Eamon Ryan (Dublin South, Green Party)

I received the report in November 2007. I acted on it by sanctioning a television licence fee increase. The report mentioned that a five-year plan, including measures of performance, was set out after RTE's licence fee revenue increased significantly in 2002. The station had to reach certain hours of programming, for example. The report stated that although the plan had been successful in increasing the production of home-produced output, for example, RTE needed to go further.

We needed a metric of performance in RTE that first measured the quality of content not only simply in hours of output but in detailed metric analysis as to how it met its public service obligations. Second, we had to measure the efficiency or the effectiveness with which RTE delivered such programming on the basis of the measures the Deputy mentioned, namely, performance compared to other countries in terms of RTE's flexibility, efficiency and cost efficiency. We wanted a new measurement system in RTE on quality and effective flexibility to achieve savings within the operation. To achieve that we appointed PricewaterhouseCoopers in March 2008 to work with RTE to examine how we would develop that new metric of performance and efficiency within the organisation. That work was ongoing and is now completed. We are now assessing the 2007 and 2008 accounts on the basis of the original five year measurement system, but from 2009 onwards we will apply this new assessment method to establish how efficiently RTE is working and what is the quality of its programming.

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