Channel 4 has announced potentially far-reaching changes to its policy on diversity and tackling inequality within the corporation.

In an announcement last week it said it wanted to “extend our ability to reflect all kinds of social diversity including ethnicity, disability, nationality, regionality, age, gender and beyond”.

As part of its new strategy, the public service broadcaster will recruit a head of diversity at senior executive level. The person will lead its diversity strategy across all the organisations activities.

The move may come as reminiscent of an earlier era when the broadcaster had its own Multicultural Programmes department run by Farookh Dhondy. That was disbanded when senior executives felt that diverse programming needed to permeate all parts of Channel 4, and not be produced just by one department.

The announcement of a new diversity executive editor will be seen as an attempt to deal with criticism on two fronts.

First, that Channel 4 is still failing to accurately reflect modern Britain, despite employing diversity managers with a remit to look at talent development and on-screen programming.

The second criticism is that people of diverse backgrounds are not represented at senior level within the company - that its top management still overwhelmingly remains a white, male and middle-class domain.

Going further, Channel 4 has also announced it will appoint a separate commissioning editor with responsibilities for commissioning multicultural programmes during peaktime. It has ring-fenced £2million to commission more multicultural programmes for that 9pm - 10pm slot.

It will also double funding for the existing diversity-placement scheme within commissioning and roll out a similar scheme across all departments within Channel 4.

The corporation also announced it would extend its Researcher Training Programme which funds 18 placements per year at independent production for researchers from minority groups.

It will now include other trainee production roles as well as researchers.

A spokerperson at Channel told AIM Magazine that it would also work with key production companies to ensure they had diverse teams on Channel 4 projects and meaningful diversity policies.