Official Report 724KB pdf
Under our next item, we will take evidence from Ofcom on its scrutiny of the BBC. We are joined in the room by Cristina Nicolotti Squires, Ofcom’s group director for broadcasting and media, and Glenn Preston, Ofcom’s Scotland director. I welcome you both.
I invite Mr Preston to make a short opening statement before we move to questions from members.
Thank you for the invitation to speak to the committee today.
I will quickly provide a bit of background information about Ofcom in case people are not familiar with us. We are the United Kingdom’s communications regulator. We are independent of Governments and the companies that we regulate, and our duties are set out in statute. As you probably know, we have a wide remit, which covers fixed-line telecommunications, mobile services and the post spectrum, and we recently became the UK’s online safety regulator. However, I think that the committee will be interested primarily in our work across the television, radio and video-on-demand sectors and, in particular, how it relates to Scotland’s creative industries.
We have grown our presence in Scotland significantly in recent years. In 2017, we had about 24 people, as I highlighted during a previous appearance in front of the committee. Today, we have well over 100 people, who are based at our office in Quartermile in Edinburgh. That number covers colleagues working right across Ofcom’s remit, including about 13 colleagues in Cristina Nicolotti Squires’s broadcasting and media group.
The UK’s blended model of public service broadcasting is admired across the world, with the publicly funded BBC, the publicly owned Channel 4 and commercially operated services such as STV and ITV. That model delivers well for UK audiences and is the bedrock of the UK’s production community.
However, although the UK broadcasting sector continues to serve audiences well, it is in the midst of major change, driven by global trends and changing consumer habits. To put that in context, I note that the public service broadcasters spent £2.7 billion on first-run UK-originated content in 2023, whereas Netflix is expected to have spent £13.5 billion globally in 2024, and YouTube is expected to have spent closer to £15 billion. That, combined with information on viewing habits that show that those aged between 16 and 24 spend less than a fifth of their viewing time with traditional broadcasters, gives a sense of the scale of the challenge that our broadcasting sector faces.
There has been a positive story of growth in Scotland’s TV sector in recent years. Spend on external productions here has nearly doubled—the figure was £119 million in 2010 and £225 million in 2022—with local and global companies viewing Scotland as a place where they can make high-quality programmes across a range of genres. Indeed, today, Netflix is launching “Dept Q”, a multimillion pound production that was filmed in Edinburgh, and we wish it great success.
Although inward investment is to be welcomed as part of a mixed production ecology, the role that global streamers and tech companies now play in bringing news and entertainment to the public means that it is vital that there is a level playing field for our public service broadcasters. To that end, the UK Media Act 2024 introduced the biggest change to the public service media framework in two decades, and our on-going implementation of the act will secure, among other things, appropriate prominence for public service players—such as the STV player appearing on smart TVs—to better enable them to compete. In addition, Ofcom’s upcoming review of public service media will have financial sustainability at its heart, and we will continue to ensure that our wider regulatory framework continues to support growth and creativity for the benefit of audiences, broadcasters and the wider production sector across Scotland.
I will close by publicly congratulating MG Alba, which, as the committee is probably aware, won a couple of Prix CIRCOM awards, including the overall genre award, last week. That was an amazing achievement, with investment from MG Alba, Screen Scotland and others, and it was fantastic to see.
I will stop there. I look forward to hearing the committee’s thoughts on our work over the course of the meeting.
Thank you very much for those opening remarks. Ofcom contributes to the BBC charter renewal process. In which areas could the BBC, specifically BBC Scotland, enhance what it does for consumers and for those who produce content in Scotland?
Ofcom’s role in the BBC charter renewal process is more of an advisory one, because, at the end of the day, this is about an agreement between the Government and the BBC. We are keen to ensure that the BBC continues to invest in productions here, so we welcome the news last week that the BBC will increase its production spend here and ensure that that continues. The Scottish production sector is a really important part of the creative economy, which is doing really well across the UK. Last night, there was a premiere of “Dept Q”—the trailer looked fantastic.
We are keen to ensure that the BBC, as part of its public purpose in its existing charter, continues to deliver great content for audiences right across the UK, whoever they are. We have noted on occasion that the BBC needs to work a bit harder to ensure that it makes content that appeals across different age groups—for example, we know that it struggles with younger viewers—and there have been some challenges with the BBC’s connection to those from lower socioeconomic groups.
We will be part of the charter renewal process, but the final decision will, of course, be made by the Government and the BBC.
How do you view the balance between the need to be commercially and financially viable and the fact that public sector broadcasters can do things that commercial operators would not normally do?
It is important to note that public service broadcasting—that includes STV, the BBC and Channel 4—is a really important part of the creative economy. Investment, risk taking and the creation of new genres of programmes are needed, because people do not leave film school and suddenly become able to direct a Hollywood movie. A talent base is being grown in this country, and that is bringing in great revenue, but the situation is challenging. In relation to the financial models, advertising in broadcasting has gone down tremendously and audiences are fragmenting. Those are real challenges for the industry.
We try to balance financial sustainability with the provision of great content that audiences want and that reflects their lives. For example, although news programmes have never made money, they are really important for democracy and in ensuring that local people feel connected.
Thank you.
Good morning. The BBC has described current Ofcom quotas as complex, and it acknowledges that it is possible for a project to qualify as Scottish even if it only has a production office located here. In relation to the Scottish quota, how can Ofcom ensure that commissioning by the BBC and Channel 4 delivers unambiguous economic and creative growth in Scotland for the next decade?
We saw the BBC announcement last week that you are referring to. The nations director talked about a change in approach, particularly on the issue that you mentioned about a production company’s substantive base—where it is headquartered. We welcome that decision by the BBC. That announcement was focused on ensuring that, in the future, the BBC looks to meet at least a couple of the criteria in most cases, although it realises that this is a complex area, so there might be times when some nuance is needed. The BBC wants to achieve a position in which the money that is spent in Scotland stays in Scotland. That is the overall aim, and Screen Scotland has been calling for that, so we welcome the announcement.
The guidance is complex—I make no bones about that—but it is drawn in that way because the sector is quite complex. The funding arrangements are very complex, so the guidance involves a lot of nuance. We try to create guidance that is as flexible as possible, that responds to the complexity of the sector and that encourages people to invest and make things in Scotland, but we also want to allow Scottish companies to invest in other parts of the UK while still being able to qualify as a Scottish production.
The sector is facing real headwinds from global platforms and streamers, and the cost of production has gone up, so we are keen to ensure that our regulatory powers are proportionate. We want to help companies to be as flexible and innovative as they can while ensuring that the local economy benefits.
Do the changes in approach to BBC commissioning for Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland confirm that the BBC has not always played with a straight bat in this process and that the corporation has failed to act in accordance with the spirit of Ofcom’s rules?
I will not answer for the BBC, because the committee is taking evidence from it later today. The BBC is still valued by people in Scotland. Our research shows that something like 83 per cent of adults use it every day or across the week. Based on the criteria that we set, the BBC is meant to spend 8 per cent of its spend in Scotland, but it has actually spent 9 per cent. It has been doing that, but I welcome the fact that it is extending its determination to spend more money locally.
I will make one additional point. Our “Made Outside London programme titles register 2023”—I think that that is what your question refers to, Mr Stewart—showed that there were, I think, more than 700 returns. Over the past few years, the BBC has made about 50 per cent, or just over 50 per cent, of those returns. The register just shows individual titles; it does not provide information on hours, spend and so on. It is worth saying that nearly 90 per cent of those BBC returns meet at least two, if not three, of the criteria, so we have to understand that a fairly small number of productions qualify only on the grounds of their substantive base. That is important context, and we need to be clear about that.
There will be changes to BBC and Channel 4 production costs and production quotas as a result of the Media Act 2024, which will have an impact on how things are managed. How will Ofcom ensure that PSBs continue to work with producers in Scotland under the new regime?
We are committed to ensuring that those broadcasters deliver what they are supposed to deliver. We produce annual reports on the performance of Channel 4 and the BBC, and, if we think that they are not delivering what they should be, we call that out. As Glenn Preston said, we have a lot of people based in Scotland, and they spend a lot of time talking to local production companies and having their ears to the ground, so we know what is going on before official investigations. As you know, we are in the midst of implementing the Media Act 2024, and we will be holding everyone to account.
As the committee might be aware, as part of Ofcom’s governance arrangements, we have a statutory advisory committee for each of the UK nations, including Scotland. Our advisory committee for Scotland went to see Channel 4 at the tail end of last year. The committees tour around different parts of the UK to meet people in the industry and other organisations that are interested in Ofcom’s regulatory duties. The purpose of the committees is to give us advice on regulatory issues that we will have to consider, including how in-house production works. The committee for Scotland spent time with Channel 4 and talked to it about its thinking in that regard.
It is fair to say that it is still early days, so we are not yet clear about how everything will pan out, but we have ears and eyes on the ground in Scotland. Those people engage directly with the industry and the production sector to ensure that we listen to what people are saying—the things that they are excited about and the things that they think could be challenging.
Thank you.
Good morning. I want to ask about your radio remit. As I think you are aware, I have an interest in that. I am old fashioned—I still listen to the radio, and I believe in the Queen song “Radio Ga Ga”. The radio is always there to listen to.
One of my biggest concerns is that, since about 2018, there has been a systematic loss of the Scottish voice on radio in Scotland. In the guidelines on programming and sharing between the regions, there is a reduced requirement for local content, which has given some of the big broadcasters the opportunity to become very London-centric and network everything. The Media Act 2024 does not help Ofcom, because it effectively makes you even more toothless in that situation. How can Ofcom justify its role as a public service regulator when it has systematically allowed the collapse of local radio in Scotland through deregulation and consolidation? My question is: what is the point of Ofcom?
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That is a fairly existential question. I do not recognise the characterisation of Ofcom as “toothless”. I really do not think that that is the case, but you—
I am shocked by that, because, having kept an eye on the issue, I have not seen any enforcement or regulation, as station after station has networked more and more. Okay, you no longer have the powers to do that, but you had them in the past and that made no difference.
You recognise the fact that the UK Parliament has passed an act that is essentially about deregulation. You are right that the fact that we can no longer require things of commercial radio in particular is because of deregulation.
You did not do it in 2018. Effectively, there was a change to the localness provision in 2018. You had the power, but you did not use it.
That was on the basis that deregulation was coming—it was already proposed.
Local commercial radio in Scotland is thriving. It has a bigger reach than it has in England or Wales. Commercial radio is proving to be incredibly sustainable and strong. The most listened to radio stations in the central belt and north of Scotland are Clyde 1 and Moray Firth Radio. I recognise your point about those stations doing more networking, but Global, for example, returned to a full-time Scottish schedule in 2023 immediately after that, because audiences had stopped listening.
Yes—Global pulled out of Heart and Capital, and then a few years later it came back, had a meeting with me and said, “You were right, George, we lost our audience—it tanked.” However, the crux of my question is about the fact that broadcasters could effectively shut down local radio in Scotland tomorrow and Ofcom could not do anything about it. The broadcasters could just network.
Currently, the breakfast show on what was formerly Clyde 2 and is now called Greatest Hits Radio, is the only Scottish content. We get news all the time, but that is the only Scotland-based show, and it is based in Glasgow. Moray Firth Radio and Forth 2 have lost their breakfast shows, so we have lost the local voice throughout the country.
When you, as the regulator, had the power to do something, why did you not make any inroads to try to stop that? You just said that deregulation was happening. You should not have accepted that.
I was not around at that time but, at the end of the day, as a regulator, we have only the powers that are given to us by Governments. At the moment, there is no requirement for stations to produce the sort of locally created shows that they used to produce. However, in the Media Act 2024—as a former journalist, I am particularly passionate about this—there is a requirement for them to provide locally gathered news content, which is really important. We are beginning our consultations on that. From my point of view, that is really important, because local radio is important to local democracy.
On what is in the 2024 act and how it has been construed, Ofcom has made representations but, at the end of the day, the law is decided by Governments and we can only enforce with the powers that we have.
On the back of the Media Act 2024, what powers do you currently have to enforce Scottish output on local radio?
As I said, deregulation means that radio stations are not required to have the same formats as they had before, but there is a requirement for them to provide locally gathered news for their audiences. We are in the process of drawing up a consultation on how to define locally gathered news and on what is the appropriate amount of locally gathered news. We will put out that consultation at the beginning of next year and take responses from everybody—I am sure that there will be plenty of them—and then we will have to draw up some guidance and enact some powers.
Can you understand the situation in Scotland? Radio Clyde was the first commercial station outwith London—I think that it started in 1970—and that created a whole generation of broadcasters and talent who probably would not otherwise have had that career and opportunity. For young people trying to get into broadcasting, radio was often used as a way in, but that will not happen in Scotland any more. It will be extremely difficult, if not impossible, for someone to do that.
It is important, however, to point out that audiences and formats are evolving. These days, many people still listen to some live radio, but they are consuming podcasts. I think that, last week, STV announced that it is launching a radio station. If there was not a thriving radio sector in Scotland, it would not be doing that. I do not know much about its exact plans, but I know that it plans to do live broadcasting as well as podcasts. STV is a big company with a lot of possibilities.
I am extremely interested in that, because that proves that there is a market. STV is doing that from an advertising point of view. The chief executive has said that it allows advertising throughout the day. Mornings on the radio are very good for advertisers, and they can be on television in the evening. However, that is not what we hear from local radio stations as they network more and more—they say that they cannot sustain that. That is the argument. Why would a major player such as STV say that it is doable when we get a completely different story from local stations? As the regulator, what have you done? You are part of the reason why we do not have Scottish voices on Scottish radio at the moment.
I would say that the reason is to do with the Government rather than the regulator.
In 2018, you had the power. Well, you personally were not at Ofcom, but the powers were there and Ofcom did not use them.
At the time, around 2017 and 2018, when deregulation was first on the table, there were still requirements on radio to deliver to their licence formats.
Yes—we enforced those. I can provide the committee with evidence of that. I do not have that to hand, but I know that we enforce against local radio and have done in the past. It might not necessarily have been enforced—
Can you tell me about one time where there has been enforcement in Scotland?
I cannot do that off the top of my head, but I can make sure that the committee—
Sorry—I did not hear the question.
Can you give one example of a time in Scotland when you used the enforcement powers and said to a broadcaster, “You can’t do that,” or, “You must do this”?
I do not have a specific example but we have certainly had—
Just one.
I know that we have had conversations about whether stations were meeting their licence formats over the past few years, so I am happy to come back to you on the specifics.
Okay. I will be interested to see that.
For me, that issue is an example that shows why broadcasting should be devolved to the Scottish Parliament. Do you agree that, if the regulator was more Scotland-focused and reported to this place, as opposed to Westminster, that would be better for the Scottish broadcasting landscape?
There are a couple of points there. Post the Scotland Act 2016, Ofcom is legally obligated to be accountable to Holyrood, just as we are to all the legislatures in the UK. Our governance has the nations’ interests baked into it. For example, the Scottish ministers appoint a member of the Ofcom board. We have a content board that looks at all our broadcasting and media issues and that has a Scotland member. We have just announced Peter MacMahon, who will be known to many of you, as a member of our content board, which brings advice into the organisation already. In answer to Mr Stewart’s question, I mentioned our advisory committee, through which we have broadcasting expertise giving us advice on the development of our policy and regulatory conventions.
If we are looking at the Scottish context and looking for Scottish voices in the Scottish media, would it not empower you as a regulator if you reported to the Scottish Parliament on a Scottish context through the devolution of broadcasting?
You would expect me to say this, because we are an impartial independent regulator, but that question is not for Ofcom—it is up to the Governments and Parliaments to tell us how they want to do it.
Yes, but I want to take the politics out of it. You will probably find some members here who do not agree with me on the end game for Scotland in future but who will agree with me that we are not looking at broadcasting through a Scottish prism. From that perspective, I am not trying to make political headway; I am just trying to say what I believe should be the way forward and what is best for Scottish broadcasting.
On the Scottish prism point, I hope that I have demonstrated that we have that type of representation already in Ofcom and that we are accountable to the Scottish Parliament. We cannot offer a view on the question of devolution. If Governments and Parliaments decide that they want to do that, it would be our duty to take it forward.
You have made a fist of it, Glenn, but Ah’m no convinced.
George Adam is not a fan of regulators in general, I think, and I am afraid that I join him in that. The Westminster Parliament gives regulators powers, but I am unconvinced that they use their powers. I think that George Adam has made a very strong case for that in connection with what is happening with radio broadcasting in Scotland. At the end of the day, the reason why we have a regulator is to make sure that the marketplace is fair and that it fairly reflects what Parliament—Westminster in this case—has regulated for you to enforce.
I did not think that the answer that you gave to Alexander Stewart was particularly convincing. Instead of talking about ensuring that the 8 per cent of programming that the BBC is required to make in Scotland is made in Scotland by local production, it sounded like you were creating a massive loophole by talking about nuance and flexibility. How committed is the regulator, Ofcom, to insisting that that 8 per cent is not just a tick box for the BBC and that the programme is actually being made by locally based production companies? I did not hear any assurance in response to Mr Stewart’s question that that was your intention at all.
That is our intention. We can have differing views. We welcome the fact that production in Scotland has flourished over the years. We have to make sure that, as well as providing a regulatory framework, we do not stifle innovation and creativity. Production companies tend to have just a few people as permanent staff. Quite a lot of production companies will have two or three people who are based here and then, when they get a commission, they will start hiring people. You do not need to be an expert to know that it is much better to hire people locally than to be driving or flying them all the way up from London all the time.
That does happen, though, doesn’t it?
It has happened in the past, but let us take “The Traitors” for example, which I am sure somebody will want to talk about.
I am surprised that George Adam did not mention it, because he has talked about it in the past.
There had not been a high-end reality programme made in Scotland before. Studio Lambert decided that it wanted to film it in Scotland. The first series became incredibly popular and it brought in people who had done reality TV programmes before, because no one in Scotland had made one before. That is just what the situation was. We still do not have all the exact information for the following series. There was an error made about the reporting of the production and the make-up of it in the first series, but undoubtedly “The Traitors” has put Scotland and Scottish production right on the map.
Our understanding from the BBC and Studio Lambert is that, as each series comes, more people are being hired locally. Scotland has now shown the world that it is a place where high-end reality programmes can be made. If we had been restrictive and said to Studio Lambert, “We are sorry—you can only make this first series in Scotland with very narrow conditions,” it might not have come here and it might not have brought anyone with it and taught things. There is a balance.
I hear the rationale and understand it, but what will Ofcom do to see that that happens? At the end of the day, as Scottish parliamentarians, we are interested in creating a sustainable creative industry in this segment in Scotland rather than something that flies in, makes a programme and flies out. What are you going to do?
We will make sure that the BBC delivers on what it said that it was going to do and that the numbers are accurate when they are being reported. We will scrutinise as each series comes in.
So I misheard all this language of nuance and flexibility and headwinds as a get-out-of-jail card for the BBC.
You did not mishear it. As I said, as with all regulation, we do not want to make it hard for Studio Lambert to come here to make the programme. We want it to carry on doing it in Scotland, but we do not want to be saying to it, “Series 4 has to have nine cameramen from Scotland and only one from England.”
No, I understand that.
It might turn round to me and say, “We really wanted to have nine but, at the moment, we cannot find a ninth and we will have to have eight.” That is the nuance and the realism that we are talking about.
No, I get that. Let me ask you, from an Ofcom point of view, about the BBC charter, article 14 of which talks about ensuring the
“authentic portrayal and representation of the diverse communities”
as part of BBC programmes. What is your definition and standard against which you measure the BBC’s compliance with article 14?
We do a report every year on the BBC’s performance on all its public purposes and missions. On the next charter going forward, what is the wording of that and—
What is Ofcom’s interpretation of that wording currently? You are the regulator, and I presume you have interpreted article 14. What is your interpretation?
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Our interpretation is that every year, as I said, we do a review.
No, what does
“authentic portrayal and representation of the diverse communities”
mean? What programming, what tangible measurement? I know that you are reporting—I get that—but what is your tangible measurement? How do we know whether the BBC is fulfilling article 14 in a Scottish context?
Well, we called out in previous years that we still think that the BBC is struggling with younger audiences and with lower socioeconomic groups.
So it is failing in that.
It has more to do in that area—that is how I would put it. There is not a metric.
Forgive me, but the answers that you are giving are too vague. There is a specific here. I do not know that Ofcom has a measurable interpretation of
“authentic portrayal and representation of the communities”,
so that you can say, yes, the BBC is doing that or the BBC is not doing it. That is at the crux of the “River City” stuff, by the way. It is important that Ofcom clearly articulates what article 14 means.
I think that we do. The annual report that we have to produce on the BBC looks at how it delivers the mission and public purposes that cover the things that you are talking about and whether it is meeting the operating licence requirements for individual public services. We assess that by talking to audiences. We have not really spoken much about audiences. We ask audiences whether people hear their voices, see their lives and those sorts of things; that is how we define this stuff. We come to Scotland and do focus groups and omnibus surveys.
What are audiences saying?
Exactly what Christina Nicolotti Squires said, which is that, on the whole—
Are they happy with it?
No, I would not go as far as saying that they are happy. On the whole, the BBC is delivering on its remit in these areas. However, as Christina said, there is scope for improvement in some areas, particularly around how we serve younger audiences and D and E social classes. Our job is to say to the BBC, “This is what the audiences have told us. You need to demonstrate how you will change.” That is the type of thing that we will be reporting on later this year, having told the BBC in previous years that it needed to up its game in that area.
We will watch for that with interest.
I have two more quick questions if the convener’s patience allows it. We cannot talk about TV and radio, or about one segment of broadcast, without talking about all the platforms that now exist. Does Ofcom have powers to properly protect children from harmful or age-inappropriate content online?
Yes.
Are you using them?
Yes.
What have you done?
Since the Online Safety Act 2023 was passed, we have been required by the UK Parliament to put in place a couple of regimes around illegal harms, particularly focused on the protection of children.
The online safety process is not a takedown regime. It does not give Ofcom powers to reach into platforms and say that they have to take particular content down. It is a systems and processes regime. It is about ensuring that companies have all the right preparation and systems in place to stop that content appearing on it in the first place. The act requires Ofcom to produce guidance to tell companies how they can go about doing that.
But it gives Ofcom no powers to enforce it.
No, it does. You have asked what we have been doing and we can share all this with the committee. We have been sharing this with different Scottish Parliament committees over the past 12 or 18 months. We are required to consult on the guidance that we apply to companies and we have done that on illegal harms. The guidance deals with issues such as terrorism, child sexual abuse and exploitation, and the child sexual abuse material that you may see online. It is all out there and available for people to see.
What about pornography?
Yes, pornography as well. We did those two things slightly separately. We did the illegal harms piece first because that is what Parliament required us to do. Then we moved on to the child protection piece. Both pieces of guidance have been produced and are now reaching the enforcement stage. Companies have to demonstrate to us by July of this year that they have the systems in place. If they do not do that, that is when we can come to enforce. There are different disruption measures. Some of them involve fines, which can be up to 10 per cent of global turnover, so they are significant sums of money.
Does that reach beyond the United Kingdom?
Yes. The act applies within the UK and it relates to UK users and user-to-user services.
It applies to users in the UK, but content might be produced on a platform outside the UK. Do you have powers over those sites?
The act only extends to the United Kingdom, but we can still fine a company for things that are happening to users in the UK. It is still possible for us to fine a company—
What is the ultimate sanction that you could take against a company?
This is the point. There are other disruption measures. Fining is an option, but we have other business disruption measures. We can go to the courts to seek to stop things such as payment systems or, ultimately, a website, for example, being available in the United Kingdom. We can go to that level if it is necessary and we are concerned that the harms in the areas that you have identified are such that UK users can no longer access that content.
That is another thing that we will want to watch the development on. As you can probably tell, I have strong views about what children can currently access online.
My final question is about Royal Mail. There is a bunch of stuff going on with Royal Mail. You will understand that constituents regularly tell me how poor the Royal Mail service now is in certain parts of my constituency and indeed in wider Scotland—particularly in rural and remoter areas but also in urban areas. What powers does Ofcom have to enforce the universal service obligation that Royal Mail is currently, I think, paying lip service to?
I do not know whether you have seen this, Mr Kerr, but last week we announced an investigation into Royal Mail for not meeting its quality of service targets. In the past two years, we have fined Royal Mail for not meeting its quality of service targets and we have just started an enforcement process since Royal Mail announced that it has not met its quality of service targets again. Those are our mechanisms.
We have been looking at the sustainability of the universal service obligations. I and one of my group directors will be before the Scottish Affairs Committee at Westminster to talk about exactly these issues in a couple of weeks. We will have to reach a view on whether we think there need to be changes to the universal service obligations.
You have already said—and I refer to the announcement that you referred to—that the universal service obligations urgently need reform. I think that that is a quote from what Ofcom said. Do you want to elucidate on what “urgently needs reform” means? Some of the ideas that have been floated around this issue are, for example, that second-class letters would not be delivered by a certain time or on certain days or that the service would not be six days a week—all kinds of further retreats from the universal service obligation. What does it mean?
This is fundamentally about whether the USO is a sustainable thing and whether it is affordable. It is quite old. We have to face that. We have looked at a lot of European and other international models. I think that either the Swedes or Danes have just done away with their universal service obligations, recognising that there has been a massive shift in how people communicate. At the heart of this is what people tell us they need. We talked a bit about the audience point in relation to broadcasting and we have similarly researched user needs for the postal service.
I will be frank with you. When I first looked at those user needs, I expected people in rural and remote communities in particular to say to us that the USO has to stay as it is. They did not say that. We published all the research. What users said was that the quality of service has to be good and it has to be reliable. They are less bothered by things coming less frequently, but they want things to actually turn up, particularly hospital appointment letters, for example. We must look at those issues and ask, first, to what extent the universal service delivers on them and then how we will hold the Royal Mail to account.
So the “urgently” needed reforms that Ofcom identified are around consistency and reliability.
Reliability. That is exactly right.
It is about reliability—absolutely.
I will add to that. This is not just a rural and remote problem.
No.
It is also an urban problem. We have had correspondence with Kaukab Stewart in her MSP capacity in the past few weeks about the G1 to G5 postcodes, because people were not getting the service that they needed.
No.
The urban experience was exactly the same as that in remote rural areas.
We have an excellent postie in our street, but I can tell you that the man is weighed down because of what he is expected to do. We now get mail at all hours of the day and night. Something is changing. The need for predictability and reliability has to be reinforced.
That is exactly the space that we are occupying.
Fair enough. Thank you.
Can you influence what happens on the big social media sites, such as X, Instagram and platforms like those?
The Online Safety Act 2023 requires all social media platforms—those you have mentioned and many others; the 2023 act catches a lot of services—to have in place systems and processes that comply with its requirements. Ofcom enforces those requirements. In the UK, all those organisations must comply with the act’s requirements.
I realise that there is now a 24-hour news cycle and that people have access to material such as that on the horrendous incidents in Liverpool at the weekend. The police asked that people stop sharing what was very difficult content that, as Mr Kerr says, was accessible to any young person or teenager online. Do you have any ability to quickly take such content down?
I reinforce the point that ours is not a content take-down regime. Neither the act nor Ofcom’s powers allow us to step in and say that particular pieces of content have to be taken down. We need to be clear about that. The regime covers the systems and processes that the platforms have in place to stop such content from going up in the first place.
I can say a couple of things. Following the horrendous Southport attacks last year—that was before the Online Safety Act 2023 had taken effect and before we had powers to allow us to intervene in such issues—we looked at what had happened. There were examples of what you described: content had gone up that triggered unrest and violence. We have published our findings, and if you have not seen them we are happy to share them with you. We think that the platforms were slow in acting and understanding what was going on.
The interesting thing about the horrendous scenes in Liverpool is how quickly the authorities came out to say, “Do not do this. Do not share this,” exactly because of the learning from Ofcom’s research and findings to encourage not just the platforms themselves but everybody involved in responding to such an incident to work together to make sure that it is dealt with as safely as possible.
There have been consistent calls on Ofcom and the BBC from the Scottish screen sector to increase the share of production in Scotland. Mr Stewart earlier said that the BBC’s change of tack, announced last week, maybe suggested that it was not adhering to the spirit of Ofcom’s guidance. That is one way of looking at it. Another way of looking at it would be that the BBC’s decision suggests that Ofcom’s rules on Scottish qualification have been, to quote you, too flexible to ensure that the projects that the BBC commissions deliver value for money in Scotland. Is that right? Could “too flexible” mean too weak?
I think that the results speak for themselves. The production sector in Scotland has been very successful. The industry is having a very difficult time all around the UK at the moment, with audiences fragmenting and the tech giants coming into that space as well. There is real pressure on the industry.
We like looking at numbers. There are now 51 active production companies making content in Scotland. There were about 32 in 2014, so evidence shows that the production sector here is flourishing. Our guidance is guidance. As Glenn said, for the vast majority of what the BBC does here it sticks to two out of three of the criteria, but we welcome the fact that the BBC is going further. It is about ensuring that the BBC sticks to its remit and public purpose and that audiences see themselves reflected on screen, which is hugely important and something that we welcome and encourage. There will be different viewpoints, but the evidence is that the industry is doing well while facing the same headwinds as others. I note from a recent survey that the production sector is struggling less in Scotland than in other parts of the United Kingdom. It is flourishing. It is going well and I would say that that is quite good evidence that the guidelines are working.
09:30
I will add a couple of thoughts. I have been in front of the committee before to talk about regional production. We reviewed our guidance in 2017-18 and then updated it. We recognised that the guidance needed some tightening up, including on how the returns were done, how we reported and what happened if people felt that they wanted to report concerns about numbers. We gave effect to all that in 2021, having done the work across a couple of years, recognising the long lead times for broadcasters and production companies in producing content. The revised guidance has been in place over the last three or four years and on the whole it seemed to be working pretty comfortably. Then we had the couple of instances that Cristina mentioned—we talked about “The Traitors”, for example—where people started to express concern. We have said that we want to implement the Media Act 2024 and focus on its provisions, but we are happy to look at the guidance if there is a feeling that it needs to be changed again.
Thank you. Does the BBC’s change of tack and position highlight the need to look at the guidance again?
At the end of the day, it is the results that count rather than how we get somewhere, and we welcome the BBC’s decision to increase production. As Glenn said, we are implementing the Media Act 2024. Let us let that settle down; let us see how it is working with the various tech giants and maybe have a look at it again in a couple of years’ time when the 2024 act has been implemented properly. I am not ruling out looking at guidance again.
I do not think that the BBC’s announcement suggests that the guidance needs to be reviewed immediately. It is an interesting and good announcement. First, the reality is that the vast majority of what the BBC in particular does already meets at least two, if not three, of the criteria. That applies to nearly 90 per cent of what it does. The number of shows that you would be talking about is very small. I think that it is positive that the BBC says that it is listening, will be doing things differently, and wants to meet two of the three criteria.
I am nervous that being overly prescriptive risks disincentivising investment. I worry about that. Cristina gave the example of “The Traitors” and Studio Lambert and there will be other production companies that think the same way. The broadcasters are bound by the rules and they have to work with the production companies to help meet them. If the regulator is reaching in and telling them who they should be employing and where they should be making things, I worry that that disincentivises investment. I want companies to come to Scotland and make stuff and use local people to do so. Equally, I want Scottish companies to be able to go and make something in other parts of the UK. I think that there is a real risk, if we become overly prescriptive, that we disincentivise them from doing that.
You mentioned the importance of audiences seeing themselves on screen. In response to Mr Kerr, you talked about the BBC needing to do more to build support among audiences with above-average economic and social needs. Presumably, BBC Scotland cutting a drama like “River City”, which is about a working-class community and voices, will make the situation worse. Have you or will you be looking at that decision?
Definitely. At the end of the day, however, we do not tell the BBC what to do editorially. The BBC has to decide how to spend its public money and what to produce within the quotas and the guidance that we issue. The BBC made a commercial decision to end “River City”. Its audiences were going down. The BBC needs to spend its money where the audiences are and younger people are no longer watching linear TV. The BBC has announced plans to spend the “River City” money elsewhere, and we will be making sure that it reflects all socioeconomic groups in Scotland and elsewhere. It is up to the BBC to decide how to do that. We would not be prescriptive and say, “You must make this programme at this time of day.” It is important that the BBC can be innovative. Audiences now are fragmented in a way that they certainly were not when I started my broadcasting career. It is important that the BBC creates content where people are getting it.
It is clear that the BBC still has a lot of work to do for younger audiences as well as for those with above-average economic and social needs.
That is what we have found and what we have been hearing from people. I cannot predict what the effect will be. Once the BBC has done a year without “River City”, we will have to see what people tell us. This is about what audiences want and the audience for that particular programme has been declining over the years. We all know that the audience for linear TV is declining rapidly and the BBC has to make content where people are watching it.
It is useful to think about examples of what Ofcom could be, and I am thinking about Canada. I think that it was Pierre Trudeau, Justin’s dad, who said that being in Canada is like being “in bed with an elephant”, because its southern neighbour is 10 times its size and the danger of complete cultural overspill is huge. Canada had quotas for the numbers of university lecturers who had to be Canadian. A dark secret from my past is that I was a radio DJ in Canada, which sounds a bit grand, but it was on Sunday night campus radio. I was obliged to play a certain number of Canadian songs during the course of that two-hour programme.
We can contrast that with what Ofcom is doing here. We have heard lots of talk about “nuance” and “guidance” and maybe increasing it and so on, but Ofcom agreed with the BBC last year when it decided to reduce news output in Scotland by, I think, half, from 250 hours to 125 hours. George Adam mentioned what has happened to radio in Scotland. It does not feel like local radio any more. I started campaigning in 2007 to have Scottish football matches free to air. It took a long time to get anywhere, and when it did we had the absolute fiasco of the Greek match, where the sound and the covers did not work because the BBC was so out of touch with doing that. Channel 4 has no target for Scotland and you seem to be content with that. I understand that Ofcom is a creature of the UK Parliament and if the UK Parliament decides that you will be toothless, as George Adam put it, that is what you have to be and work with.
Let me ask you this. You may have covered this and it may have been in the briefing, but I could not see it. What has the BBC’s record been like on the 8 per cent spend and hours quota that it is asked to deliver in Scotland? I heard your explanation about “The Traitors” earlier, but it is not Scottish in any meaningful way apart from the venue where it is filmed. What has the BBC’s track record on the 8 per cent requirement been over, say, the last five to 10 years?
I do not have data going back that far in front of me but I can provide it. I know that the BBC has met the quota in the last couple of years.
It is an obligation. It is important to say that. The 8 per cent quota for spend and hours in Scotland is part of the operating licence that Ofcom sets for the BBC. Cristina is right. Bear it in mind that we did not regulate the BBC until 2017, but over the last eight years there has been no instance of the BBC not meeting the 8 per cent obligation.
What counts? I forget what the obligation is. Is it production based in Scotland?
There are three elements, the “substantive base”, the “production spend”, and the “off-screen talent”. They are the three buckets, if you like, of criteria.
When we had the cast and employee representatives of “River City” here, the point was made that the BBC was essentially doing away with what might almost be called a cultural college, where sound recordists, camera people, production staff, actors and actresses could get their start in Scotland. That is going by the board, and it seems like a huge loss.
I want to go back to the example of “The Traitors”. You said that there was no history in Scotland of having—I forget your term for it.
A high-end reality show.
A reality show, yes. The fact that we did not have the talent to do that show is a condemnation of the track record, and it is compounded by your saying, “We will allow BBC”—or whoever produced it—“to do it this way, because they do not have the staff there.” However, that is what happens when you do not invest. Is that not the purpose of it? I would have thought that Ofcom would have had a vested interest in ensuring that the cultural capacity of the media in Scotland was sustained and sustainable. “The Traitors” is an example of the fact that that did not happen—you did not have people involved in that.
Is cultural capacity part of your remit? Are you concerned about its decline? I am talking about all the skills and trades, as well as the actors. I will let you answer that question and then come back with one more.
I am not convinced that there has been a decline, necessarily. The numbers show that the production capabilities in Scotland have, as Glenn Preston has said, doubled over the past few years.
But there is not a single person with the ability to do high-end reality shows.
Well, it is not that there is not a single person. I think that you are right that the numbers are small, but there are unquestionably people who are capable of doing that. I guess that part of the point of wanting “The Traitors” to be made here is to get that pipeline going and have the talent to be able to do more and more of that sort of thing so that, when something becomes a returning series, you will have more locally based people making that content.
I am trying to think how long high-end reality TV has been going—it depends, I suppose, on whether you call “Big Brother” high end or not—but such programmes are probably only about 15 years old.
There is a skills shortage in Scotland, and the production companies need more people with skills. Whatever the BBC decides to spend its “River City” money on—if I can put it that way—it will be in its own interest to ensure that there is a continuing pipeline of emerging talent with the skills that Skills Development Scotland, Screen Scotland and this Government have been investing in. It does not help the BBC at all if those skills are not here, and a continuing pipeline of talent and a continuing training scheme will be important for whatever new programmes the BBC makes.
Channel 4 has invested a lot in skills training in Scotland, too. At the end of the day, there is a commercial reality, and it is good and beneficial for the companies to make sure that the skills are here.
I have another thought to add. We will want to see what comes next. You will have witnesses from the BBC here shortly, so I guess that you can ask them about this, but I think that there has been talk of more formal announcements being made in the autumn, particularly on the issue of the training academy, as you have described it, from “River City”, which it can continue to focus on in order to develop people for the sector.
I saw a good announcement yesterday. I do not know whether you know TRC Glasgow Limited, but it is a brilliant Glasgow-based company that trains people for and encourages them to go into the production sector. We meet it quite regularly; it has received investment from Screen Scotland, BBC and, indeed, Channel 4, which Christina Nicolotti Squires just referred to, and yesterday it made an announcement about this very issue of how we encourage into the industry people who, typically, might not come to it and about its new programme, which has been co-funded by those investment partners.
So, I think that some action is happening in this area, but we will definitely want to keep shining a light on it and watching what the BBC plans to do.
Is that the extent of your role? I talked to the folk from “River City” who were here about this, but the BBC seems to have a symbiotic relationship with Netflix and other streamers, in that, notwithstanding what has been said about skills shortages, its expenditure, its experience and the capacity that it creates are very useful to Netflix and others when they consider coming to Scotland. Does it not seem sensible to try to get those different players around the table and get them to agree on some proper way of creating a stream of that talent, whether it be production assistants, camera people and so on? Is that not part of your role?
Part of our “Review of Public Service Media”, which we will be publishing in the middle of July, looks at the role of streamers. There have been all sorts of public discussions about whether they should be taxed and so on, but the fact is that they do invest quite a lot of money in training. When “Adolescence”, for example, was being filmed in the north of England, a lot of work was done with the community in the area, with open days that people could come along to and see how they could become a cameraman, a sound recordist et cetera.
We do not measure what the streamers bring in from a regulatory point of view, but there has been quite a lot of discussion among Screen Scotland, the BBC and Channel 4 to ensure that the pipeline of talent is there. I do not think that there is any remit to insist that Netflix pays a certain amount of money towards training, but I am sure that it would say that its very investment in the UK is bringing that forward.
09:45
I appreciate that it might be the nature of your remit, but it seems extremely passive, with your talk of shining a light, issuing guidance, being flexible and nuance—all those things. It seems to me that playing a much more active role and trying to encourage a vibrant sector would be useful.
My last question is on sports fans in general, but football fans in particular, in Scotland being able to see matches that are important to them. That sort of thing has been declining. Aside from the lack of free-to-air matches, the coverage of Scottish football by other UK broadcasters is pretty appalling. Is Ofcom concerned about or involved with that at all?
Yes, to a degree. I will explain that, because it is quite complicated.
The good news, which you will be aware of, is that the BBC has secured an exclusive deal to broadcast Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland men’s international football in the run-up to next year’s world cup, which is a total of 41 live matches over the next 15 months.
Our remit relates to listed events—that is, sporting events or other events of national interest. They are designated by the UK secretary of state—Ofcom does not have a role in that. The UK Government of whatever colour says to the UK Parliament, “These are the things that we think should be shown on free-to-air channels.” Our job, then, is to look at the acquisition of exclusive rights and whether the organisations have bought them fairly and, if we feel that they have, to give them consent to broadcast. Those are the limitations on our role.
We have been hearing these arguments for quite a long time, but it is for the Government to have a conversation about this and to ask whether anything about the list of designated events that are deemed to be of national significance needs to change. What goes on the list is the Government‘s choice. If it decides that it wants to add the likes of, say, Scotland men’s international football matches, we will come in and fulfil our regulatory function, as we are asked to under the regime.
I get that you are a regulator and that you do not have this power, but Westminster Governments have for decades now, I think, refused to list Scotland men’s—and, I would argue, women’s—football team events. As a result, people in Scotland have had to watch England play Albania, and they cannot watch Scotland play Spain or whatever. Does that not concern you as an organisation?
Yes. If it is free to air, that is a positive thing for audiences, but that is the limitation of our role. We do not have the opportunity to say what we think should or should not be on a designated list. The Government makes the decision and then Parliament passes legislation to that effect.
Thanks.
I want to ask a couple of quick supplementary questions before I bring in Mr Harvie.
Going back to what Mr Brown was saying, I, like some other members of the committee, have very little interest in football, but I noticed that the national news at the weekend featured some of the successes of England men’s and women’s teams in Europe but not Aberdeen winning the Scottish cup. Is there some disparity in the bias of national content with regard to the home nations? Should the national news be doing more to highlight what is happening in Scotland and cover some of that content?
Anecdotally, I can tell you that, in my previous career running newsrooms at ITV, Channel 5 and Sky, I would have been very cross if one of our programmes had not put the Aberdeen result out. National news programmes should be doing the news for everybody.
However, Ofcom does not get into those arguments, does not have editorial powers or requirements and cannot tell individual news programmes to do something. Whatever channel it was on—and you do not need to say—I cannot ring them up and say, “That was really bad.” There is no formal way of doing that. We do insist that everyone in the UK is properly reflected, but there is no mechanism for us to say, “You’ve broken this rule, so we’re going to fine you.”
That sort of thing is done through what you might call softer power—and if you let me know later which channel it was, I might send a text. It was a classic thing at ITV’s “News at 10”, which I edited for many years, that we ensured that we covered not just England football results but Scottish ones, too.
Channel 4 has been mentioned a couple of times. We have heard today that quotas can sometimes lead to a feeling that things are being implemented and data gathered in a tick-box way. What is the rationale for not setting quotas for Channel 4 in the same way that they are set for the BBC?
The BBC is a publicly funded organisation, and Channel 4 is publicly owned, so they are slightly different. Channel 4 has to report to us and be transparent about where it is commissioning content, and I think that its spend outside England has amounted to something like 11 per cent over the past year.
Again, it is a matter of balance. The most important thing is the outcome—that is, what is being made here and what is being seen and valued by audiences. The balance is between making sure that that outcome happens and making sure that innovation and ideas are not stifled and that there is flexibility. The evidence shows that there is a burgeoning and flourishing production sector here and, of course, we want that to continue, but I do not think that being prescriptively regulatory will necessarily bring about that outcome. So far, the approach is not doing a bad job.
Do not underestimate the huge changes that are going on in audiences. For example—and I am going to talk about my own experiences again—when I edited ITV’s “News at 10” in 2010, we had an audience of 5 or 6 million; now, about 2 million people watch that programme. Audiences are fragmenting and going to very different places. It is important that the great content that is still being made, whether it be on Netflix or the BBC, is being made where people are watching.
The outcome is what we measure. Ofcom is very much an evidence-based organisation; we do a huge amount of research. It is the outcome that is important, and I maintain that it is important to balance guidance and quotas with allowing people to be innovative and flexible—in other words, to take a bit of a punt or a bit of a gamble.
Channel 4 has an out-of-England target, and you have just said that it is making 11 per cent of its content outside of England. Do we have a figure for Scotland?
I do not think that we do at the moment. We re-licensed Channel 4 last year. Its out-of-England quota increased: it was 3 per cent originally; it moved to 9 per cent a number of years ago; and for the duration of the next licence—that is, by the end of the next licence period in 2030—it will be up to 12 per cent.
You are right that it is an out-of-England quota, but another thing that we have required Channel 4 to do is to report against its performance in each of the nations. That information will be coming.
In a year’s time, you will be able to see the percentage.
And you will be able to work out how much of the overall 12 per cent target Channel 4 is producing in Scotland.
I cannot shake the feeling that we still have an approach to regulation and scrutiny of, and political debate about, the BBC that derives from a time when it was massively dominant in terms of the economics of production, storytelling, culture and news. It was massively dominant, but now it is a player in a market. It seems to me that the legislation that you mentioned—the Online Safety Act 2023 and the Media Act 2024—might catch us up to where we should have been 20 years ago, but it does not fully address the current landscape and what it will continue to evolve into.
The media act does give you some powers in relation to video on demand. I looked at your website to see whether the consultation on that is out yet, but I did not see it. I want to ask about the context, scope and breadth of that consultation, but I will connect my question to the point that the convener made about the recent Liverpool incident. The BBC quite properly immediately said that the incident was not being reported as a terrorist incident and that the suspect is white, but that did not matter at all because huge numbers of people were immediately fed lies that the suspect was an immigrant or that it was a terrorist attack. There is nothing at all that the regulated parts of news can do to stop the very deliberate proliferation of lies and conspiracy theories. The Liverpool incident is by no means the only example of major video-on-demand platforms actively promoting conspiracy theories, far-right propaganda and the kind of public health misinformation that we saw during Covid.
What is Ofcom empowered to do under the Media Act 2024 about those very profound challenges of disinformation, conspiracy theories and lack of political neutrality during an election on major video-on-demand platforms, as well as the proliferation of social media platforms?
You referred to the video-on-demand code. The 2024 act requires us to draw up a video-on-demand code. I think that we will bring out the consultation later this year. It will be based broadly on the aims of the broadcasting code around protecting audiences from harm, due impartiality and due accuracy of news et cetera; it will look pretty similar. It will go out to consultation and, once we have published it, we will start looking at whether to try to bring the two codes together, because at the end of the day people are consuming things across different platforms.
The Westminster Parliament decided not to include misinformation and disinformation in the protection from harms in the Online Safety Act 2023. We have no legislative lever to pull; there is not a take-down regime. I will not go into whether that was the right decision; it was not my decision. It is difficult to define what is information and what is disinformation and you and I may have very different views about that. I actually suspect that we have quite similar views, but different people have different views.
There are other levers, however. Next month, in June, we are having the third in a series of round tables with the platforms and the broadcasters. I want to make sure that people can find duly impartial and accurate news and that we have a framework, which the broadcasters provide. At the moment, broadcasters do not have to have the content on their social media platform comply with the same standards as in the broadcasting code, but they all choose to do so because that is good for their brand. When I was at Sky, I was in charge of TV and digital output. People would come to me and say, “We don’t have to stick to the rules for this” and I would say, “No, you do because it is part of our brand. Our news is accurate and impartial”.
We are bringing the platforms and the broadcasters together. There has been some discussion about giving prominence on social media to public service broadcasting outlets and we will be addressing that in the “Review of Public Service Media”. However, what does prominence look like on a TikTok feed? I do not know. Ofcom is working to facilitate that. We want the broadcasters and the platforms to talk to each other about how we make sure that people can get in their feed—
This is the—
May I just finish?
We also have a big responsibility in terms of media literacy, which is about teaching people to know that what they see on social media is not as regulated as what they see on TV.
I agree that that point is important. However, it is all the more important because we have an unregulated landscape. You have twice talked about making sure that people can find or can access impartial or accurate content. I suggest that that will be entirely ineffective if people can find accurate, impartial information if they go looking for it but meanwhile are being actively bombarded with the very opposite.
Can you confirm that the work that you are doing on video on demand will not require YouTube, for example, as a content provider to pay due regard to impartiality and accuracy in the content that it provides to everybody? I do not think that you are empowered to that.
10:00
The Secretary of State will designate what are called the tier 1 providers. There is a separate issue with YouTube because it is a platform but not a producer of content, which is a slightly different thing.
There is no legislation to say that TikTok or Facebook are not allowed to run certain content. I do not think that any regime in the world has achieved that, although lots of people have looked at possibilities. It is about that balance of freedom of expression versus protecting audiences from harm.
What we can do is work in as many different ways as possible. Media literacy is a hugely important part of that. Our evidence shows, for example, that something like 60 per cent of people get their news from social media but, interestingly, during the 2024 UK general election, people were telling us that they were going to the broadcasters to get their political news because they knew that it would be more accurate and impartial. Educating people is really important. People know that what they see on TikTok is not always right, but there will be people who go with conspiracy theories.
Some do. You referred to the racist riots last year, which were sparked by online misinformation, propaganda and racism; they were quite deliberately stirred up in that way. Some people will tell the difference between truth and lies when they see it and some people will understand that social media content is not going to be honest or reliable, but others will not.
On your point about the responsibility of the broadcasters, this week the main regulated broadcasters covering a Reform Party press conference just broadcast its racist film about Anas Sarwar, uncritically and unquestioningly; the cameras turned to the projection of that film and it was broadcast to the nation on regulated mainstream news channels.
Those channels are required to be duly impartial. “Duly” is an important word here. I did not see the whole of that programme, but, in my experience, it would be unusual to show that live and then have no commentary, rebuttal or response from Labour—I would find that strange. I do not know exactly whether there have been complaints about it and we are investigating. As I said, I have not seen the whole context of that.
There are two slightly different things here. Whenever broadcasters choose to take a press conference, whatever is said in that press conference, they have a responsibility to be duly impartial in their coverage. Whoever is giving the political press conference, there has to be some response or rebuttal.
On the wider thing about making sure that there is not disinformation, wild theories and racism on social media, it is fair to say that we do not have powers to do that.
That remains a massive gap in regulation of the news that people consume.
It is difficult. It is a topic that you could spend days discussing. What is news, exactly? How do you regulate news? Is news only what broadcasters or respectable companies put out? It is a difficult area and it is an area that will take up a lot of discussion in the future. As I said, we are trying to bring people together—the platforms and the broadcasters—to make sure that people get easier access to the reporting that they do. That is an important tool.
I will ask a quick final question. Cristina, you have particularly mentioned the audience quite a bit. How open are you to the public contacting you with concerns and how do you engage generally with audiences to ensure that you are getting the information from them?
We are incredibly transparent. Through our website, it is a fairly simple process to complain about a programme. When there are complaints made about programmes, we follow them up and we assess the bit of content. Quite often, people make complaints about a programme judged on a clip that they have seen on social media rather than the whole programme.
We do interact. We have a grass-roots format, I suppose, with our advisory panels in England, Wales, Northern Ireland and Scotland. We are forward facing. We do a huge amount of research. We did a piece that came out recently—and I would encourage members to take a look at it—on adults’ media use. We look at and report on those trends. Some are quite stark and quite frightening. The drop in linear television audiences is going faster than even we had predicted. We have a pretty good grasp on what the public are telling us and we encourage people to get in touch. We are open. We engage with all sorts of different stakeholders.
I talk about audiences a lot because that is the most important thing. In my role, I am here to make sure that audiences get a great range of content that they love and engage with. Overall, Ofcom is there to make sure that the consumers are getting the best services that they can.
We do not have responsibility for individual complaints in relation to telecoms, but we do for broadcasting. As Cristina said, it is possible for someone to use our website. We have a consumer contact centre that serves people across the whole UK and can take calls and complaints as well.
It is probably worth acknowledging that in relation to the BBC, in line with the charter and framework agreement, there is the BBC first process. If audiences want to complain about something on the BBC, it is necessary for them to go first to the BBC and the complaint goes through various stages. If they are not happy with the outcome of that, they can come to Ofcom. We encourage people to go to the BBC first.
There are some exceptions to that, however. When a complaint deals with difficult issues such as privacy, for example, it is possible for a consumer to come to us directly and say, “I want you to look at this now because it is so important”. It is an area in which we deal with individual complaints regularly.
We publish the “Broadcast and On Demand Bulletin”. It goes out roughly monthly and it summarises everything that we have received; it summarises complaints that we have decided either to take further or not to take further, the reasons for that and what the process is. We eventually publish the decisions that map out everything that has come in front of us, all the evidence that has been presented to us and what our final decision might be.
That is great. That is all the questions for this morning. I thank you both for your attendance. I will suspend for a quick comfort break before moving to the next evidence session.
10:08 Meeting suspended.Next
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