ITV Establishes £80 Million Diversity Commissioning Fund

ITV is pledging to reserve £80 million ($105 million) of its content commissioning budget over the next three years to drive change toward racial equity and disability equity.

Of this amount, at least £20 million ($26 million) will be reserved for content made by Black, Asian and minority ethnic-led and disabled-led production companies.

ITV has also created a new £500,000 ($658,000) development fund to develop ideas that will qualify for the Diversity Commissioning Fund.

To qualify for the fund, productions must meet either the first criteria or two of the remaining criteria: Diverse company ownership or leadership, diverse creative leadership, diverse stories and portrayal on-screen and/or diverse salary spend.

ITV CEO, Carolyn McCall, said: “Today’s announcement builds on ITV’s Diversity Acceleration Plan. We want to keep up the momentum and drive more progress at ITV and across the industry so that our audiences can see their broad range of experiences and perspectives reflected in our content.”

Ade Rawcliffe, ITV’s group director of diversity and inclusion, added: “ITV is committed to creating content by, with and for everyone, connecting and reflecting modern audiences. We want more people of color and disabled people to be able to tell their stories and get opportunities in senior production roles. With this reserve fund, we’re working to speed up progress in a sustainable way, and play our part to change the structure of the industry.”

Marcus Ryder at the Sir Lenny Henry Centre for Media Diversity said: “ITV dedicating program finance for television productions that meet set criteria to positively increase diversity and inclusion is an important development. The LHC is happy to have been consulted in the process, and if implemented fully we see this as a vital policy tool in any broadcaster’s efforts to increase representation of underrepresented groups in production.”