Killing Page was a Creative Decision

Nabbed this off Digital Spy:

Primeval co-creator Adrian Hodges has claimed that killing off Sarah Page (Laila Rouass) was a "creative decision".

The producer told Total Sci-Fi that he was keen to introduce new regular characters to tie in with the show's revival.

"Sarah Page has gone as a character," he confirmed. "[That was] just one of those creative decisions that we took in the downtime. It was nothing to do with Laila Rouass. [Co-creator] Tim [Haines] and I felt that we had to have new characters and to do that we had to let one or two of the others go [because] we couldn't afford them all!"

Hodges revealed that Page's off-screen death will be briefly referenced in the show's new run.

He explained: "There is some dialogue about her death, and there's an expanded reference in the webisodes on the ITV website."

He added that the introduction of new character Matt Anderson (Ciaran McMenamin) was prompted by former star Jason Flemyng's departure from the series.

"Once we knew Jason wasn't going to come back for the whole run, we needed a new leading man," he said. "We wanted to take what had worked best about [Douglas Henshall's character Nick Cutter] combined with what we liked about [Jason's character] Danny, and we wanted to go slightly younger."

He added: "We spent more time in development on Matt and his back-story than on anything else because we wanted to make the text and the subtext come together over the whole 13 episodes."