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It will appear odd to people, and to Ofcom, too, that you said that you are trying to protect regional news gathering but that you are doing that by getting rid of the infrastructure to deliver it. That was not a question, just a comment, convener. Thanks.

I should tell the witnesses that we recently had the BBC before the committee to discuss its decision to cut back at “River City”, and the loss of back-office jobs and skills was an issue that was raised then.

The 10-year licence was applied for only last year and started only this year, so in the same year that STV pitched for the licence, it wants to make these radical changes and cuts. Do you think that there is some bad faith going on here, such that it applied for the licence, knowing it was not going to see through its terms, but, in getting the licence, it fended off competition and is now moving forward to make these cuts? Do you think that that is what is going on here?

I have only two other questions; lots of members want to come in.

I go back to the points that were made about the licence commitment. Do you understand that the licensing process is there to protect the public interest? People looking at what is happening here will have seen you agreeing to a licence that started this year and then trying to dramatically reduce the licensing commitments while making commitments that are not licence requirements. That just makes a mockery of the licensing process. Will you comment on that?

Sorry—I have a further question on gallery production and the facility in Aberdeen, which is to become what is called, I think, a reserve facility. Half a million pounds was spent on that. Are you honestly saying that it is a reasonable to have that as a reserve facility, and that you will ship people up to Aberdeen at short notice if there is a problem in Glasgow? Is that a sham to cover for the fact that you should not have invested that money if you were not going to use that facility?

Ofcom has been pointing out these trends over a decade of its reporting, so the situation cannot have caught STV by surprise. It also committed to substantial investment in the Glasgow and Aberdeen facilities. I just wonder how it can go from that to this situation. I come back to the point about whether it negotiated the licence in bad faith, cordoning it off from any other people coming in and bidding for it. STV gets the licence and then it suddenly reveals a few months later the dramatic changes and huge cuts that are being talked about.

On the job losses and the loss of output from the north-east, I wonder whether it seems to you that STV has a unique selling point, given that nobody else provides what STV provides in the north of Scotland. If it gets rid of that USP, no one else will provide that. It is giving up its USP, in what seems a bit of knee-jerk reaction to a share price drop. Are there other areas that it could look at to try to make sure that it gets through the process without cutting jobs and giving up the USP of the regionalised reporting that it does?

This will be my last question, convener.

From a layperson’s point of view, though, an unqualified opinion would give a level of reassurance that would be completely unjustified in this instance. They failed to set a budget; they failed to show why they had not set a budget; they were not able to provide evidence of any discussion as to why they had not set a budget, which is a breach of the financial regulations; and they were also making substantial errors in what they were doing. An unqualified opinion is surprising to me, as a layperson.

Deloitte was the auditor for the college.

It was then appointed as the external auditor—or am I getting that wrong?

I was not so much saying whether it was a good or a bad thing but, looking at my own area, we have Forth Valley College, and there is this potential dog-eat-dog approach where people are chasing student numbers because that is the basis of much of the income of both further and higher education institutions. Within a board area that has three different campuses, even if the two larger campuses decide that they want to be the ones to get the lion’s share of the numbers, it strikes me as odd that there seems to be substantial unmet demand. For example, lots of students want to go to the Forth Valley College Alloa campus in Clackmannanshire, yet it cannot afford to fulfil those places because of the grant that it gets. It seems to me that there is more of a general dog-eat-dog approach between the different institutions. I have not finished reading your previous report so I do not know whether you have covered that, but it would have important implications and lessons around the direction for the sector more generally if that was the case. Are we looking at fewer students? What is the effect of the income that has been lost from overseas students in particular, and how do we get a more equitable distribution?

I have only a couple of questions. Looking at the data that you provided for the validation that you might get from media reach—I think that that might be the way to describe it—do you see dangers in that? Some people say that there is a formulaic approach whereby reports are produced that are relatively straightforward and discuss the pros and cons of an issue, but contain a soundbite quote at the end that, if you publish it on the right day, is guaranteed to stir up a good amount of parliamentary discussion and media coverage. Is there a danger that you might be seen to be chasing headlines and adding to a preponderance of negative stories, given that the media will always prefer those to positive ones? Do you recognise that danger if you are looking to that metric for validation?