Regional news services at ITV are at risk of being abandoned over the next decade and may need public money to safeguard them, the broadcasting regulator has said.

The alert from Ofcom came as it allowed ITV to drop its dedicated half-hour bulletins for the Border and West Country regions, saving £40 million a year.

Ed Richards, the chief executive of Ofcom, said yesterday that it had little choice but to allow ITV to make savings. He said that it had “moved beyond reasonable doubt” that [the current system] was “not sustainable for the long term” and that ITV’s regional news would become uneconomic after the broadcaster introduced cutbacks next year.

Ofcom said it believed that between £145 million and £235 million a year of public money would have to be handed to ITV and other commercial broadcasters after 2012 to safeguard regional news and other genres of programming, including children’s television and drama.

It also said that Channel 4 will struggle to generate enough advertising to maintain its existing programme budgets, with a shortfall of between £60 million and £100 million in the next decade, and held out the possibility of using some BBC licence fee money to plug the gaps.

The decision to end the Border and West Country bulletins prompted an angry reaction from unions and regional politicians, with complaints that cutbacks created large broadcasting regions that meant nothing to viewers. Luke Crawley, of the broadcast union BECTU, challenged Mr Richards at an Ofcom press conference. “You seem to think it is OK to have a region that stretches from Penzance to Glouces-ter, about 250 miles in a car – and that people living in Border will now get a news bulletin made by a bunch of Geordies living on the other side of the Pennines,” he said.

Stewart Purvis, Ofcom’s partner for content and standards, said the regulator believed that “money was better spent allowing journalists on the ground in Cumbria sending reports back by satellite to Newcastle” than insisting that ITV maintains a news staff in Border’s Carlisle headquarters.

ITV will be allowed to merge the Carlisle-based Border news with the Gateshead-based Tyne Tees service, while the West Country will be subsumed into its Bristol-based West region. It has agreed, however, to produce a 15-minute “sub-regional” bulletin for viewers in Cumbria, Devon and Cornwall.

Elsewhere in England, regional news outside peak time will be cut back and the requirement for other regional programmes reduced to 15 minutes a week. No changes are proposed to news services in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, where local support for the dedicated bulletins is stronger.

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