Mr. Declan McLoughlin:

On the 50% audience profile threshold, the focus of the code is on children's programmes. The way it works is that the 50% is almost a technical measure so when broadcasters are planning future programming they can look at trends in children's viewing and identify which programmes will have more than 50%. In practice they tend to be children's programming in the traditional sense, what one sees in the morning or during children's programming streams. That is where that works. It means if one were to get significant numbers of children watching, which is a slightly separate issue, one would be coming much lower on the percentage. There is the issue of how many children are watching versus how much of the audience is made up of children. There might be a small number of children watching but they would make up more than 50% of the audience because it is a children's programme and that is the only audience. One finds that if there is a programme that is very popular with children, such as during the family viewing time or the World Cup, there might be significantly higher numbers of individual children watching but they would not make up half of the audience. One of the issues to examine in the review is whether we should be regulating family viewing time as a result of that.

The children's code is focused on children. It considers children who may be unaccompanied or where there are particular products such as toys that are targeted at them directly-----