Meeting of the Parliament 16 June 2011
I thank the cabinet secretary for her good wishes to me on taking up my new post as the culture spokesperson for the Conservatives. I also welcome the ascension of the post of Cabinet Secretary for Culture and External Affairs to the Cabinet of the Scottish Government.
I also thank the cabinet secretary for her speech about the Scottish digital network. As one of the many newbies in the Parliament, I recognise the amount of work that was done on the matter by members in the previous session of Parliament, particularly by my former colleague Ted Brocklebank. That work was impressive, but we need more information, particularly following the cabinet secretary’s speech.
First, we need to hear more about the framework and vision for a digital network. Are we talking about linear or online programming? Would it be on demand or a mixture? How would it happen? What would the progression be? How would we future proof the content that would be sent out across the nation?
We have issues surrounding the funding and timeline for establishing such a network. We also have grave questions about the impact on our current broadcasting output in Scotland, particularly concerning BBC Scotland, the jobs there and Gaelic broadcasting.
I will get on to those issues in a moment. My colleague Alex Johnstone will talk in some detail about the boy side of it: the nuts and bolts, the heavy engineering and the pipes that will take all the content into people’s houses. Before that, I will come back on some of the points that the cabinet secretary raised.
When we talked about the problem with the take-up rate for digital broadcasting, particularly broadband and the infrastructure that is at the crux of the debate, the cabinet secretary suggested that there was a deficiency of content and that, if we improved content, we would improve the take-up rate. The problem with that argument is that, in Glasgow—my area and Patricia Ferguson’s—the take-up rate is low. That is nothing to do with how Scottish or Glaswegian the available content is, because Glasgow is best served of all the areas of Scotland by an identifiably Glaswegian and Scottish television output. It is where the major two networks are based. It is where the jobs are. It is where many of the dramas, such as “Lip Service” and “Taggart”, are based. People there see themselves represented on the screen, but we still see a low take-up rate.
I am not sure that content is the problem. The problem is that the digital network report and the cabinet secretary have conflated what is free and what is not. Glasgow has a low take-up rate because it has areas of great poverty. It has a low take-up rate because of the economics, not because of the programming and the output. The problem is that, although a digital network may be funded centrally, people would have to pay for the facility to have it in their homes. They would still pay for their broadband.