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A total of 21.2 million people watched ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ News television coverage of the Spending Review across the day on 20 October.

³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ Deputy Director General and Head of ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ Journalism, Mark Byford, said: "We knew from our research that the audience had an extraordinary interest in the Spending Review issues. In that context, we marshalled the specialist teams of ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ Journalism to come together and provide a service of high quality and impact. These figures show that during a major news story audiences turn to the ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ in huge numbers for trusted news and analysis."

The main ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ news programmes all had above average audiences: ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ Breakfast aired before the spending announcement, but still had an audience of 1.6m. The ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ News At Six had 5m, the regional 6.30pm news had an average audience of 5.8m across the UK and the ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ News At Ten had 4.9m. Newsnight also had an above average audience of 1.1m.

The ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ News website had around 4.2 m UK unique users on 20 October, according to provisional data. This is likely to be the biggest day for the ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ News site since the UK elections in May – when 7.4m used the site – and is expected to be slightly higher than the 4m seen on the 13 October, the day of the Chilean miners' rescue. The "Live: Spending Review" page was a particular success with almost 2.5 million UK page views on Wednesday. Some 800,000 UK users viewed audio/video on the News site on Wednesday, nearly twice as many as on an average weekday.

The ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ News Channel performed significantly ahead of Sky News, reaching 3.8m viewers compared to 2.2m. The Spending Review programme on ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ Two and the News Channel reached 3.8m between 11.30am and 3.30pm with an audience share of 14.2%.

In terms of the individual channel performances during the slot: ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ Two Spending Review coverage reached 2.8m and the ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ News Channel Spending Review coverage between 11.30-3.30 reached 1.1m , double the usual reach for the slot. ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ Parliament also drew in additional viewers, reaching 423,000 individuals yesterday, 286,000 up on this year's daily reach average.

PR