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As a broadcaster, ITV strives to ensure that the programmes shown on ITV channels reflect our society. Portraying diversity on-screen can help promote viewers’ understanding of people of different ethnicity, gender, sexuality and age, and people with disabilities. It is key to keeping our programmes relevant and ensuring they appeal to as wide an audience as possible. It is also the right thing to do.

As a member of the Cultural Diversity Network, we championed the 2009 launch of an industry-wide Diversity Pledge. The Pledge is a public commitment by broadcasters, production companies and in-house producers to take measurable steps towards improving the representation of our diverse society through our programme output, as well as becoming more diverse and inclusive behind the scenes.

We track on-screen diversity through an automated system that records the diversity of main, secondary and background characters. This data is essential for us to identify where our programmes do reflect society and where we need to make changes. The method has some limitations, because it monitors visible diversity, as a viewer would. This means that non-visible diversity such as sexuality and some disabilities may not always be captured. We are introducing a more sophisticated tracking and reporting system to improve the quality of diversity data and give us further insight into on-screen representation in our programmes.

Read about diversity on-screen in ITV soaps, dramas, reality shows and factual programmes and in our news broadcasts

Under our Diversity Pledge, in 2010 we will continue to improve the representation of society on ITV, by looking at ways to increase on-screen diversity in the programmes we commission as well as in our own productions.