Loose Women star Janet Street-Porter breaks her silence on ITV's budget cuts
Janet Street-Porter has criticised ITV's handling of its budget cuts, and is adamant she will not be one of over 220 people who will lose their jobs.
Janet Street-Porter has slammed ITV's handling of its budget cuts - but is not scared about losing her panellist job on Loose Women.
The broadcaster-and-journalist's Loose Women co-star Kaye Adams, 62, previously said the channel's "out of the blue" move to air the daytime panel show for 30 weeks instead of 52 weeks from 2026, and to axe over 220 jobs was a "terrible" decision.
And Janet, 78, agrees with Kaye's appraisal of the cuts.
She told The Guardian newspaper's G2 magazine: "I don't agree with how they've done the cuts."
Fellow Loose Women panellist Nadia Sawalha, 60, spoke out about ITV's "brutal" budget cuts in a video uploaded to her YouTube channel in May, and revealed she and her fellow stars could be "let off" at any moment from the programme due to their self-employed contracts.
However, Janet - who joined Loose Women in 2011 - is confident she will not lose her job as the axe swings.
She said: "Oh, I know I'm going to keep that job."
Kaye - who has been a regular panellist and host of Loose Women since it began in 1999 - admitted she had battled "sleepless nights" following the announcement of ITV's budget cuts in May.
Speaking on her How to be 60 podcast in June, Kaye said: "It did come out of the blue.
"I didn’t anticipate it, which is probably stupid in retrospect. You get into a sort of rhythm of life.
"I had a couple of sleepless nights, I have to say, because it’s just like the rug’s been pulled from under your feet – what has been familiar."
Speaking about the job cuts, Kaye added: "It’s going to have an impact. Lots of people will lose their jobs completely, which is terrible. It’s a huge change."
However, Kaye does suspect that ITV's budget cuts it could ultimately be good for her.
She said: "But I gave myself a talking to and I listened to my own advice for once – change is hard, but it can be good.
"The past is a trap, don’t fear the future – I’m telling myself all these things. And maybe this is the nudge that I needed to make some changes in my life, and I’ll just have to go with it."
Nadia - who, like Kaye, has been a regular panellist on Loose Women since the show's launch - got emotional when she talked about the "hundreds" of people who will lose their jobs in her video.
She said: "What’s been brutal, absolutely brutal, over the last week, honestly, I feel tearful about it, is that hundreds of people … are going to be made redundant out of the blue, these are all the people behind the scenes that support us in every way."
Addressing her own and her colleagues' freelance contracts, Nadia added: "What people don’t realise at Loose Women is that we’re self-employed, I am self-employed. Every contract is a new contract.
"I could be let go tomorrow, I could be let go in five years - you don’t know because we’re not employees."
As well as Loose Women, the morning magazine show Lorraine will now operate on a 30-week "seasonal basis", while a raft of shows will be broadcast from a new location in central London.
Kevin Lygo, the managing director of ITV’s Media and Entertainment Division, recently said the broadcaster was going through a "transition".
He said: "I recognise that our plans will have an impact on staff off-screen in our Daytime production teams.
"We will work with ITV Studios and ITN as they manage these changes to produce the shows differently from next year, and support them through this transition.
"Daytime has been a core element of ITV’s schedule for over 40 years and these changes will set ITV up to continue to bring viewers award-winning news, views and discussion as we enter our eighth decade."
