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A total of 21.2 million people watched ´óÏó´«Ã½ News television coverage of the Spending Review across the day on 20 October.

´óÏó´«Ã½ Deputy Director General and Head of ´óÏó´«Ã½ 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 ´óÏó´«Ã½ 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 ´óÏó´«Ã½ in huge numbers for trusted news and analysis."

The main ´óÏó´«Ã½ news programmes all had above average audiences: ´óÏó´«Ã½ Breakfast aired before the spending announcement, but still had an audience of 1.6m. The ´óÏó´«Ã½ News At Six had 5m, the regional 6.30pm news had an average audience of 5.8m across the UK and the ´óÏó´«Ã½ News At Ten had 4.9m. Newsnight also had an above average audience of 1.1m.

The ´óÏó´«Ã½ 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 ´óÏó´«Ã½ 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 ´óÏó´«Ã½ News Channel performed significantly ahead of Sky News, reaching 3.8m viewers compared to 2.2m. The Spending Review programme on ´óÏó´«Ã½ 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: ´óÏó´«Ã½ Two Spending Review coverage reached 2.8m and the ´óÏó´«Ã½ News Channel Spending Review coverage between 11.30-3.30 reached 1.1m , double the usual reach for the slot. ´óÏó´«Ã½ Parliament also drew in additional viewers, reaching 423,000 individuals yesterday, 286,000 up on this year's daily reach average.

PR