Channel 4 sell-off ‘will undermine PM’s promise to level up country’

theguardian.com:

Government plans to privatise Channel 4 are wide open to being challenged in court because they would undermine Boris Johnson’s commitment to “levelling up” the country, the head of the Northern Powerhouse Partnership has said.

Henri Murison, director of the NPP, whose chair is former Tory chancellor George Osborne, said on Saturday two bills to be announced for the next session of parliament in this week’s Queen’s speech – one on the privatisation proposals, and another requiring that all government policies contribute to “levelling up” – were completely at loggerheads and “utterly incoherent”.

Ministers face a mounting Tory rebellion in parliament over the plans, which were not in the 2019 manifesto, from peers and dozens of MPs who think the government is wasting time on a policy that they believe will do more harm than good.

Channel 4 was set up during Margaret Thatcher’s time as PM to encourage the growth of small production companies outside London and the south-east. It is committed not to produce its own programmes, but instead commission them from more than 300 independent production companies across the UK, many of them in the north of England.

Last year Channel 4 opened a new HQ for about 200 staff in Leeds and now aims to increase the proportion of its spending on commissions to companies in the UK’s nations and regions to at least 50% by next year.

Murison said culture secretary Nadine Dorries’s plan would fall foul of a new bill drawn up by Michael Gove that will require all policies to pass a levelling-up test to ensure they contribute positively to equalising economic opportunity across the country.

“Based on what was in the levelling up white paper, our judgment is that the decision to privatise Channel 4