The function of the Board would be to oversee all programme planning and scheduling for the ITV network. It might well not itself undertake all the detailed planning for incorporating the output of up to sixteen companies into two services; but, in formal terms, those involved in such planning would be doing so as agents of the Planning Board, to whom they would report. The arrangement proposed would broaden the present structure of the company programme controllers’ committee and would leave the companies’ creative momentum as the primary source of specific programme ideas; but it would also provide a strong ITA presence at the centre of the system and enable the ITA to survey, at an early stage, the full range of what was available, or potentially available. Thus the Authority’s involvement in the organization of ITV’s network output would not only take the form of mandating programmes and receiving schedules for consideration, as now, but would also include discussion of scheduling at an earlier stage: the full Authority’s means of exercising this oversight would be unchanged, since its senior staff would continue to be answerable for what was planned to it and to the committee (the Programme Schedule Committee) which gives special consideration to this part of the Authority’s work.