Mr. John Purcell:

The audience may become used to the particular type of content and if you are unsuccessful after a year, that person on staff is let go and you cannot continue to provide the content. This happened to us in relation to Sound and Vision funding linked to gender, equality, diversity and inclusivity. We were able to do certain measures but then following year we could not.

I will give a further example of the absurdity of some of the additionality. I could have two regular journalists working in a radio newsroom, one gathering the news and the other reading it. A local court reporter is also funded under one of these schemes. If one of the staff goes out sick, the person doing the court reporting is not permitted to fill in for the other person and read the news. This is just not practical. I have faced situations in the newsroom whereby both people were out sick at the same time and the person recruited under these schemes could not be assigned to cover the other work because their funding is only for a defined additional role.