Kate Little & Claire Poyser, Lime Pictures, Lion TV and Wise Owl Films

Hollyoaks’ impact within the Liverpool region has been immense. Lime has a staff base of 400-plus permanent employees with an average length of service greater than 10 years. In terms of inward investment, 60% of permanent employees live within a 15-mile radius of the Childwall site, meaning that potentially more than half of the annual salary cost of £24m is spent locally.

The soap continues to be fundamental to the growth of Lime Pictures. A long-running, high-volume, continuing drama has provided the company with a foundation upon which we have been able to build one of the UK’s largest independent production companies.

It has provided scale, enabling us to open other production bases in London, Leeds (Wise Owl Films) and Los Angeles, opening up new markets. Subsequently, our production slate has expanded into unscripted (The Only Way is Essex for ITV Be; Celebs Go Dating for E4), and kids’ and family drama series for the global market: Free Rein and Zero Chill (Netflix), Evermoor (Disney) and House Of Anubis (Nickelodeon).

In addition to underpinning Lime’s growth, Hollyoaks enables us to invest in training, ranging from new writer and director schemes through to the Lime Intern Scheme, which offers paid entry-level training within actual production.

Hollyoaks has continued to build on and maintain Brookside’s legacy of telling ground-breaking, issue-led stories to a pre-watershed audience. Our storylines bring hard-hitting contemporary issues to life for a younger audience and inspire debate among them.

Many watch the show with friends and family, which in turn provides an entry point for conversation around these topics. Our multi-award-winning stories have covered issues like sexual consent, far-right radicalisation, male suicide, self-harm and, via the ‘County Lines’ storyline, drug dealing and its associated child exploitation.

To maximise the impact of these stories and to support viewers who might be affected by the issues raised, Channel 4 funds allied digital and social media activity. For example, the Snap show Sid’s Caught with Drugs, featuring one of the characters involved in ‘County Lines’, had more than 127,000 screenshots, largely falling on the help and support link.

“C4’s dedication to providing content to minority audiences is critical to ensuring that UK broadcasting includes the widest range of voices”

The majority of views were by 13- to 17-year-old males, meaning it was very potent in encouraging people who may have a similar story to Sid’s to seek help.

C4’s editorial freedom and ability to focus purely on its PSB obligations, as opposed to delivering value back to shareholders, enables it to commission and broadcast content that just couldn’t be justified via a commercial optic.

Its dedication to providing content to underserved minority audiences is critical to ensuring that UK broadcasting embraces and includes the widest range of voices. The distinctiveness, the risk-taking and the audacity of C4’s output would be lost [if it were privatised].