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:Thanks for the opportunity to talk about that.

If we were meeting 10 or 20 years ago, a lot of the discourse about the screen sector in general would be about the absence of studios, the absence of significant commissions for network and the absence of job opportunities. If you wanted to get on and be successful in film or television, you had to leave Scotland. We had a very underdeveloped screen and television sector in Scotland—which, incidentally, would also have been the case in Wales, Northern Ireland and the English regions.

Since then, for a number of different reasons—a bit of push and a bit of pull, externally and internally, from within the sector—that has begun to change. As we know, measures have been introduced to try to make public service broadcasters commission more from outside London and the south-east of England. There has been significant success with that, although there is more to do. Studios have opened in Scotland, and repeat series as well as big-budget films have been commissioned, which has helped the system across the piece to grow.

We are now approaching the point of the screen sector becoming a billion-pound annual industry in Scotland. That is a success by any measure, compared with where we were. However, I think that the committee has received evidence from the likes of Screen Scotland and trade unions and, when one looks below that headline success, we can see that there are very different realities for different parts of the film and television sector. We need to be cognisant of that and to intervene, where we can, to ensure that, while the general direction of travel is welcome, those other challenges are dealt with.

:I often have the feeling that Ofcom wants to play a key role but does not make full use of the powers at its disposal. That was definitely the case with STV, because Ofcom knew that something had to happen because what was proposed was not acceptable. However, it was enough for Ofcom that STV made just a few changes to the plan. There are other such cases. A very high-profile case was raised in relation to a television production in Scotland and how many people from here were working on it, and Ofcom was involved with that. I think that Ofcom intends to do right, but I am not entirely sure why it is reluctant to be more decisive, because it should be.

:Is there an automaticity in all those things? No. However, if Government ministers and parliamentarians were to be empowered to have closer and more direct engagement with broadcasting, then public sector broadcasters, instead of sending decision makers up to Edinburgh or Glasgow on day trips, would need to have an altogether different relationship with decision making in Scotland.

At the end of the day, what matters is the question of whether devolving broadcasting would make a difference to listeners and viewers. I believe that it would. If it is true that devolving powers changed things for health, education, justice, transport or the environment—I could go on—then it is also true for broadcasting.

:My issue is less about BBC Scotland being responsive or not, where there are issues—and there are some current issues related to BBC Scotland that may come up—but is more about BBC network and the frustration of having meeting after meeting about such issues. I do not know how it operates with other political parties, but Scottish National Party members of this committee take part in an annual dinner hosted by the BBC at the SNP conference, which I feel is like groundhog day. We sit and raise issue after issue, and we largely get a very sympathetic hearing, with people saying, “That’s fair,” or “There is a balance of things that we need to get right, but that is a fair point,” but people then go away and nothing changes.

: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.