Meeting of the Parliament 23 February 2016
No, I want to get through the numbers.
Does the BBC really spend our contribution on those things? The BBC could not provide any detail on how it arrived at the total expenditure, as it does not produce accounts for Scotland. That raises the question of how it arrived at the total of £337 million. The BBC website claims that £123 million is spent here on local content, yet the committee was told by the managing director of finance and operations at the BBC that the figure available to BBC Scotland to commission local content was around £35 million. That sum would also be supported by around another £35 million of largely fixed costs. The cash budget available to make programmes for local consumption, however, remains at a lowly 8 per cent of our share of BBC revenue.
Then there is the network spend that the BBC is supposed to use to represent and cater for the different nations, regions and communities across the UK. The BBC claims to have a network spend here of £82 million, making those well-known Scottish programmes such as “Homes Under the Hammer”, “Question Time” and the lottery show, to name but three, but is it really spending that amount on Scottish network television, albeit on mainly lift-and-shift programmes transferred from other parts of the UK? The guidelines that the BBC abides by in determining nations and regions spend are set by Ofcom, which highlights the following in its regional definition guidelines. If a Scottish-based TV production company wins a commission from the north of England and spends 60 per cent of the budget in that area and only 10 per cent in Scotland, the total budget is attributed to Scotland. If, however, a London-based production company wins a commission in Scotland, it can spend 30 per of the total budget and 50 per cent of the crew budget outwith Scotland and the total is still attributed to Scotland. Therefore, actual network money spent here could be £82 million or it could be as low as £8 million.
Then there is the £132 million covering the other services that we get from the wider BBC. It would seem on the face of it to be value for money, until you realise that Ireland has been receiving the same BBC programmes for a fraction of the cost. The commercial director of BBC Worldwide, speaking in 2014 after a new licence deal was agreed with Ireland, stated:
“We’ve enjoyed a really productive partnership with RTÉ over the last twenty years and I’m delighted that this is set to continue. It’s great to know that as a result of this deal RTÉ viewers will be able to continue to enjoy the BBC programmes they love for years to come.”
The RTÉ accounts state that overseas programming cost nearly £16 million covering all foreign programmes including what is acquired from the BBC. Ireland pays the BBC, at most, an eighth of what we are being charged.
We need the BBC to provide some clarity around the actual level of spend in Scotland and to tackle the production shortfall. The BBC finance director did suggest a way forward, saying that
“we can move towards an overall service licence for Scotland, that would be helpful and would give us a framework that could be used for monitoring.”—[Official Report, Education and Culture Committee, 12 January 2016; c 27.]
With a service licence for Scotland we could utilise the former BBC Three channel to create a proper TV station with full commissioning and editorial rights with its own controller, based here and free from political control. Nobody would lose any existing TV programmes, as BBC One and BBC Two would still be broadcasting. We could then support and sustain the wealth of creative talent that we have here and have the best of both worlds.
16:54