Seòmar agus comataidhean

:Of course.

I was asked by senior BBC news executives how they would know that they were on the right path and were understanding the problem. I said, “The day you stop talking about ‘the Government’.” There are three Governments in the United Kingdom. It is endemic: it is absolutely accepted that saying “the Government” means the United Kingdom Government, while the Scottish Government and the Welsh Government are correctly presented in that way.

As I said to those executives in conversation, that never happens in other European countries with devolution or federalism, because it is automatic, on German public television, to talk about the federal Government, the Bavarian Government or whatever. The BBC cannot get even that most simple of things right. Once you have heard or seen that, you cannot unhear it. Anybody on the committee or anyone watching these proceedings should listen to BBC Radio 4 and the endemic misreporting. It is an issue that has been raised with the BBC, which it says it is taking seriously, but it just cannot get it right.

:And disinformation, too, which is concerning. However, there is an argument that to meet the highest standards of public service broadcasting output, it has to be seen where the people are. It is not good enough for decision makers to sit on high and say, “No, no, we insist on there being three or four television channels”—to be frank, that sounds almost North Korean now. The world has changed and we have to accept and understand that, among the younger demographic in particular, literally nobody is watching linear television. If younger people are not there, but we wish them to be able to access the best of television and information, that is not straightforward, but it is unavoidable. That is where I wish the BBC and others well, because they are looking to try to find ways in which they can get a fair return, protect intellectual property and so on.

:I totally agree.

:That might be among a range of suggestions that would help BBC executives to take the issues a lot more seriously. The BBC knew that it had a problem after the 2014 referendum, and that was from its statistics, which showed that the public in Scotland had the lowest level of trust in BBC news of any part of the UK, with good reason. The learnings from that in the BBC were then applied to how it covered Brexit. It seems to me that there is an awareness that there is a thing—a challenge. I think that we all understand the challenge, which is that there is no BBC England; instead, there is BBC network, which is both BBC England and BBC UK at the same time. That is really confusing for most of the people who work in it, who are not from Scotland, Wales or Northern Ireland, because they have not lived with—

:Well, we want a window into the mindset, and that issue has been raised again and again. I invite you to listen to the BBC press review, in which—surprise, surprise—every single newspaper that is mentioned almost every single day is published in London, which is just utterly inexplicable.

In a past life, I used to do the press review involving newspaper titles from across Europe but the BBC apparently does not have the wherewithal to include what the headlines might be in the Belfast Telegraph, the Western Mail or any Scottish newspaper except when, as part of its initiative of trying to get all of this stuff right, it dispatches Nick Robinson to Edinburgh for two days to co-present the “Today” programme. Because he happens, magisterially, to be in Edinburgh, one includes the newspapers that are sitting in front of him today. It is considered to be warranted because he is in Edinburgh as opposed to it being the default position of the British—I stress “British”—Broadcasting Corporation.

09:30

:During this parliamentary session, I have had cause a number of times to say to Ofcom that it should act on what has been happening in the commissioning of screen content in Scotland and in relation to public service broadcasting conditions for news. I do not think that it has used the powers at its disposal to full effect, so I agree with Mr Adam that it should, because if it does not, we will not have the optimal outcome.

:It does, but it is not for me to sit here and speak on behalf of Ofcom.

:My opinion is that Ofcom should use its powers more—for example, on commissioning, the spirit of the outcome of the rules, as well as the letter, is clear to be seen and understood. There has almost been a reticence on the part of Ofcom to use its full powers for fear of I do not know what.

That is why there is a regulator in this space. We need it to do what it should be doing. It has some very competent people working for it who can make that happen.

:Yes, it does.

:That is a fair concern, because the jury is out on what happened on those two examples when Ofcom had a locus; it should have protected screen commissioning in Scotland, and in the case of public service obligations to news, it should have protected the interests of viewers, but it did not do that to the full. One has to be concerned that it will not use its powers to the full to the advantage of the viewer and, by extension, provision in Scotland. Both those things should matter.

In fairness, I have to concede that Ofcom has to balance quite a number of competing interests, and I think that most fair-minded people would do that. However, you have boiled it down to a very simple point, Mr Adam, which is, should one not be acting in the interest of the viewer and consumer, and not just in the interest of the broadcaster in question? That is a fair concern to highlight.