The BBC is stealing from Scotland

Axing "River City" will damage trust the UK broadcaster can ill afford to lose

Scotland contributes around £300 million annually to the BBC - a third more than the Scottish Government’s entire culture budget. The BBC is supposed to invest at least as much into content made in Scotland (1).

Yet, year after year, it has been exposed for exploiting a loophole (2) that allows it to include indirect spending. To the Beeb, Scotland is a pretty location, to which crew and cast fly in from the south of England.

Now, the BBC is axing River City—its long-running drama set in Glasgow with a primarily working-class Scottish cast and crew.

There have been assurances that the corporation will redirect the money saved by this cut into other Scottish content - but this will probably be “Scottish” content - ie made by Londoners on tour, with implausible amounts of the budget counted as paying for food and board in Scotland.

Scotland’s media sector is much smaller than that of a similar-sized independent country.

Ireland’s annual media revenue is above 4 billion euros. Denmark does even better than Ireland with a 6 billion euro sector. Scotland’s media sector is worth about a quarter of that.

Scots are not uniquely less talented or capable than people who live in Ireland or Denmark. It should be possible for Scotland to aspire to have a comparable media sector while remaining part of the UK. But it won’t - so long as the BBC siphons so much Scottish money and jobs to London.

The Scottish Government has no power over broadcasting, which is reserved to Westminster. A recent assurance by BBC leadership that they will do better is just one more in a long line of easy promises that are soon broken.

Take the Traitors. Classed as largely Scottish content, it is filmed in Alness Castle near Inverness - but Speaking Up For Scotland’s Screen Talent (SUSST) campaign group found that only 13 of the 219 people listed in the credits for series three were based in Scotland. That is even lower than series one and two.

Earlier this year, director Peter Strachan wrote an open letter arguing that the BBC’s claim to be spending £300 million a year in Scotland is bogus.

“As a result of this unfair treatment, three-quarters of Scottish directors, heads of departments and crew are currently out of work and our indie production companies are on their knees. Strachan wrote:

“I am writing to speak up for Scotland’s freelance TV talent base…At the recent Scottish Affairs Committee, the BBC painted a picture of boom times in Scotland. Hayley Valentine extolled the merits of the so-called “Scottish drama” produced for the BBC. She cited titles like

• Shetland (Silverprint Pictures, London-based indie),

• Nightsleeper (Euston Films, London-based),

• Granite City (LA Productions in Liverpool),

• Rebus (Eleventh Hour Films, London-based), a

• Murder is Easy (Mammoth Screen, London-based)

A similar controversy was sparked last year when a report from Oliver & Ohlbaum Associates Ltd (O&O), commissioned by Screen Scotland, revealed much of the BBC’s “Scottish” network quota has been commissioned from London and produced by London-headquartered production companies via Scottish branch offices. It found that only five of the Top 15 “Scottish” producers (by hours commissioned) were headquartered in Scotland over the period. The remaining 10 were headquartered in London, with their output qualifying as Scottish by relying on the Ofcom criterion of having a "substantive base" (branch office) in Scotland.

Back to River City - it is a genuinely Scottish show with a working-class cast and crew who benefit from the potential for stable income and the ability to build experience and skills. Herald writer Alison Rowat described the cut as an act of cultural vandalism. She suggested promotion or investment could have been expanded its loyal viewership of rew 200,000.

Where are the figures showing potential job and training opportunities lost versus those created? Was there any analysis or was this simply a case of executives thinking they knew best?

“For my money – £174.50 licence fee – River City was vulnerable because it was a Scottish working-class soap made by working-class casts and crews. No one thought there would be the backlash there has been. It wasn’t like cancelling Question Time with its well-connected panellists and audiences (now there’s an idea)….

“Representation matters. As the old saying goes, if you can see it, you can be it. For many working-class Scots, River City was ‘their’ soap, and therefore ‘their’ way into TV. Doors opened that had too often been closed, and if it could happen for the guy down the road, it could happen for you. You cannot put a price on that kind of positive PR.”

Positive PR is something that the BBC could certainly use to build trust with Scottish audiences again.

A petition against the axing of the show has 12,000 signatures - it is here. Watch the show on BBC iPlayer.

(1) I originally wrote that this was a legal requirement but the BBC disputes this - I think it is fair to say it is an excpectation by many Scots.

(2) I got a full reply to this piece from BBC Scotland director Hayley Valentine

Dear Ms Kemp,

Thank you for your recent email, which has been treated as a letter to the BBC rather than a press inquiry, given you sent it to the Director General, Director of Nations and Interim Director of Nations. I am replying on behalf of myself and all of those colleagues mentioned.

I would be very clear that the BBC is not manipulating anything regarding its spend in Scotland. The BBC reports its spend as directly required by Ofcom, our regulator. We must report it in this way. That said, as per the blog you cite in the name of Rhodri Talfan Davies, the BBC believes it can go further than Ofcom requires, and ensure that the vast majority of network productions which we make in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland will qualify as Scottish, Welsh or Northern Irish on the basis of at least two of the three Ofcom production criteria, and that in addition to that, we will reach our “8% of network spend in Scotland” requirement without relying on productions which only qualify on the basis of having a substantive base here. Rhodri outlined the Ofcom criteria in his blog, and also explained the implications for timing and for reporting. It is also worth noting that there are a number of productions where money is clearly spent in Scotland or on Scottish audiences which do not appear in the “Scotland spend” section of the BBC’s Annual Report & Accounts. These would currently include items such as the Scottish international football rights, or large events like Radio 1’s Big Weekend when it operated in Dundee in 2023, with such items accounted for elsewhere in the financial statements, despite this spend clearly being in and for Scotland.

I don’t recognise your characterisation of the BBC “stealing” money from Scotland. In the parliamentary evidence session which preceded my own, Ofcom shared evidence which suggested that 90% of the BBC’s network productions in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland already qualify on more than one Ofcom criterion, so we are talking about a small handful of titles currently qualifying only on the basis of substantive base, such as The Traitors. That said, I also don’t recognise at all the figures you’ve mentioned about the number of Scots who have been working on Traitors. I’ve read the link you sent, and don’t think for a moment that the titles you list (not all of which I mentioned in my own evidence despite what you claim) are evidence of what you have called “Londoners on tour.” Landward, by your definition, would be made by “Londoners on tour”, being produced for BBC Scotland by a production company with a substantive base in London, and to make that claim about Landward would be plainly nonsensical given that it has been made for half a century in Aberdeen. Likewise, the same is true for Beechgrove, in nearby Aberdeenshire, despite the production company which currently makes it being London-based. Shetland, too, operates end to end in Scotland, including all of its post-production alongside all of the filming. I am also very supportive of Scottish companies carrying out work for the BBC all across the UK. I do not believe that because a company is based in Scotland they should be prevented from working elsewhere, which would be the flip-side of insisting that only Scottish-owned companies could do BBC work here – and there are a number of examples of Scotland-based companies making content elsewhere, particularly in the sport genre.

Finally, I note you state that the BBC has a legal obligation to invest at least as much in Scotland as it raises here. That’s incorrect, as not least it would assume that the BBC spends all of its money in the four nations of the UK. The BBC has a regulatory obligation to spend 8% of its network TV budget in Scotland, in line with population. Last year, that amounted to around £105m, and exceeded the 8% target. Network radio and online services spent a further £9m. BBC Scotland last year spent around £131m on the content and services it produced, with a further £12m spent on development (backing new ideas and upcoming Scottish talent) and £39m on distribution (the transmitter, iPlayer and BBC Sounds costs etc). In years when the BBC does not spend the totality of its Scottish-raised funds in Scotland, that money pays for BBC services from all around the world, highly valued by audiences here, including coverage of the Olympic Games and World Cups, the BBC’s large international newsgathering operation, especially important now given the current interest in world news, and the BBC World Service, which was moved from being government-funded to mainly being Licence Fee funded in the 2010s.

Kind regards,

Hayley

Hayley Valentine

Director, BBC Scotland | Stiùiriche a’ BhBC ann an Alba