Chamber and committees

I appreciate those answers—it is inevitable that there will be a health focus this morning, given the witnesses—but I am asking about the context. Is that work being done in the context of implementing the recommendation that the UK Government and devolved Governments should work together to introduce a whole-system civil emergency strategy?

This is the—

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.

That remains a massive gap in regulation of the news that people consume.

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?

Are you saying that the BBC was not the source of that perception?

It still feels as though there is quite a lot of confusion about where that came from and the way it has been handled is extremely unfortunate. If there is any suggestion that anybody at “River City” was told something that was not true by the BBC, you should investigate that seriously.

I move on to the impact of the decision. Hayley Valentine clearly set out the issue of making sure that the BBC is producing output that people want to watch. Even the folk at “River City” understand that there are changing tastes. They do not have their heads in the sand. However, the BBC needs to do another thing beyond producing content that people want to watch—it also needs to create the ecosystem for the industry, including training opportunities and first job opportunities, on a scale that justifies it. One reason why I think that there should be a broadcaster like the BBC—a large, dominant, publicly funded broadcaster—is to create that ecosystem, because nobody else will do it.

Can you confirm that you do not expect the new six and eight-part productions to create the same level and scale of career opportunities and training opportunities as “River City”? How do you intend to replace that for the longer term so that the BBC is making that permanent, on-going investment in opportunities that mean that in 10, 20 and 30 years we will have an increasing and diverse cohort of folk working in the industry?

I will move on to the recent announcement about qualifying criteria for regional production. There has been a broad welcome for that. Would you accept that it is, in a sense, an admission that the situation has been not always wholly honest in the past? For example, a report from Screen Scotland last year showed that of the top 15 “Scottish” producers by hours commissioned, only five were based in Scotland—two thirds of them were headquartered in London. Only two of the 11 suppliers mainly used by the BBC in that list were companies formed and headquartered in Scotland.

Is it fair to say that the way in which those issues have been handled in the past has failed to create the level of benefit and investment in a broadcasting and production ecosystem in Scotland that there could have been and that we therefore have to catch up a bit, which is why the changes are long overdue?

I get the point, but part of the BBC’s purpose and value is to shape that landscape; it is not just to say, “We want to get the best ideas so we’ll go to a company that is based in London to do it”, but to say, “We want the best ideas to be coming from companies based here”. That is what you have the opportunity to grow.

Do you expect those numbers to be reversed as a result of the changes, such that two thirds of companies will be based here and occasionally you will use one that is based in London?

But you expect the numbers to change to some extent as a result of the decision that was announced last week?