The number of hours of factual programming on the ABC has dropped by 60% since 2014, drama by 20% and documentary by 13.5%, the broadcaster has told a parliamentary inquiry.

Original Australian documentaries and factual programs have dropped from a total of 224 broadcast hours in the 2014-15 financial year to just 110 last financial year.

First-run Australian drama has dropped from 51 hours to 40 and narrative comedy from 24 to 20.

The ABC gave the details to a Senate inquiry on the economic and cultural value of Australian content.

The chief executive of Screen Producers Australia, Matthew Deaner, said if the trend continued, the ABC would no longer be the home of Australian stories.

“In 2016-17, the ABC broadcast approximately a quarter of the hours of drama that Networks Ten and Seven each broadcast in 2016,” Deaner said.

“I am concerned that if this trend of reduced hours and budgets for Australian drama, documentary and factual programming continues, our ABC will lose its way. We can’t let this happen.”

But the ABC’s new entertainment and specialist director, David Anderson, said the ABC had allocated an extra $30m in funding to Australian content this financial year.

“Updated figures to those provided to the Senate this week show the ABC will spend an extra $30m on Australian content in 2017-18, across internal and external production,” Anderson said.

“Of this, there will be an expected boost of more than $9m in spending on drama. In terms of drama in total, which includes narrative comedy, there will be an expected 15% increase in first-run hours, from 60 hours in 2016-17 to 69 hours in 2017-18.”

Last year the former ABC TV director Kim Dalton accused the ABC of quietly siphoning millions of dollars of the budget for local drama, Indigenous, documentary and children’s TV into other areas.

The man who ran ABC TV from 2006 to 2013 said the ABC was underfunded, but sheeted the blame home to management rather than budget cuts by successive governments.

Anderson said the extra funding had paid for programs including Pine Gap, Mystery Road and Back in Very Small Business, and the return of popular series such as Rake, Jack Irish and Rosehaven.

“The ABC’s boost to Australian content will result in approximately $119m being spent in partnership with the independent sector on externally commissioned projects this financial year. It will also generate an expected further $125m in external funding for externally commissioned, co-produced content.”

The ABC revealed earlier this year that it now costs every Australian just four cents a day, half what it cost in 1987 when the the famous “eight cents a day” campaign was launched by then managing director David Hill.

Local content has never been under more pressure. Commercial television is lobbying the federal government to adjust the complex drama points system – which demands a minimum amount of original local content be broadcast each year – because production costs have significantly increased while audiences are shifting to on-demand services and YouTube.

The networks want to drop the requirement to broadcast children’s TV entirely.