EXCLUSIVE: A Loose Women star has said that the TV show panel will not be affected by the ITV cuts, which will see 220 jobs lost and no live audience

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Loose Women star Gloria Hunniford is opening up on the show’s future

Loose Women star Gloria ­Hunniford says the show’s ­on-screen talent will all escape the axe amid the cuts hitting behind-the-scenes workers. ITV bosses are overhauling its Daytime roster with the loss of 220 of 440 jobs. But presenters – including ­Christine Lampard, Ruth Langsford and Kaye Adams – are set to keep their roles.

Gloria, 85, said: “The cuts will be behind-the-scenes staff, because you’re going to have all three programmes in one studio.” With regard to the Loose Women panel, she confirmed: “I think everybody is staying – absolutely.”

Gloria added: “We are very concerned about the team, because we have a very large team and they’re all very clever and they work b****y hard. It’s very sad to see it breaking up.”

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ITV Daytime’s overhaul with 220 out of 450 jobs in daytime at risk

The cuts formed part of a huge ITV Daytime overhaul with 220 out of 450 jobs in daytime at risk. This was despite the show’s reputation for ground-breaking campaigns such as Change + Check, as well as recently amassing its highest ratings for four years under much-admired editor Victoria Kennedy.

Gloria says the new set-up means that from January there will be three live broadcasts from one new studio in London’s Covent Garden. The TV veteran added: “I’ve never seen three live programmes come from one studio but they tell me it’ll work. You’ll have Lorraine in the morning, then This Morning, and then you’ll have Loose Women.

“There’s no point in thinking, will it work? It has to work, you know, and people make it work.”

The changes also mean that Loose Women will no longer be filmed in front of an audience, which Gloria hopes will not affect the format too badly. She added: “I think we’d be able to do it very well but, on the other hand, the audience is lovely and they join in and everything.”

This comes after TV presenter Lorraine Kelly has described the cuts to her show as “heartbreaking” as she opened up for the first time about her show being slashed. The star also vowed to continue on her self-titled programme amid previous speculation she was prepared to walk away.

She said: “I don’t see me going anywhere until people get fed up, you know? Until people say, I’ve had enough of that one.” Speaking about the cuts which sees her show cut from an hour to 30 minutes and only airing for 30 weeks out of 52, she said her first thought was for her team affected.

She admits: “It’s really heartbreaking to split up the team, a lot of my team have been with me for more than 20 years and they’re my friends. I’ve grown up with them. They were babies when they started with me and now they’ve got babies of their own.”

Lorraine said she was pleased that a lot of the team had since been redeployed on other shows. She added: “It’s been difficult with the cuts, it’s been hard. I’m a lot happier about it now but it was honestly and genuinely all about the team. I wasn’t annoyed or angry about this for me..it was about the team.”

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Lorraine says she has no plans to retire(Image: Ken McKay/ITV/Shutterstock)

But she said the plans have NOT accelerated any plans to retire. “Absolutely not. I am going to be toddling off that show in my Zimmer frame and even then, I’ll be coming in….I look at people like Janet Street Porter, Gloria Hunniford, still doing Loose Women, I mean, Gloria’s in her 80s, you look at Angela Rippon, you look at these astonishing women who are just getting into their stride in their 70s and 80s, and I look at them and I think, Yep, I’m still going to be there.”

However she said that she had an “inkling” that cuts were on the way. “It was kind of like, we sort of had an inkling that things were going to change,” she says. “Because we’ve made a lot of cuts, and we’ve been trying really hard to make sure that because we don’t have that much money, we actually punch way above our weight for the quality of guests that we get on. I mean, I’ve just been talking to George Clooney (for his new film Jay Kelly), for God’s sake. He wanted to talk to me.”

She said she was currently on a year’s contract – but denied reports she would leave at the end of it. “We’re all freelancers. We’re all just on a year’s contract,” she said.