised in the Sue Gray partygate report, after the government’s former ethics chief apologised for attending an illegal gathering.

Amid speculation about whether Boris Johnson will be fined over lockdown parties in No 10, there is also consternation in Whitehall about how to deal with the fallout from senior civil servants being implicated as organisers of gatherings when the full report is finally published.

It comes as Helen MacNamara, the former head of propriety and ethics in the Cabinet Office, issued an apology after a leak named her as one of the 20 people issued with fines after a Metropolitan police investigation. It is understood a leaving party for Kate Josephs, who ran the Covid task force, has also attracted fines in the first wave of penalty notices. Josephs is currently on paid leave from her job as chief executive of Sheffield City Council pending an investigation.

A senior source said there was concern that details in the report by Gray, herself a senior civil servant, would cast some civil servants in a bad light and there may be evidence that some knowingly broke rules when organising gatherings, leading to the potential for disciplinary action.

Gray has the power to name senior civil servants in her report although she may choose not to use it. In her interim report, she named no names and referred only to the “senior official whose principal function is the direct support of the prime minister” – thought to be an allusion to Martin Reynolds, the principal private secretary.

Read the full story here:

Pro-green cabinet ministers are frustrated by Boris Johnson’s decision to back away from ambitious onshore windfarm plans for England, as it emerged more than 100 Tory MPs are lobbying against the policy behind the scenes.

The prime minister, who is to announce his energy strategy later in the week, will announce big targets for increasing nuclear power and offshore wind, as well as exploiting more North Sea oil and gas.

But he has been hit by a cabinet split over onshore wind, with Kwasi Kwarteng, the business secretary, and Michael Gove, the levelling up secretary, in favour, and others including Grant Shapps, the transport secretary, branding onshore turbines “an eyesore”.

Another nine ministers sitting in cabinet – Steve Barclay, Nadine Dorries, Simon Hart, Chris Heaton-Harris, Brandon Lewis, Priti Patel, Jacob Rees-Mogg, Mark Spencer and Nadhim Zahawi – signed a letter calling for a cut in support for onshore wind in 2012. The letter was orchestrated by Heaton-Harris, now responsible for party discipline, who co-ran a campaign called Together Against Wind and wrote a manual that was a “step by step guide on opposing a windfarm in your area”.

A spokesperson for Heaton-Harris would not comment on his communications with the prime minister about the issue of onshore wind.

Read more from my colleagues Rowena Mason, Rob Davies and Helena Horton here:

Watertight restrictions need to be put on the organisation that buys Channel 4, Dorothy Byrne has said.

When asked if Labour should commit to renationalise the network if in government, the former head of news and current affairs at Channel 4 told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme:

I don’t think it is for me to say what the Labour government should do.

But I think if this is what the government’s going to do, and it looks like it, I think the fight is on to really ensure as much as possible that there are watertight restrictions put on to this organisation that buys it.

Meanwhile, conservative former chair of the digital, culture, media and sport committee Damian Collins spoke in favour of the privatisation.

The MP for Folkestone and Hythe said:

If we do nothing in a landscape where traditional broadcasters have got declining incomes, declining amounts of money they can spend making new programmes, will Channel 4 be sustainable?

For me that’s the test, actually. Private ownership and the injection of money that could come from that could be good for making Channel 4 sustainable long-term.

The former head of news and current affairs at Channel 4 has said the government plans to privatise the network to “throw a bit of red meat to Tory supporters”.

Speaking to Times Radio on Tuesday, Dorothy Byrne said Channel 4 was not left-wing, adding:

I think it’s being privatised to throw a bit of red meat to Tory supporters of a very right-wing nature at a time that the government is in trouble.

I think the political agenda is to show that the government is doing something radically right-wing to please people. It’s the same agenda as attacking the licence fee.

It’s that knee-jerk thing, privatise thing, that’s a good thing to do.

She also said:

Channel 4 is not there to compete with Netflix and Amazon. It’s there to provide a public service to the people of Britain, which it does brilliantly well with programmes like Channel 4 News and Unreported World.

It is flourishing and thriving at the moment, it costs the British people absolutely nothing, it is not in debt, it is very successful.

All of its programmes are made by independent production companies, so there isn’t any need to privatise Channel 4 to raise money to help independent production companies, because Channel 4 is already doing that and it makes many, many of its programmes outside London, it’s moving to making half of its programmes outside London.

Privatising Channel 4 “doesn’t make any sense” and will cause a “great deal of damage to jobs and opportunities”, Labour has said.

Yesterday it was revealed that the culture secretary, Nadine Dorries, is pushing ahead with controversial plans to privatise Channel 4, with the government backing proposals to sell off the broadcaster after 40 years in public ownership.

The plans had met fierce reaction from the media industry, with prominent broadcasters such as Sir David Attenborough suggesting the government was pursuing an agenda of “shortsighted political and financial attacks” on British public service broadcasters.

Shadow culture secretary Lucy Powell told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme today:

It doesn’t make any sense. I can’t find many people are in favour of it.

I think it will cause a great deal of damage to jobs and opportunities in the creative industries, especially in Leeds and Bristol, and Manchester, and outside of London.

I fear that … rather than competing with some of the big US streaming giants, it is more likely to be bought by one of them.

That will take money out of the UK economy, out of the creative industries and the independent sector that has so thrived under Channel 4.

When asked if Labour would take it back into the public ownership if in government, Powell said:

Well, I have not written our manifesto commitment on this overnight since this announcement was laid. There is going to be a very long and drawn-out, difficult process because there are many people opposed on their own side of the Conservative Party on this.

They are going to have a difficult issue getting this through parliament, which is also why I don’t understand why they are doing it because of all the things that we could be spending our time doing in parliament right now, dealing with the pensioners who can’t afford to keep the heating on, the families who can’t put food on the table, people can’t afford petrol in the petrol pump, and we are going to be expending a huge amount of parliamentary and political time doing something that no-one in the public wants, and no one in the industry wants either.

Welcome to today’s politics live blog. I’m Nicola Slawson and I’ll be taking the lead today. You can contact me on Twitter (@Nicola_Slawson) or via email (nicola.slawson@theguardian.com) if you have any questions or think I’m missing something.

We also have a dedicated Ukraine blog, which you can follow here: