Scottish Affairs Committee

Oral evidence: The future of Gaelic broadcasting, HC 463

Wednesday 2 September 2026

Ordered by the House of Commons to be published on 2 September 2026.

Watch the meeting

Members present: Patricia Ferguson (Chair); Dave Doogan; Lillian Jones; Douglas Lumsden; Douglas McAllister; Kirsteen Sullivan.

Questions 40-93

Witnesses

I: Delyth Evans, Chair, S4C; Geraint Evans, Chief Executive Officer, S4C; Deirdre Ní Choistín, Director General, TG4; Trevor Ó Clochartaigh, Director, Innovation, Sustainability and Sectoral Capacity, TG4.

II: John Morrison, Chair, MG ALBA; Donald Campbell, Chief Executive Officer, MG ALBA; Margaret Mary Murray, Head of Gaelic Services, BBC; Luke McCullough, Corporate Affairs Director, Nations, BBC.

Examination of witnesses

Witnesses: Delyth Evans, Geraint Evans, Deirdre Ní Choistín and Trevor Ó Clochartaigh.

Chair: Good morning and welcome to this meeting of the Scottish Affairs Committee, at which we will consider issues around Gaelic broadcasting. I am very pleased to welcome our first panel. Could you introduce yourselves and tell us what your role is? We will then get straight into our questions.

Geraint Evans: My name is Geraint Evans. I am the chief executive at S4C.

Delyth Evans: Good morning. My name is Delyth Evans. I am the chair of S4C.

Deirdre Ní Choistín: Good morning. My name is Deirdre Ní Choistín. I am the director general of TG4 in Ireland.

Trevor Ó Clochartaigh: Maidin mhaith. I am Trevor Ó Clochartaigh, director of innovation, sustainability and sectoral capacity at TG4.

Q40        Chair: Thank you again for being with us this morning. We really appreciate the opportunity to ask you some questions and to learn from your experiences.

I want to direct my first question to Delyth and to Deirdre. Could you both give us an overview of the statutory basis for S4C and TG4 and how they are funded, and perhaps suggest, if you can, what the upsides and downsides of those funding models are?

Deirdre Ní Choistín: TG4 is a public service media broadcaster. We were established 30 years ago in 1996, initially as part of RTÉ, but we have been an independent entity since 2007. Our funding is direct funding from the Exchequer. We have an annual allowance and the funding recommendation is made from the regulator, Coimisiún na Meán. It takes a mixture of the annual statement of performance commitments and the review of performance and public funding to make that recommendation.

The recommendation is then made on an annual basis to the Minister, who brings it to Government for approval. It is announced yearly on budget day—so this coming October, for example, we will know our funding recommendation for 2027. We are different from other broadcasters, in that we do not have multi-annual funding. In Ireland, for example, RTÉ, the English-language public service media, currently has a three-year temporary multi-annual funding arrangement. TG4 does not.

Delyth Evans: S4C was created 40 years ago. It was created by statute, so we have a statutory basis. We are funded by the licence fee, not by the BBC. We come under the licence fee, but, as a separate organisation, our funding is decided by Government—the Department for Culture. That is supplemented by an annual programme agreement with the BBC, which provides around 10 hours of programming for us every week. That arrangement stems from the previous situation before S4C was established, whereby the BBC in Wales used to make 10 hours’ worth of programming in Welsh. That arrangement has continued under the current programming arrangement.

We feel that the current system works very well for us. There are clearly big concerns about the licence fee. That is a slightly separate issue, but up until now, the system that we operate under has worked very well. One of the most important elements has been the funding certainty that we have in order to plan ahead. Geraint can tell you more about that; it has been very important.

The second important thing is cross-party support. We have always had the support of all political parties for the existence of S4C and for the role we play in the Welsh economy and in support of the Welsh language.

Geraint Evans: Sufficient funding is the key for us. That was in the Broadcasting Act 1990, and we were glad to see the Secretary of State reiterate in the Green Paper on charter review that sufficient funding would be an important part of the charter review process for S4C and also for MG ALBA in the UK. Sufficient funding is the important element for us.

What is sufficient is the next question. “Sufficient” for us means more than just achieving the basics; it is about being able to engage with and appeal to wider audiences than the ones we currently appeal to. We are then able to be an economic catalyst for growth across Wales, because we see that for every £1 of licence fee funding we get, we deliver £1.70 in GVA in terms of economic benefit to the UK.

Sufficient funding is the key thing on our minds as we embark on the charter review process. The submission we have made is that we will need, at the very least, a CPI increase on our current licence fee settlement, but we will more than likely need more to be able to engage with young audiences, because of the need to appeal to them on all the platforms that they consume. We are no longer a TV channel; we are more than a TV channel, and we need to appeal to young audiences on all the platforms where they consume their content. That is one of the key challenges going forward.

Q41        Chair: Deirdre, you mentioned that you are independent but that the funding comes from Government. Are you and your colleagues involved in negotiations with the Government about funding? Is it agreed cross-party, and is it subject to political machinations? I am interested to explore how that independence works.

Deirdre Ní Choistín: The key issue is that we do not have a multi-annual funding recommendation from the regulator or Government. We have cross-party support in the island of Ireland—both north and south—for TG4, and were recognised under the Good Friday/Belfast agreement as a public service media provider in the island of Ireland. The process currently involves an annual request for funding and is based on the augmentation or additionality of the service we provide for our audiences. We currently have large gaps in content that we cannot provide. For example, we do not have adequate funding to provide content for teenagers. We have a children’s channel, Cúla4, that we established three years ago, but we have a content gap for 13 to 18-year olds, who we cannot provide content for because we do not have sufficient funding.

The current process works on the annual statement of performance commitments as well as the annual review with the media regulator. A funding recommendation is then made to Government. It then depends on the other budgetary pressures and where we perform or how we do on that. We have had incremental funding since 2016, and last year we had a 9% increase in our funding allocation to €65.4 million, but it is a lot less, for example, than S4C. The European Media Freedom Act has been in place since August last year. That has a provision for adequate, sustainable and predictable funding for PSM across Europe.

To compare the Irish context with the rest of Europe: public service media is generally underfunded in Ireland compared with Europe. We are in the bottom 10 of EBU countries. The public service funding, which would include RTÉ as well, is 0.08% of GDP, in comparison with 0.14% of GDP as an average across Europe. Ireland is funded less than Portugal, on the same level as Malta and just above Romania. For context, that is where we are in terms of public service media funding.

Currently, it is a yearly ask, and it is a lot of lobbying and a lot of meetings with politicians to show the worth of TG4. Generally, however, across the board there is a high appreciation of the value of the content that we provide, particularly for connection with audiences through sport, music and documentaries, and also regarding regional employment. We work with about 60 companies as a publisher-broadcaster. We have multi-annual output contract deals with companies, and part of the remit for that is sustainable employment in a wealth of areas outside the key production areas of Dublin and Wicklow in Ireland.

Chair: That is helpful. Thank you very much.

Q42        Lillian Jones: My question is to Ms Evans and Ms Choistín. How important are multi-annual funding agreements for commissioning content and safeguarding editorial independence?

Delyth Evans: They are very important in commissioning any kind of programming: it is very hard to do that if you only have one year’s funding certainty. If you do not mind, I will hand over to Geraint, because he is better able to talk about the commissioning details.

Lillian Jones: I have separate questions for Geraint. 

Delyth Evans: Okay. It is about the point that I made earlier: funding certainty enables us to plan ahead, across all genres. We work very closely with the production sector in Wales, and it is incredibly important to the Welsh economy to have those jobs in the Welsh language, particularly in rural areas outside the urban areas. For them to plan ahead for their workforce and so on, knowing that there is funding going forward is incredibly important.

Geraint Evans: It is especially important in specific genres such as drama and sport. Drama production takes a few years. Having clarity on how much funding you have over multiple years—

Lillian Jones: We will come back to cover that.

Deirdre Ní Choistín: It is key for TG4 that we would like to have a multi-annual funding arrangement. The new Broadcasting Bill, which is currently going through Parliament, has a recommendation that we move from a five-year to a three-year funding model, but it has not actually clarified that it will be a multi-annual recommendation. That would be our request. There is currently an arrangement for RTÉ, but it is a temporary arrangement. Again, we see it across Europe: the best-performing examples of public service media, here in the UK but also in Denmark, Germany and the Netherlands, have multi-annual arrangements. The EBU has also shown a strong link between strong democracies and multi-annual funding for PSM. It is very important.

On the difference that not having multi-annual funding makes for us as a minority-language broadcaster, as Geraint mentioned, planning ahead for drama, for example, does not happen within a budgetary year. It takes multiple years and multiple funding sources to produce Irish-language drama, and we do not have that year-to-year certainty on where we will be in the next year and what we can commit to. Currently, we would like to commission two drama series a year, but we are always thinking about plan A and plan B, depending on what our funding is.

There are then inflationary costs and other costs that eat out of the content budget. As a publisher-broadcaster, most of our Exchequer funding goes straight out to the sector. About 74% of funding is spent on content, but without multi-annual funding you cannot plan ahead. You spend half the year trying to get more money for the following year and trying to make sure that you have a zero balance at the end of the year. It is not an efficient way for us as a PSM to run TG4.

Q43        Lillian Jones: Mr Evans, what benefits has a multi-year funding settlement had for the ability of S4C to plan and invest in Welsh-language broadcasting?

Geraint Evans: I will centre it on sport and drama. Sport is a key genre for S4C. It enables us to draw audiences from all parts of Wales and beyond, because language is not seen as so much of a barrier: if you want to see a sports event, you will tune into it whatever the language, because you can still enjoy the sport. That enables us to have the rights for things like the Tour de France, international rugby and football, and now even Six Nations darts, which recently did very well for us across all platforms.

With sports rights deals and negotiations, the rights are usually linked to a competition that is multi-year, so you have to have a multi-year settlement to be able to commit to that level of funding. Sports rights are not cheap, but they are valuable and deliver good audience for us. To invest in them, we need clarity on funding. As Deirdre mentioned, drama is similar. It is a multi-year project to get a drama or a film on screen, as we did recently with the film “Effi o Blaenau”, which premiered in Glasgow before going on tour in Wales and the UK. That did very well for us.

For those two genres specifically it is very important, but it is also important for things like returning series. If you can commit to a production company so that it knows and has multi-year visibility, it can produce something more efficiently. Going from one year to the next does not enable businesses to plan carefully, develop talent and skills and invest in their workforce—not unless you have that visibility. But I return to those two genres, where it is absolutely key: if you want to compete in the market for sports rights or develop high-quality drama, you really do need a multi-year funding settlement.

Q44        Dave Doogan: Good morning. Deirdre, how important is commercial revenue, over your public sector funding? Can you give us an idea of the quantum or percentage?

Deirdre Ní Choistín: I will not give specific numbers on that, but it is a small additional income for TG4. I do not think it will ever be sufficient for us to rely on full-term, but it is an additional income for our scheduling and allows us, for example, to buy film content and acquisition content to support our schedule. We do not have enough funding to have all Irish-language programming, so we have films and some drama series in English that we buy with commercial income to support our schedule. It is important for TG4, but it will never be a key part of our funding mechanism.

Q45        Dave Doogan: I accept that, but within that reality, is there a strategic priority in TG4 to grow the commercial element? That would not be to displace any of the public funding, hopefully—you would want to make sure that that was nailed down—but to grow the commercial element of your funding.

Deirdre Ní Choistín: There is. It is part of our annual statement of performance commitments with the regulator that we grow the commercial income, but again, the amount is quite small in comparison to the funding we need to provide the services we provide. As a public service broadcaster, we have a remit to provide Irish-language content for Irish-language audiences. It is an additional income, but it is not enough to drive and to deliver key—

Dave Doogan: No, because you are a public service.

Deirdre Ní Choistín: Exactly.

Q46        Dave Doogan: But what is the nature of the growth in commercial revenue, year on year?

Deirdre Ní Choistín: I would have to come back to you with exact figures on that, but it is about 10%, year on year.

Q47        Dave Doogan: Thanks. The BBC is, by any measure, a challenged organisation. Not the least of those challenges is the licence fee, what it is going to do in future and how it will go forward. How do you quantify and plan for that as a strategic risk within your organisation?

Geraint Evans: The future funding of the BBC and S4C—which are funded by exactly the same model, the licence fee—puts public service broadcasting at great jeopardy. If there are fewer people paying the licence fee, the income from it will go down. We hear that all the time. We have heard the BBC say quite plainly in this building that the future of the licence fee is unsustainable as it is. The Government need to look at other models, because the licence fee is not going to be increasing at the same level as the costs in the production sector. In much the same way that it is a risk for the BBC, it is a risk for S4C as well.

Our submission to Government as part of the charter review has very much been that we need the same level of funding—and more, if we are honest—because S4C is a very lean organisation. Our budget is about £100 million, but the licence fee collected by the BBC amounts to around £3.8 billion, so a very small proportion of the licence fee comes to S4C. As a lean organisation, it would be very difficult for us to find efficiencies if our income were in any way in jeopardy. It would jeopardise the future of the service and, by doing so, would jeopardise the future of the Welsh language.

Dave Doogan: That is very clear. Thank you.

Q48        Kirsteen Sullivan: Delyth, I have a couple of questions for you. First, S4C has had a long-standing partnership with the BBC and has been able to maintain its own statutory identity and funding arrangements. How important has that balance between partnership and independence been to S4C’s success? Secondly, has the relationship changed since receiving a multi-year funding settlement that has been funded directly by the licence fee?

Delyth Evans: The relationship with the BBC is incredibly important to us and always has been. As I said earlier, it delivers 10 hours’ worth of programming to us a week. We share a building with the BBC in Central Square. S4C has three centres around Wales, which is very important in terms of our regional profile, but having premises in the centre of Cardiff, in the BBC building, is also important. We have a very good relationship with the BBC, which we value very much; we also share back-office and technical services with it, which is really important. We have a presence on the iPlayer now, which is also really important. We might come on to prominence, but having a presence on the iPlayer is brilliant for many of our audiences and we value it greatly.

The relationship with the BBC is a good one, and we want to see it continue and develop in new ways. The Green Paper on the licence fee talked about better partnerships, or greater partnerships, across public service broadcasting, and we feel that we are a good example of a partnership with the BBC at the moment.

In terms of being a separate organisation, that is how S4C was set up, and we guard that very carefully. Our audiences think it is terribly important that we are an independent Welsh-language broadcaster—the only one of its kind—delivering content through the Welsh language. That is greatly valued by our audiences. The BBC understands and respects that, but we have managed to develop a very close relationship with it, and we want that to continue.

Q49        Kirsteen Sullivan: Has the relationship changed since receiving a multi-year funding settlement?

Delyth Evans: I am not sure that it has changed particularly. Geraint might know more about that than me.

Geraint Evans: I would not say that it has changed anything in particular. For the last five years we have been funded wholly by the licence fee, as well as by the statutory supply agreement, which is the 10 hours a week that we receive from the BBC.

What I would say about that partnership is that the Secretary of State has recently asked the PSBs to work in partnership because the competition that we face is not as much from each other as from the streamers and from YouTube. The iPlayer relationship has been essential in driving up viewing numbers for S4C because of the prominence of iPlayer on connected TVs and the familiarity of the audience with it.

Going into a new iPlayer deal with the BBC, which enabled S4C to go from being a walled garden within the iPlayer to come out into the home page and achieve prominence on that main “New & Trending” rail there, has really driven viewing numbers for us. There was a growth of 25% year on year from 200,000 to 250,000 viewers in terms of monthly active users for us on the iPlayer as a result of that change. Working in partnership with the BBC, as S4C does, is a great example for any other broadcasters.

I know there is a question out there as to whether there should be one PSB player. We can definitely see the benefits of that, if we are realistically going to be able to compete with the streamers and the challenge of YouTube. We may come on to that because that is vitally important for us: the competition is not so much from each other but from the changing viewing habits, particularly of the young users but of all users, in terms of the viewing of streamers and the change of habits towards viewing of YouTube content.

Kirsteen Sullivan: So, in short, the partnership is just as important, going forward, as the multi-year funding settlement, if not more so?

Geraint Evans: Absolutely, yes.

Q50        Dave Doogan: Deirdre, we have done the commercial stuff; what about the tax situation that TG4 enjoys? How important is that, and what does that level of concession enable you to do that you otherwise could not?

Deirdre Ní Choistín: The tax credits?

Dave Doogan: Yes.

Deirdre Ní Choistín: We rely on multiple funding sources to produce high-quality content. For example, we work very closely with the Irish language broadcast fund of Northern Ireland Screen. We broadcast the same content a lot with BBC Northern Ireland because the channels are for different audiences, but that partnership works really well.

The tax credits are a revenue-based incentive. Section 481 gives a tax credit for film, drama and documentaries. The advantage of that is that you can get payment in advance on up to 90% of the payment, which helps producers to produce the content. That differs from a lot of jurisdictions, where you can claim that back after production has finished. That is a huge incentive, but the real advantage to us is that it is another funding source for film, documentaries and high-end, high-quality content.

We have another uplift, the Scéal uplift, which is 8%—so that is up to 40% of a tax credit—but it applies only to lower-to-mid-range films; it does not apply to television drama, for example. We are involved in the effort to hopefully change that so that we can include television drama in it. That is part of our lobbying efforts with Ibec’s Audiovisual Ireland.

A new tax incentive was introduced last year for unscripted programming by section 487A. I suppose that is an inward investment initiative from the Government, but we are still working through how it actually works in terms of indigenous productions, and particularly whether there is an advantage for us from that for lower-budget minority language productions. It is definitely already having an impact on inward production into Ireland.

There are other tax credits—for virtual effects and gaming, for example—but all those are advantageous for us as broadcasters, for production companies and particularly for co-productions between producers in the Republic of Ireland and those in Northern Ireland; we can work on the tax credits available in both jurisdictions and the different funding streams from Northern Ireland Screen and Screen Ireland. That has worked very well for us for high-quality content such as “Crá”, which was on the BBC iPlayer and such a huge success that it was then broadcast on BBC Four. That all came from working with the tax credits from both jurisdictions.

Dave Doogan: It sounds like it is essential, then, for the breadth and quality of what you are producing. Is it too much to say that without those tax credits, there would be things that you could not do?

Deirdre Ní Choistín: Without those tax credits, there are a lot of things we could not do—our films and high-quality drama, for example. They are one of numerous funding sources that we have for the content we make. For example, we had a film, “An Cailín Ciúin”, go to the Oscars in 2023; that would have benefited from the tax credit. Last week, IFTA selected one of TG4’s films as Ireland’s entry to the best international feature film category; that is our fifth film since 2021. All of those films would have benefited from the tax credit.

Again, those high-end projects give status to TG4 and the Irish language and bring new audiences to us who would not necessarily engage with television content but will watch the films in cinemas. When they hear, “Oh, this has been selected as Ireland’s entry for the Oscars,” they think, “I’m interested in knowing more about that.” It is brand and status building, but ultimately, without those funding sources, we would not be able to produce that kind of quality content ourselves.

Dave Doogan: Understood. Thank you.

Q51        Chair: Mr Ó Clochartaigh, I will come to you now. I am sorry: you have been sitting quietly and waiting, but you will get your chance now.

How important have the Irish language broadcast fund and the Sound & Vision scheme been in expanding Irish-language content generally, supporting independent producers and strengthening the wider Irish-language media sector as a whole?

Trevor Ó Clochartaigh: As Deirdre has explained, the funding sources for most of the production companies tend to be a tapestry. They are trying to find money from different pockets and supports. It would be wrong to think, though, that the money is just about producing audio-visual content that is going to go on screen, because behind all those efforts there are also training initiatives and seed funding. There are also schemes to develop writers and directors and shadowing schemes to bring crews through and to train new talent. Those are vitally important.

The ILBF in the north is one of our strongest partners, and the training and sector capacity building that it has been doing over the years has meant an increased number of production companies available to work with us as well as the staff and people who can work on the productions—and it has brought those to a much higher level.

This is important to share with the Committee: you have a very important role to play in creating the space for this type of work to happen. We are 30 years old this year; my role is around innovation, sustainability and sector capacity, and we are looking forward to the next 30 years. We are trying to build the new cohort of people and companies that can create content for people who speak Irish and increase those numbers. Unless the legislation gives the space to do that, you cannot build in that way.

As Geraint mentioned, it is also important that we look to collaborating transnationally. Really good collaboration has happened over the years: for example, I spent my first years in TV production as a director on the soap opera “Ros na Rún”. When that started, we borrowed lots of people from “Pobol y Cwm” to come over, because we did not have people with the relevant experience at the time. We brought them in as heads of department, but local heads of department shadowed with them and so grew up through the system.

It is important to take into consideration the sector capacity building that needs to be done. It builds the regions and the cultural and creative sector for us outside Dublin and Wicklow, which means that people can stay at home, work in their own areas, raise their families, send their kids to school and spend their money in the local area; that has always been a huge argument that we have made with our funding submissions. That element of what we do cannot be underestimated. It is the same for all of the broadcasters here, because we need to work together to fight the challenges and get those eyeballs from the people who are looking at Apple, Netflix, YouTube and others, because that is where the competition really is. We need public service media at the forefront in all of these efforts.

Chair: That is very helpful, thank you.

Q52        Douglas McAllister: Can I ask a general question to either Trevor or Deirdre? Forgive me, because I cannot see it in our papers; I have the information in relation to the Welsh language. Can either of you tell me what percentage or proportion of people in Ireland report having any skills in the Irish language? What percentage can actually speak Irish?

Deirdre Ní Choistín: In the last census in 2022, 1.8 million people said they spoke some level of Irish. But in Gaeltacht areas, for daily Irish speakers, the figure is down to about 66,000 per year. There is then another cohort of about 500,000 who say they have a good level of Irish, or who can speak Irish very well.

We have to create content and cater for all those different types of Irish speakers. We have the core daily Irish speakers in the Gaeltacht and we also have the 1.8 million, primarily because Irish is a compulsory subject in schools up to leaving cert. It is the first official language of the state and the constitution, so we have official status for the language. However, there are multiple layers of fluency and ability within that, and TG4 caters for all levels of speakers.

Trevor Ó Clochartaigh: The number of speakers should not be equated with the audience, because the audience includes not only all the people on the island of Ireland but those abroad in the diaspora, through the player. All of our content is accessible to a much broader audience through subtitling or whatever, which is very important in the international sense.

Deirdre Ní Choistín: Our content is available internationally on the player, and it grew by 22% last year. Some 215 countries and territories watch TG4 content on the player, so people worldwide want to watch Irish-language content.

Q53        Douglas Lumsden: Before I ask a question, I want to declare an interest: my wife is part-owner of a small independent TV company, but I do not consider that to be a big enough reason for me to exclude myself from the session today.

Geraint, you mentioned iPlayer and streaming services. How much are those changing how you are operating, working and reaching people with the Welsh language?

Geraint Evans: We all know that the numbers of people watching traditional TV or linear television are declining, but what we are seeing is a real growth in our digital platforms. We have our own player, S4C Clic, and we have a presence on iPlayer that does really well for us. Again, it is about the familiarity that the audience has with that platform.

Also, we now commission specifically for platforms such as YouTube, TikTok and even Instagram, because we know that very few young Welsh speakers actually engage with social media content in the Welsh language. Around 80% of Welsh-speaking young people use social media in English only, and that is because of the sparsity of Welsh-language content on those platforms. So we now deliberately set out to commission. We recently commissioned a vertical drama, which means that you can watch it on your phone on TikTok, and we have gone back and commissioned a second. We can see that that is the type of content that is going to get young people watching Welsh-language content on a regular basis.

That is also the kind of content that means we can compete with the other challenges out there. We know that, according to the recent Ofcom “Media Nations” report, around 60% of Welsh people watch YouTube on a weekly basis. Again, that is the competition. It does not mean that they are watching YouTube content; maybe they are watching content from other PSBs on YouTube, as well as all kinds of other types of videos. We commission specifically for that platform, because we know that if they are spending so much of their time there, the Welsh language needs to be there.

S4C was established in 1982 due to public protest in many ways, because people wanted the Welsh language to be on the most popular media of its time if it were to survive. I have since described this as a battle on several fronts, as it is not just a battle for the future of the language on television; it is a battle that needs to be on YouTube, TikTok and Instagram, as well as on the other players that we have.

Q54        Douglas Lumsden: If we look at the demographics of your viewers, what sort of age ranges are there? Is it a complete mix, or is it an older generation? How does it pan out?

Geraint Evans: It is a real mix. Around 60% of the viewing of our audience aged between 16 and 44 is purely on the players. They spend more and more of their time watching our content on Clic or iPlayer, rather than on traditional linear television. The older audiences are still watching on linear television. In terms of the future of the language, we have to think about the younger audience—by young, I mean under 45.

Douglas Lumsden: I’m old, then!

Geraint Evans: That is how we term the younger audience. It might be parents with children and so on who could be consuming Welsh-language content, and we want that to be a part of their lives. We need to commission carefully and to establish that we have rights, so that we have a longer rights window for our content on things such as BBC iPlayer. That way, our dramas can be on there and people can tune into them. That is all part of the new strategy that we have, which is again about being more than a TV channel. We have to cater for audiences on whatever platform they are consuming their content.

Q55        Douglas Lumsden: How much new content—excluding sports and news, which obviously cannot be repeated—are you producing every year?

Geraint Evans: Basically, for 52 weeks of the year we have a live schedule, with original new content from 7 o’clock to 10 o’clock every evening, which is pretty much all new content commissioned. We still need to serve that linear TV schedule, but we are increasingly finding that that schedule needs to have a longer tail: it needs to be able to be viewed by people for a longer period of time afterwards.

The number of hours commissioned by S4C is significant. I can come back to you with the figure; I have not got it at the top of my head. Sustaining a volume of content to maintain a linear TV schedule but also the shorter-form content that appeals to younger audiences is all a part of what we need to do now to be a modern public service media organisation, not a public service broadcaster.

Q56        Douglas Lumsden: You mentioned that sport is quite a big thing for you. How are people watching it? Excuse me, I do not know—do you have to listen to it in Welsh, or are there options to listen to it in English as well? How does it work?

Geraint Evans: It depends on the rights holders and what they will allow us. Very often, we have successfully gone into partnership with streamers such as Amazon or TNT, which may have a contract for a sport that they will show on their pay TV service. We have gone in and negotiated with them to get some free-to-air rights to show that in the Welsh language only on S4C. Those streamers do not deem that as competition, as if they were selling those rights to, for example, BBC or ITV, so that has proved to be very effective for us.

However, for domestic sport, we occasionally provide English-language commentary as well as Welsh-language commentary where rights allow, and that has been very popular with audiences in Wales.

Q57        Douglas Lumsden: Has the Media Act 2024 implemented the recommendations from the independent review conducted in 2017?

Geraint Evans: Pretty much, yes. In Euryn Ogwen Williams’s report, there was a clear desire for us to be moving more into the digital space and creating a digital hub. Since then, we have developed our own digital news service, which is an in-house service by S4C, working again in partnership with the BBC. We are increasing the amount of commissioning to platforms such as Instagram, TikTok and so on, and are increasing our social media team, who are repackaging content from linear TV and getting it out on those social media platforms. There has been a clear drive there.

The report also stated that we should be getting our funding from the licence fee and multi-year funding as well. Many of these recommendations have already been implemented. The other one was that the board should become a unitary board, which it is now, with Delyth as chair.

Chair: That concludes our questions to the first panel. Thank you for your time this morning and for being so open and frank with us; it has been very helpful to our inquiry. Thank you for coming along to London today.

Examination of witnesses

Witnesses: John Morrison, Donald Campbell, Margaret Mary Murray and Luke McCullough.

Chair: Good morning and welcome to our second panel. May I ask you all briefly to say who you are and what you do?

Luke McCullough: Madainn mhath—good morning. I am Luke McCullough, the corporate affairs director for nations at the BBC.

Margaret Mary Murray: I am Margaret Mary Murray. I look after the BBC’s Gaelic-language services, BBC ALBA, which we operate in partnership with MG ALBA, and BBC Radio nan Gàidheal.

John Morrison: I am John Morrison, the chair of MG ALBA.

Donald Campbell: Madainn mhath. I am Donald Campbell, the chief executive of MG ALBA.

Q58        Chair: Thank you very much, and welcome—welcome back to some of you, as we have had you here before on at least one occasion, or perhaps more in your case, Mr McCullough.

My first question is for Mr Morrison. MG ALBA has called for parity with S4C in funding and in its statutory recognition. In practical terms, what would that look like for Gaelic broadcasting, and what specific changes would be needed to make that happen?

John Morrison: In terms of parity, we look for an equivalence of treatment. I do not think that we are in the position where we are looking for the same budget that Welsh has, but we would like to see, for example, when documents come out relating to broadcasting from DCMS, a couple of additional words in Welsh and Gaelic. That would be very welcome because sometimes, as we have seen even recently, Gaelic is not mentioned in very important documents that are looking forward to the BBC charter.

We were happy to see the Green Paper mention the sustainability of MG ALBA. Sustainability is key for us, as I am sure the Committee is aware. I notice that you have actually used some of our own words, that we are in real jeopardy, and that cannot be overstated. Our budget was frozen for 10 years, so its value has dropped by about 45%. That trajectory is unsustainable for any organisation or company. We are looking for equivalence in both legal terms and in the treatment of Gaelic and Welsh. Obviously, we are also looking for an increased budget.

Q59        Chair: And how would that help you to improve what you deliver for broadcasting?

John Morrison: It would be transformational, because one of the first things we did when I came in was get EY to have a look—Ernst & Young, in old-fashioned language. EY did an analysis that showed that, effectively, our budget should be double what it was at the time because it had fallen so far behind. It said that, if we had kept up with inflation, we would have created an additional 300 or 350 jobs. Most of the jobs we have created as a result of production have been in the highlands and islands, which badly need jobs. For example, we have a media centre in Stornoway that is now one of the biggest employers in the whole of the Western Isles.

The demographics of that are fantastic, because you see young people who have gone away to college or university, and they come back because they can have careers. Trevor mentioned the importance of sustaining communities, and that is vital. So we do all that. Then, in terms of broadcasting, it allows us to do the ordinary things that every other TV channel does. We are now down to new content every week of just over 20%—21%, or is it 23%?—which is not a TV channel. If we slip below that, we can see audiences go away, particularly young audiences because, like everybody else, they are consuming Netflix and Apple TV. With BBC ALBA, unless we have new content, they go away. We can see that in the weekly figures.

For example, one big thing that we did, and would like to do more of—I am sure you will ask us about the risks associated with spending all our drama budget on one big production; the board sat with the image of eggs in a basket—is that we took a calculated gamble that a big production in Gaelic could actually raise the profile of the channel and the language. We are delighted that happened, because “An t-Eilean” was watched by 2 million people—more than 2 million now, because of the iPlayer. However, it also won best drama in public sector regional television in Europe, and also best programme in regional television in Europe, which shows you that there is no dearth of talent nor of storytelling ability. We would love to do more high-profile drama.

If you think about it, we spent our entire budget for a year on a four-part series, and we would love to do more of that. In other programming, one of the previous contributors spoke about big gaps. There are big gaps in our schedule as well. We would love to do more programming. We would love to do more digital because, as we heard earlier, that is where the youth audience is going.

For example, with our LearnGaelic and SpeakGaelic, which have been hugely important and have been welcomed by audiences and learners of the language, we now have nearly 50,000 people signed up to Facebook and learning Gaelic online. We can see that they are staying with us for over 20 minutes, which shows they are actually savouring the content. On Instagram, we are heading towards 110,000 followers, again showing the way that young people are consuming the content. We would love to do so much more than that.

In terms of finance, there was a figure that emerged in both the House of Commons and the House of Lords that said that MG ALBA spent £420 per Gaelic speaker while S4C spent £260 per Welsh speaker. Honestly, we looked at that figure and were bemused by it. When you look at the budget that Wales has and the budget that we have, how do you slice and dice those figures to come up with that figure? Who has done that?

What we found was that if you add all the sums that go into Gaelic broadcasting and then take the lowest number of speakers, which is those who are totally fluent in Gaelic—69,000 or 70,000—then you get that figure. The latest census showed that the number of speakers of Gaelic had actually gone up to 130,000, which is a doubling in ten years. BBC ALBA has played a critical role in that alongside Gaelic-medium education.

Also, if you are going to do that calculation, that is the least helpful figure for us, because every week 360,000 people in Scotland tune in to BBC ALBA—360,000. Then you look at the figures. I seriously ask the Committee to look at that figure with a fairly jaundiced eye, because we think it is flawed.

Q60        Chair: I was going to ask you a little bit more about the issue of parity and the numbers of speakers but, taking your point about that particular figure, was it calculated in the same way for S4C, or do you think it has been calculated differently?

John Morrison: I do not know. We do not know, unless you have depth of knowledge, Donald. Certainly, if you take S4C’s budget and MG ALBA’s budget—even when you add the BBC—it is very difficult to calculate how you can get to that figure. I think it is by taking the lowest number of speakers, the highest amount of money, if you add the money that we receive at MG ALBA, and then adding in the BBC contribution. Then you get a figure divided by the lowest number of speakers. But the lowest number is people who use the language daily. We then have the same number again who are learners, a lot of whom are approaching fluency now and have shown by their interest that they want to continue.

Then you add in the 360,000 people who tune in every week. If you look at when we do the really high-end productions, which we would like to do more of, more than 2 million people watched “An t-Eilean”. I do not know exactly how it was calculated.

Q61        Douglas McAllister: What is the annual budget? What is the actual figure? I can see the figure for the Welsh and Irish.

John Morrison: We were working with £13.4 million, and it was stuck there for about ten years. Last year, we got an uplift of about £2 million, so our annual budget is £15 million now.

Q62        Douglas McAllister: Where does that come from?

John Morrison: That comes from the Scottish Ministers. The way I have described us previously is that we are like the orphan child of British broadcasting because everybody loves us; we were set up by Westminster; we are regulated by Ofcom; we have a very valuable and productive partnership with the BBC; we are funded by Scottish Ministers, but somehow, somewhere, we fall between the stools. We need somebody to take charge of where we are going and make sure that we have a proper settlement.

Q63        Lillian Jones: Mr McCullough, S4C currently has a multi-year funding settlement and TG4 is also hoping to secure multi-year funding. What would the benefits be of multi-year funding for MG ALBA and BBC ALBA?

Luke McCullough: It is interesting to go to that question on the basis of what Mr Morrison has just been saying because, of course, we have both MG ALBA funded by the Scottish Government and BBC ALBA—the BBC’s channel—which is funded by MG ALBA and by the BBC through the licence fee. There is the funding that MG ALBA brings to the channel, and there is the funding that the licence fee brings to the channel. When the channel started in 2007-08, as the Chair will remember from her previous life, the BBC invested £4 million of licence fee funding and there was investment through MG ALBA from the Scottish Government, which, as the Committee has just heard, has got stuck for some period of time.

In that same period of time, despite the BBC’s revenue decreasing in real terms by over £1 billion, investment from the BBC in BBC ALBA has gone up by more than inflation. If you applied the inflation rate to that £4 million original investment, you would get something like £7.5 million. We now spend £10 million on BBC ALBA and then further investment on Radio nan Gàidheal, BBC Online and so on.

There is no less certainty of the BBC’s investment in the channel than there is in any other BBC service. We treat our investment in BBC ALBA exactly the same as we would BBC One, BBC Radio 2, Radio Scotland and Radio nan Gàidheal. There is the certainty of licence fee funding for all that we do, to an extent, but, as Mr Doogan was saying in the previous session, there is a real challenge and a threat to that licence fee, which probably impacts multi-year anything.

The licence fee settlement as it is at the moment ends in August 2028. We are in the slightly strange position where 93% of the population of the United Kingdom use the BBC every month, but only 78% of households are paying for it. There is a large and growing gap between the number of people who are paying for their public service media, including BBC ALBA and BBC Radio nan Gàidheal, and the costs of providing them. The real threat is around the sustainability of funding generally to all the BBC’s services and no service is exempt from that. I would say that the BBC’s contribution to BBC ALBA has been more than steady. It has been growing. However, we entered that as a partnership model, and it is vital that the partnership as a whole continues to grow and have some certainty.

Q64        Lillian Jones: Mr Morrison, can you give any specific examples of projects or investments that would be easier to pursue if MG ALBA operated within a multi-year funding framework?

John Morrison: If you take “An t-Eilean”, the high-level drama, for example, that rarely fits neatly within a financial year. Therefore, it would be easier to plan ahead for high-level drama. The other important element for our viewers is that we like to think of ourselves as the home of women’s football. At BBC ALBA, we show a lot of women’s football and it has been fantastic for the game and very good for the channel as well. However, sports rights are negotiated over a three or four-year period. This comes very high up the risk register for the board when we have to say, “Do we commit to this?” The answer is, “Yes, we want to commit to it, but we have no guarantee that we can fulfil that commitment without the multi-year.”

There is a risk there. It would bring security for us, but it is not just for MG ALBA; it is for the people who work for us. It is the jobs that are involved in showing these games on TV. Women’s football is one of the fastest growing sports in the world. In Scotland, BBC ALBA’s coverage of it has contributed to that, but it is not helped by not having a multi-year deal.

Q65        Lillian Jones: Mr McCullough, since 2017 BBC ALBA has been regulated through the BBC’s wider operating licence rather than a distinct service-specific framework. Has the move to a broader BBC-wide regulatory model strengthened or weakened protections for Gaelic-language broadcasting?

Luke McCullough: Ofcom’s operating licence for the BBC is as strong a regulatory footing as any. BBC ALBA is regulated in exactly the same way as BBC One, Radio Scotland, BBC Radio Wales or any of the other linear services we have. The operating licence makes a number of clear provisions for Gaelic, which I think are really helpful. In terms of BBC ALBA, it determines that there will be a weekday evening news programme that is provided entirely from licence fee funds. It is broadcast live from Inverness every evening in the studios there. The operating licence also provides for a news review programme at the weekend and, beyond the BBC ALBA conditions, for learning in Gaelic.

Our learning provision, yes, exists on BBC ALBA, but also in our partnership SpeakGaelic and the Bitesize service that we offer for children and learners. There is provision for regular news on Radio nan Gàidheal through the day and for Gaelic content on the BBC website, particularly the news content, which again operates primarily out of Inverness, Stornoway, Portree and Glasgow, although also through journalists based in the Scottish Parliament.

The regulatory system therefore underpins all that, but it also allows creative freedom for us and those who co-commission with us. Margaret Mary will be able to talk about our content decisions but, working with our partners, in the licence we need a bit of freedom to stay where the audience is. If you get too prescriptive and have very specific licence conditions, you end up moving quite quickly away from perhaps what was the intention at the time that the licence was set. If you look at the charter 20 years ago, for example, which came into force in about 2007, it did not envisage BBC ALBA or iPlayer, and yet within about 18 months, both those things existed and became absolutely part of the weft and weave of the culture of Scotland and the UK.

I think you need a framework that not only sets the minimum requirements—particularly around how we serve as journalism and tell the story of Scotland to itself—but allows for creative freedom and the ability to make editorial decisions that move with the times.

Q66        Lillian Jones: What opportunities does the BBC charter review present to update and strengthen the long-term sustainability of Gaelic-language broadcasting?

Luke McCullough: In our BBC response to the UK Government’s Green Paper, we said how important the languages that the BBC operates in remain and how important we see them remaining in the future. Obviously, like everything else, that requires sustainable funding for public broadcasting and for the BBC as we move into the future, but I would expect the charter to underpin the fact that we have services in Welsh and in Gaelic, with that freedom to respond at the speed that the audience needs, and perhaps also to give a nod to the other languages that we work with.

I know that this morning the Committee has heard about Gaelic Irish in the Republic of Ireland, and about Welsh. The BBC also works with the Northern Ireland Screen broadcast fund, which the witnesses earlier mentioned, to produce content—Government-funded via Northern Ireland Screen—in Ulster Scots and in the Irish language, in Northern Ireland, sometimes working in Irish in partnership with TG4, who you heard from earlier.

In Cornwall, we are working—again in a partnership model—with Cornwall council. They have helped us invest in a “Learn Cornish” podcast, and we present the news in Cornish on BBC Radio Cornwall.

We also have a partnership with Manx Radio in the Isle of Man, where we help support learning in Manx with some Manx output. The charter needs to allow the BBC to continue to evolve that provision in a way that future-proofs it and does not tie it to one particular model and—provided that sustainable funding is found—gives a way for those language services to grow and flourish as the future demands.

Q67        Kirsteen Sullivan: Mr Morrison, what are the implications for Gaelic-language broadcasting if the charter review does not result in more stable funding and a statutory framework?

John Morrison: I would not be overstating it by saying it would be catastrophic for us. If you were running any sort of private company and the value of your turnover had reduced by 45% over a decade, that trajectory would be very concerning indeed. The most important thing for us is that it is not just about MG ALBA or BBC ALBA itself, but about the whole language and the importance of the language to the increasing number of young people who are learning it now and who are embracing it.

As we heard from earlier speakers, it is important that we are no longer just a linear TV channel; we are having to work on multi-platforms. Again, colleagues in the Celtic countries got serious support—millions of pounds—to help them diversify in the dash to digital, as we call it, but we got no money to support us with that. If that continues, we would be in a serious place and so would the language, because we are the most visible representation of Gaelic that exists anywhere in the world. Where would all the young people who are going through Gaelic-medium education go and watch sport, music, drama and television in their own language? We cannot continue on this trajectory.

Q68        Kirsteen Sullivan: Do you see the fates of both as quite closely intertwined?

John Morrison: They are absolutely linked. We would like to say that since MG ALBA has existed and BBC ALBA came on to screens, we have seen a doubling of the number of people with ability in the language. There are two key factors in that, and they are Gaelic-medium education and BBC ALBA.

There is another thing we do. I have spoken to a lot of musicians about the explosion in traditional music and the number of traditional bands playing Gaelic music, and they are now exporting that all over the world. The first platform they had for this was Gaelic radio and television, and you are now looking at potentially hundreds of people earning a living from music. Again, would they have done this anyway? Maybe they would have, but we gave them the platform that allowed them the confidence to express themselves on stage and on television, and to export this music.

Q69        Kirsteen Sullivan: Looking to 2028, what would you say matters most for the future of Gaelic broadcasting: statutory recognition in the UK’s public service broadcasting framework or guaranteed long-term funding? Or do you see them as equally important?

John Morrison: Can I be greedy and say both?

Kirsteen Sullivan: I thought that might be the answer.

John Morrison: I will say both, and the reason for that is, if you have statutory status, it makes it easier to make the arguments for funding. I would have to say that we need both.

It is important to say as well that, on your Committee website, the word “jeopardy” is used. There is another side to that, because if the Government make the right decision with the charter, you are creating a huge opportunity. In terms of finance, there is not far to go between jeopardy and the sort of catastrophic outcome I am telling you about here, and creating a world of opportunity where we create hundreds of jobs in rural areas and communities, strengthen communities, and use the Gaelic language.

Q70        Kirsteen Sullivan: How do you see long-term funding being linked to statutory recognition?

John Morrison: That is one for the politicians, isn’t it? This is maybe where I diverge slightly from BBC colleagues: we really do not care where the money comes from, whether it is BBC or elsewhere. Looking at the programme for Government and the rationalisation that has been planned for in Scotland, our money is not going to double overnight, but this is our road for the Committee to recommend to DCMS how you would go about doing it.

The EY report said that if our money had kept pace with inflation, we would be sitting at around £30 million now, rather than £15 million, so we are talking about £15 million to get us back to where I think we should be. Is that enough? Compared to the other Celtic countries, we would still be way behind, but it would make a big change for us, as well as creating digital content, sustaining the language and all the kids coming out of Gaelic-medium education, and creating jobs in communities.

Q71        Chair: You said that you did not mind, in a sense, where the money came from, but how important in reality is the contribution from the BBC in supporting the work that BBC ALBA does?

John Morrison: The BBC has been very important. When you look historically, the BBC has been broadcasting in Gaelic for 100 years. I think that without the BBC, Gaelic broadcasting probably would not exist—there might be small pockets here and there—and the language would be in a much worse condition that it currently is. The BBC has been hugely important. Mr McCullough has explained that the contributions from the BBC have increased above the level of inflation, so we welcome that. The BBC still has a cachet, and the three letters are very important for us.

Q72        Douglas McAllister: Chair, can I ask a question on that point? From the evidence we have heard this morning, the BBC funding has increased every year. It was originally £4 million and it has gone up to £10 million, so the BBC is increasing funding in line with inflation, if not higher than inflation. The problem seems to be your core funding from the Scottish Government. From what I can see and have heard in the evidence today, that has largely flatlined since the inception at roughly £13 million, with just a small increase in 2025. The problem lies with the Scottish Government flatlining your budget, does it not?

John Morrison: I suppose the facts speak for themselves. The funding was frozen for 10 years and, like anything that is frozen for 10 years, broadcasting inflation tends to run above inflation elsewhere. They were not our figures; we brought in experts to do the analysis.

Yes, that is right. The BBC contribution has been valuable. It has given us the news and current affairs. We do “New Year’s Ceilidh”, which is probably the best new year’s show on television—it is a straightforward party, and it is good. But we cannot get away from the freezing of the funding for 10 years. It has been very bad for our income.

Q73        Chair: Ms Murray, beyond BBC ALBA, what role does the BBC play in supporting Gaelic-language broadcasting, and how significant are those contributions to the language?

Margaret Mary Murray: As Mr Morrison said just now, the BBC has been broadcasting in Gaelic since 1923, and we have grown and developed our services over that time. We have a portfolio of services including BBC ALBA, but also critically BBC Radio nan Gàidheal, which is an audio service that can be heard throughout the world via BBC.com. You can hear the service live on a daily basis, but also enjoy a variety of podcasts, from learning to entertainment to the more recent addition of world cup content, which followed Scotland’s journey during those fateful weeks.

We offer a window or a door to the Gaelic language and culture through BBC ALBA. We also deliver a language-rich daily service for Gaelic speakers through Radio nan Gàidheal. We also have BBC Bitesize, which supports young people through their learning journey, from school all the way through to the latter stages of their education. We also partner with the BBC brands CBeebies and CBBC to deliver a daily schedule of children’s programmes. That has been the backbone of BBC ALBA, but it is also really attractive from an iPlayer point of view.

In terms of core public service genres, we have a new service that broadcasts hourly on Radio nan Gàidheal. Every evening it provides a live heartbeat for the TV channel. Increasingly, our news is being consumed via social and digital media, so we have seen a real growth in the consumption of our news on our recently added accounts on Instagram, Facebook and X. The BBC support Gaelic in a variety of ways through the core public service genres of news, current affairs, learning and children’s.

Recently, the partnership model has been reviewed in order to make sure that our partnership with MG ALBA is future facing. We are really ambitious for Gaelic broadcasting and the Gaelic language. That review of our partnership looked to drive digital growth, to invest more in content of high impact and to support the growth of the language, which we do through partnership services such as SpeakGaelic, which has undergone really impressive growth since its inception during the lockdown years. That is how the BBC supports the Gaelic language.

John Morrison: If I could just add, that renegotiation of the partnership, which was voluntary and entered into by both parties, ended up really strengthening the service. If I could also just add a little bit to my answer to you, Mr McAllister, we were frozen for 10 years. We have to give the former Deputy First Minister, Kate Forbes, credit: she found us an extra £2 million, which came in at the time that we were looking for funding for the second series of “An t-Eilean”, so that was—

Douglas McAllister: A one-off?

John Morrison: A second-off of a drama; it was a one-off, but I think it’s—

Douglas McAllister: It’s not annual core funding.

John Morrison: It’s not annual core funding.

Donald Campbell: It is now.

John Morrison: That bit is locked in, but we do not have a multi-year deal, so we do not know what we will get. We have not met the new Gaelic Minister yet, so we look forward to that meeting.

Q74        Chair: Some of us had the opportunity to visit the CBeebies set at the BBC, which I have to say was really fun. Mr McCullough, we have talked a lot today about parity between Welsh and Gaelic-language broadcasting. How significant is the BBC’s in-kind contribution to S4C in comparison?

Luke McCullough: It is different, but they are not like-for-like services. As I think your witnesses from S4C were saying earlier, it is a service that runs from 6 or 7 in the morning till midnight. BBC ALBA is a service that runs from 5 in the evening, when we start with the children’s content that Margaret Mary was just speaking about, and also runs till around midnight. In terms of the proportion of hours of broadcast, they are reasonably similar, but the model is different. The BBC is obviously making content in Gaelic for a BBC service. There is a lot of history of the BBC making content for S4C in Welsh that predates the channel’s existence.

They are different models and different systems, and there are different models for the other languages I was talking about earlier. A lot of the time people compare Welsh with Gaelic, but they are two different models with two different systems. Here is a partnership model on a BBC service; S4C is a different model, with different lengths of broadcast.

Our contribution to Cornish is very different again. Where the news in Cornish is broadcast once a week, in Gaelic we are broadcasting the news every hour. The number of speakers of Cornish is obviously lower, but it is not insignificant. Again, we are investing there to help more people learn.

We need to grow these partnerships and move at the right speed for the audience. I don’t think things should be the same—I don’t think anyone is saying they should be the same—but they should probably be broadly proportionate. I think the BBC’s contribution to BBC ALBA is broadly proportionate, but there are always opportunities to grow.

Q75        Douglas Lumsden: Luke, it has been reported that there are financial pressures on BBC Scotland. Is the cash for BBC ALBA protected in any way?

Luke McCullough: Nothing is protected at BBC Scotland at the moment, but we are not expecting our investment in BBC ALBA to change, particularly in the current financial year. BBC Scotland’s budget is under a lot of pressure, and we are on record as saying that, across the savings we are trying to deliver at the moment, we are trying to save around £10 million.

I know that if you look at £10 million in an S4C context, you would think that it is not enough. The entirety of our spend on BBC ALBA is also the equivalent of what we are looking to save in other areas of BBC Scotland at the moment, so we are under real pressure. The Committee will have seen some of that recently. We expect around 60 roles to close in BBC Scotland out of our headcount this year, and across the UK we are looking at around 2,000 people out of our workforce leaving the BBC over the next couple of years. These are really serious savings challenges.

However, over the 15 years that we have just come through—where, as I was saying to the Committee earlier, the licence fee income has dropped by over £1 billion in real terms—we have increased our investment in Gaelic, precisely because we know how important it is that the BBC is there to support speakers of minority languages. That is not least because, as Mr Morrison was saying, there are not many other people who are making that investment.

We are very grateful to have the partner to do that with, and we see the economic impact of that all around Scotland. We would not move away from that lightly, but I cannot stress enough that we are in really difficult times financially because of that growing gap between users and payers. You are seeing a real impact on our English-language services now. There are a number of Scottish titles that are not coming back for a second or third series, and a number of other titles that are coming back for shorter runs.

The coverage of this place—the politics programme on a Wednesday—will cease, so there will no longer be a Scottish Prime Minister’s questions programme on the basis that you can watch Prime Minister’s questions somewhere else. We are looking at shrinking the length of some of our radio news output. These are real, difficult decisions, but with less money, there will be less that we can do.

Q76        Lillian Jones: Ms Murray, at a time when the BBC is facing pressure about its own future, how can it ensure that investment in Gaelic broadcasting is protected?

Margaret Mary Murray: The BBC’s investment in Gaelic broadcasting demonstrates real value for money in terms of the way we operate in partnership. With that investment, we can demonstrate that we operate a very lean structure. The content that we make and the models that we use to deliver content are also innovative. Recently, the BBC funded coverage of our Commonwealth Games, and we did that in a very innovative way, which offers the BBC some lessons and some learning in terms of how best to ensure that its investment goes as far as possible.

Q77        Lillian Jones: What assessment has been made of the potential consequences for BBC ALBA, Gaelic content production and the wider Gaelic media sector if further BBC savings are required?

Margaret Mary Murray: The investment that we have is tight for the services that we deliver. However, that does not diminish the ambition that we have for the growth of the language. It is about recognising the value in that investment and how that value is demonstrated across the sector in jobs and in communities across Scotland.

John Morrison: Can I add a wee word there? I was with the BBC for many years. Because we are in this partnership, the partnership actually gives value to the BBC that is immeasurable in many ways, because of the diversity and the role of the BBC in representing all our communities. MG ALBA and BBC ALBA work together to represent some of the areas of the highlands and islands that are probably under-represented when you look across the whole of broadcasting. It is valuable and it helps the BBC deliver on its core purpose as well.

On the practical day-to-day side, all the Gaelic-speaking reporters that they employ also speak English, so if they end up doing a story they will often double up and do something for “Reporting Scotland”. In fact, one of the main contributors to “Reporting Scotland” for many years was from Inverness and was bilingual, and they did Gaelic and English broadcasting, so it is real value for money.

Chair: Mr Campbell, did you want to add something to that?

Donald Campbell: Yes, please. The discussion is dealing with the obvious deficits with Gaelic broadcasting at the moment. Those are laid out in our submissions here and elsewhere. Gaelic broadcasting is more than BBC ALBA; it is more than the BBC regulatory framework governing it. BBC ALBA is not just a portfolio channel within the BBC. BBC ALBA is the UK’s only Gaelic-language service, and it is delivered in a partnership between MG ALBA and the BBC. It fulfils the UK’s policy promise and its acceptance of the European charter for regional or minority languages that says there should be a Gaelic service.

The deficit that we have—and I think this will be apparent in what is coming—is that there is no mechanism that says, “This is what the licence fee will contribute, and this is what Scottish Ministers will contribute.” There is no compact that says clearly why that is important or how much it is going to be. That, in a nutshell, is what we are proposing. When we look at the discrepancies between the situation of Gaelic and that of Irish and Welsh, we see that, predominantly, they have that certainty as to why it is important, who is going to deliver it and how much resource is going to be allocated.

In some ways, one of the solutions is what S4C has, which is an allocation from the licence fee. If there was an allocation from the licence fee, that would answer the question about how funding could be protected. We are not looking for special protections, to be honest, because we realise that funding is tight in many ways. If there is a set of priorities that the UK Government and Parliament have in relation to Gaelic broadcasting, and those are shared by the Scottish Government and the Scottish Parliament, they should be provided for by both partners. It is our contention—or my contention, at least—that that should be brought out of the realm of management decision making. It should be policy-led decision making. I hope that is clear.

Chair: That is helpful. Thank you.

Q78        Douglas Lumsden: I am going to go on to tax relief and credits, which we discussed with the earlier panel. Margaret Mary, what tangible benefits has the UK Government’s audio-visual expenditure credit scheme delivered for Gaelic broadcasting?

Margaret Mary Murray: I am delighted to say that Gaelic broadcasting and BBC ALBA have benefited from the tax credit, including on children’s content. Through the BBC’s delivery of children’s programmes, the tax credit has been applied, and that, in turn, delivers benefit and allows us to commission more original content. In the independent sector, again, children’s programmes, successful documentary programmes and drama programmes for children that have been part of the EBU scheme have also benefited from tax credit and partnership funding from Screen Scotland. I guess that the biggest area of benefit is in drama, where the first and second series of “An t-Eilean” benefited from the tax credit, which supplements the budget to a significant degree. It is a really valuable part of that funding cocktail for content.

Q79        Douglas Lumsden: Can you give us some sort of idea of how much it is worth, percentage-wise?

Donald Campbell: In very rough terms, the threshold of £1 million an hour needs to be met for high-end AVEC or tax credit. Practically speaking, we need to find the funding for £800,000 of that, and the tax credits take it up to £1 million. The question that was addressed in the previous session was about those kinds of credits being more accessible and the financial limits or thresholds being set at a more reasonable level, particularly for minority-language content. The figure of £1 million an hour is a very high threshold for us to reach. We can do it only very occasionally, as with “An t-Eilean”, but if the threshold was much lower, as it is in Ireland, many more productions would qualify and the benefit to the economy and to the rural economy, where a lot of our business comes from, could be considerably greater.

Q80        Douglas Lumsden: Would that be your biggest ask of the UK Government just now—to reduce that threshold to a lot lower than £1 million?

Donald Campbell: Yes. There is a lot of interest looking for that to happen. The challenge is if it is set by the Treasury, it needs to wash its face in terms of bringing money in from the outside. It is there as a financial incentive to drive inward investment primarily, so it needs to pay for itself. When you reduce the thresholds too low and apply that to a lot of programming, the dividend needs to be as much about the cultural return or the investment in future economic growth as about immediate return through taxes, VAT and suchlike.

Q81        Douglas Lumsden: How many programmes have you had that have benefited from that? Is it just the one that we were speaking about earlier?

Donald Campbell: Some of the children’s programming benefits because there is no threshold; it is just kind of a test—and that is through the BBC’s arrangements. There have probably been five or six smaller dramas, with the European Broadcasting Union scheme, as well as series 1 and 2 of “An t-Eilean”—so very few.

John Morrison: In terms of the circular economy, the budget for “An t-Eilean” series 1 was £1 million per episode, so £4 million. Tax credits made up for roughly 20% of that. When we did some analysis on the spend, nearly £1 million of the £4 million was spent directly on hotels, bed and breakfasts, food suppliers in the Western Isles. Had we not done that, that £1 million would not have happened. That was for five weeks of filming. Series 2 has just finished filming. That was seven weeks, so we would expect to surpass the £1 million. You can actively see the money that has come to us for creating programmes, and then part of it—a quarter, roughly—being directly injected into economy.

Q82        Douglas Lumsden: John, are there any more schemes you would like to see to boost Gaelic broadcasting?

John Morrison: Oh, lots of schemes. But partnerships are the way forward. We have the partnership with the BBC, but MG ALBA is not prevented from seeking partnerships with other broadcasters—any of the streamers, for example—but we would need to have skin in the game and the money to put skin in the game in order to deliver a partnership. You can see that some of them—Netflix and the big streamers—are filming in Spain, but money will be coming in to make a contribution to that.

Q83        Douglas McAllister: On that point about partnership funding, could the argument not be made that you deserve additional funding from other external agencies such as Creative Scotland and Scottish Enterprise if you are creating these programmes? You have demonstrated to us the vast economic benefit gained by the community in the highlands and islands. Surely funding should be coming from other sources.

John Morrison: Yes, and we did that for series 2. Do you want to break that down, Donald?

Donald Campbell: Yes. In series 2 of “An t-Eilean”, for example, the local authority and Highlands and Islands Enterprise both contributed to effectively ensure that it happened on that patch, because of the vast economic benefits. I think there is a wider point around this. Earlier in my job, I was tasked not just with spending money wisely, but with ensuring that every £1 received would generate a lot more value and other income. Last year, we had almost £5 million of additional investment into content that we were funding. It was not money into MG ALBA but it was money into the projects that we had initiated, such as “An t-Eilean” and documentaries.

Scotland represents a vast opportunity and a huge talent pool, if the funding is there to further support strategising—for international documentary making, for example. That is part of question in relation to the benefits of multi-annual funding. What would that permit you to do that you cannot currently do? One thing that it would permit would be a stepped approach to ensure that our documentary producers in the Gaelic language have the marketing, networking, idea development, and partnering opportunities to work in European and worldwide networks to originate ideas that broadcaster and agencies in other countries will support.

A very good example of is a Gaelic programme based out of South Uist, from a number of years ago. There were 14 partners, and 13 of them were agencies, Governments and broadcasters from the Baltic nations. We were a minority funder; it was a programme for BBC ALBA and for the Scandinavian and Baltic channels. It is a documentary series with three episodes, about the art of yoiking—a very interesting show, by the way. That represents an example of the opportunity we have in Scotland, and Gaelic broadcasting and media are one of the catalysts for enabling that to happen. The skills are there, but what is not there is the stepped approach of “Let us invest over five years to try to get economic and cultural dividend out of this.”

John Morrison: It is also having the ability to do the investment. If you have 13 partners, that is a complex partnership that needs a legal framework. Another point I came across recently is that tourism organisations are aware of a phenomenon called set-jetting, which is when people come to the country to visit sets. It is usually those used by the high-profile, international sales, but Shetland has seen the benefit of that because of the seven or eight series there, and we hope that “An t-Eilean” will be similar. It is too early to judge the impact on the Western Isles, but it is very difficult to get a bed in Stornoway these days.

Luke McCullough: Those partnerships and the economic benefits apply to pretty much everything we make in Scotland, both in Gaelic and in English. As this Committee has heard before, in our English-language content, we are increasingly requiring partners to be able to make stuff of the scale and to the level that the audience expects. When Louise Thornton appeared as a witness before the Committee, she shared the fact that the BBC drama “The Ridge” had been funded by BBC Scotland, yes, but also by Sky New Zealand, and ended up being filmed in both Scotland and New Zealand as a result of that partnership.

We have also discussed at length the investment of the BBC in “The Traitors” with this Committee. We commissioned an economic impact report on that and, as Mr Morrison has said, when you talk to people at VisitScotland or Trainline, you can see the absolute impact on requests about journeys to the highlands and Inverness. We think that the first three series of that added about £22 million of GVA to the highland economy, so there is a definitive impact of having public investment in content filmed in Scotland, in Gaelic and in English, on tourism, economic development and jobs. We can see that tangibly, with everything that we produce.

Q84        Chair: That is very interesting. Mr Morrison, the Media Act 2024 modernised the statutory remit of S4C. If the statutory remit of MG ALBA were updated in a similar way, would that be enough to make a difference to its future sustainability, or do we need to do something structural as well?

John Morrison: Sustainability usually takes you back to budget; that is probably what will deliver sustainability. Legislation is important, and being mentioned and getting parity in legislation would be hugely important—not just for BBC ALBA and MG ALBA, but for the language and the confidence of language speakers—but sustainability usually goes back to budget.

Q85        Chair: If we take out the financial side, do other structural things need to be done, as well as looking for an updated remit?

Donald Campbell: Absolutely. Our position is that the BBC charter should address Gaelic specifically, not as a subset of the BBC’s nations and regions. As I said before, Gaelic broadcasting is a matter of UK policy and is delivered in partnership, so is not solely a BBC concern. There is a regulatory framework point. At the moment, it is entirely through the prism of the BBC operating licence. For example, last year, Ofcom’s review of the performance of the BBC was 74 pages long, with six lines dedicated to BBC ALBA. My question is whether that is enough about the contribution of BBC ALBA for there to be in the public domain—other than what we say in MG ALBA’s annual report, which is quite full. Is it enough for the regulator and UK public policy to say, “That was a good job—well done,” “That was a poor job,” “Could you do better here?” and so on?

The lack of structural provision means that we rely, sometimes quite beneficially, on the BBC remembering that there is a Gaelic priority among the other thousand and one priorities that it currently has. A special statutory or charter designation for the partnership that delivers Gaelic broadcasting would give Gaelic a seat at the table beside S4C, STV, the BBC, ITV, Channel 4 and Channel 5. As John alluded to, the Green Paper that was published a short while ago by DCMS was very inclusive of Welsh language, but there was not a mention of Gaelic language, and that is because the structural provision is not there. We rely on people to remember that it is there.

Chair: That is very interesting. Thank you.

Q86        Lillian Jones: Mr McCullough, drawing on your experience with S4C, what are the most important features of the Welsh-language broadcasting model that are currently absent from the BBC ALBA framework? Which, if any, do you think would have the greatest impact on the long-term sustainability of Gaelic broadcasting if applied to BBC ALBA?

Luke McCullough: Again, I think the models are different. In Wales, the BBC provides two radio stations in Welsh—Radio Cymru and Radio Cymru 2­—as part of the way that that service has grown and evolved over time. Those are obviously BBC services, and alongside that you have an independent broadcaster, S4C, which is presenting the content that your witnesses described to you earlier. In some ways, I would say that there is more of an opportunity to share content services and, as Margaret Mary was saying earlier, to maximise value for money in a model in which we are working in close partnership in everything we do, compared with models in which you have multiple players. The histories of the two languages and the broadcast services of the two languages are very different.

It is likewise with the other languages that we are working in. We have been on a journey with Ulster Scots and the Irish language in Northern Ireland through the Northern Ireland Screen broadcast fund. Again, it is a very different model. We are commissioning both audio and video content within the BBC portfolio but also with partners from time to time. With Cornish, we work with the local authority in Cornwall to try to drive uptake of the language, which itself will hopefully generate further content in due course.

I do not feel that one model is better than another. It is important that the public broadcaster of the United Kingdom can work in an appropriate way with the languages. We said in our Green Paper response that we know how important the language services that the BBC provides are. We are absolutely committed to them but, at the risk of sounding slightly like a broken record, it is subject to sustainable funding for the BBC. Your witnesses from S4C said that earlier about their contributions from the BBC. They recognise the jeopardy around the funding of public broadcasting at the moment.

Q87        Douglas Lumsden: John, how important has showing Italian football been to promoting the Gaelic language?

John Morrison: Very important. As I said earlier, we see ourselves as the home of women’s football in Scotland. It has been good for the channel, and it has also been very good for the women’s game in Scotland.

If I were to sum up the board’s philosophy and strategy, I suppose it is basically to be brave. We need to be noticed and to try to make as much of an impact as we can with the budget. Pre the run-up to the world cup, we managed to get eight games from Serie A involving the Scottish stars playing in Italy. That was fantastic. It drew in an audience. To go back to the figures that I was explaining to the Chair, it brought in football fans—Gaelic speakers and non-Gaelic speakers—and it was really good with the youth audience. We saw a real spike in new content—fresh, interesting and probably surprising content—on BBC ALBA. That has been really important.

Looking ahead, Serie A came to us to ask whether we want to continue doing that. We again have a partnership, this time with BBC Sport on the iPlayer. We will do 19 games on BBC ALBA, and BBC Sport will do 19 games on Serie A.

Sport is hugely important for us, as is music, and so is drama, because all these things have an interest that transcends any linguistic barriers that exist. The barriers exist, but football is slightly different. The technology is improving, and we will get subtitles with live commentary—that technology is not far away. With football, you see the sport, and if you are a football fan, you want to watch.

Q88        Douglas Lumsden: I am trying to understand the driver behind it. Is it about trying to increase the numbers, even though it is not really promoting the Gaelic language? Or is it about promoting the Gaelic language?

John Morrison: It is absolutely about promoting the Gaelic language. Part of our drive is to take the Gaelic language to new audiences and to increase interest in it, so that when people watch things they think, “Actually, I’d quite like to learn this language. Why can’t I learn it?” That is shown in the huge increase in the number of people who are logging into SpeakGaelic, our language series, which is one of the most successful things we do. All these things are interlinked.

Why do we do sport? Because lots of people are interested in it. We saw a deal and we went for it. Similarly, the Commonwealth Games were in the English language behind a paywall; we came in and did the sport in Gaelic. Again, the audience on the iPlayer was fantastic, and on the channel it was really good as well. We did not have studio content; we just focused entirely on the sport, because we thought that was what people want to see. If they are watching live sport, there is less of a linguistic barrier.

Q89        Douglas Lumsden: If you were watching that on iPlayer, for example, could you choose the commentary in different languages? How did that work? Was it just in Gaelic?

John Morrison: The commentary in English was from TNT—Warner Bros.—and in Gaelic we were free-to-air. The only place you could see it free-to-air was with us. S4C had a deal for coverage in the Welsh language, but we could not do anything in English.

Q90        Douglas Lumsden: In terms of the percentage of your budget, how much are you spending on, for example, Italian football?

Donald Campbell: I need to do the arithmetic in my head. The way we work is that we are not spending an awful lot on rights per se. We are spending money on rights, obviously, but it is a very small amount, relatively speaking. The cost of these things is usually in production, so that is part of the balance that we have to work out. If, for example, we take a package for Scottish women’s football, the SPFL, rugby or Serie A, that means we are not just able to show those games but, quite often, we have got to show those games. We then have to find the producer who is going to produce that.

The way we budget out is that we have one of these multi-year deals that we have been talking about with a sports provider—just extended for a couple of years—and that gives us security of what we are going to be paying. Within that, there is a portfolio of a lot of different ways that the thing could shape out. We have to move things around to make sure—to do Italian football, we have to do a little less of something else.

We can work out the cost of it. At MG ALBA we spend roughly a quarter of our content budget on sport, and that delivers about 60% of our audience on a weekly basis, so the return by audience is really good. As you will know, sport is on the up and up and up. You just cannot get enough sport with broadcasters now, and live, event-based television is really important.

One of the things it does for us, as a minority language broadcaster, is that not only are Gaelic speakers, users or learners interested in sport the same way as anyone else is interested in it, but there is a normalisation effect of the language. People are not necessarily saying, “Gosh, it’s a bit strange that BBC ALBA’s covering Italian sport.” But our response to that would be, “Well, the English language handles Italian sport and the Welsh language handles Italian sport. Why shouldn’t the Gaelic language handle Italian sport?” What distinctions are people drawing in their minds that would say, “Oh no, Gaelic broadcasting is only for a certain number of things,” or, “The Gaelic language is only for a certain number of things”?

It is a very deep part of the language revitalisation strategy that Gaelic is just normalised. It is a normal thing. It is just a language people speak. It has the right to cover whatever territory it wants, provided that it finds an appreciative audience for it, and in our context we can demonstrate that it is value for money.

John Morrison: It is so important for the confidence of young people to be speaking the language, and to be speaking it on a daily basis when they can say to people, “Did you see the Italian football on BBC ALBA last night?” It is hugely important. We do not see any barrier to doing any aspect of the world in Gaelic. The only barrier is usually—

Q91        Douglas Lumsden: You mentioned 360,000 viewers. My only concern is that with some of these sports things, people perhaps are not really engaging in Gaelic or learning it, and they are really about boosting the viewing figures—that is one thing, which is great—to justify extra funding later on. If I were to put that to you, would you say it is completely wrong?

John Morrison: I would never say it is completely wrong, but what I would say is that we have to do what is of interest to our audience. A lot of research goes into that, and the percentages that Donald just described show that our audience love sport, and we want to provide sport for them. And how do you make the language relevant to the lives of people and increase their interest in it? By giving them what they want in that language.

Luke McCullough: It is about overall audience access to sport as well, at a time when sports rights and broadcaster access to them have come under a huge amount of pressure. The ability of MG ALBA and indeed the BBC, who acquired the Commonwealth Games rights in Gaelic, as Margaret Mary was saying, to get that content to the audience in Scotland is vital. The sports rights market in English has more than doubled in cost since 2010, at a time when—we went through the history earlier—the licence fee has been either flat or just going up with inflation. During a period when BBC resources have been really tight, our ability to get rights in English to serve the audience has been extremely constrained.

We have been able to open up the market in Gaelic rights and put that in front of all our audiences, not just those who are speaking the language, because it is a BBC service and it appears on the “New & Trending” rail when you open up iPlayer and people think, “Oh, there’s some live sport on there. Oh, it’s in Gaelic; that’s fine, I’ll watch that.” You could see that with a number of the sports that we were covering. We were not able to do that with the Commonwealth Games, in terms of “New & Trending”, for various other rights reasons, but generally speaking you can bring Gaelic sport to the prominence of English-language sport, and we find the audience generally will come.

Q92        Douglas Lumsden: So could it be a lot cheaper to show it in Gaelic as opposed to English? Is that how the licensing works?

Luke McCullough: I will not get into specifics, but you are in a market, and I suspect that the market for Welsh-language rights, Gaelic-language rights, and Manx and Cornish rights for sport would be of lower value than the English-language rights, not least because of global markets who will come to English.

John Morrison: I do not think you are going to see the English premiership on BBC ALBA any time soon. We have, as you correctly pointed out, to look for that balance between audience, value for money, interest and growth of the language. We balance all those things, and we thought, because of the number of Scottish players playing in Italy right now, that that would be of interest to our audience. When we say “our audience”, we mean Gaelic speakers, Gaelic learners and everybody else who is interested in football.

We see with SpeakGaelic that the people who are logging in and then going on to additional courses in learning the language have usually come in because they have heard the language through either music or sport. We also do a lot of shinty, which seems like a very natural game for us to do, and the number of young Gaelic speakers coming through the teams—all the teams, male and female—has increased over the over the years as well. There is a language growth there. That figure of 69,000 Gaelic speakers increased to 130,000 in the decade up to 2022. BBC ALBA undoubtedly played a big part in that, and sport and music are key, because they attract young people.

Luke McCullough: Sport opens the door to public media for a lot of the audience who might not find it otherwise. When Hayley Valentine, the director of BBC Scotland, was before this Committee, she talked about the fact that the BBC had reacquired the men’s international football rights after a long period when they were not on the BBC. We know that a good chunk of the people who came to iPlayer to watch, for example, Scotland versus Denmark, had not been to iPlayer at all for months beforehand, and within a couple of weeks of watching the Scotland-Denmark match they came back for something else because they had found other public content that they had either forgotten about or had not engaged with. It opens the door to people consuming public service content that they might not otherwise find.

Donald Campbell: If I could just add one thing, the point that you raise is important about how this is not about chasing numbers for us. It is not about even the BBC’s objectives in terms of serving its audiences. For us, it is a minority Gaelic-language service. We are looking to create opportunities for people to encounter the language. Those have to be widespread. It is not the numbers that any of us are chasing. It is the difference that it can make from having an encounter and bringing people in, opening up a pathway towards language awareness, language participation, and being a creator in language, perhaps as a parent or whatever putting the children through a Gaelic-medium education and learning the language. Those are the important steps. That is a different perspective from English-language broadcasting. There is a purpose to what we are doing, which is quite different in that sense. In some ways it is the same and in that way it is different.

John Morrison: Can I add a tiny wee thing and say that yes, we like numbers as well? We look at the numbers for “An t-Eilean”, and over 2 million people have watched it. It is hugely reassuring for us as creators that this is something that is so attractive that it brought in 2 million people to watch it. They loved it. The feedback has been huge. Nobody cared whether it was in the English language because we are all consuming content now on our phones or on our laptops or iPads with subtitles. But it is in Gaelic. It raised the profile of the language, and we would like to do more of it.

Q93        Douglas Lumsden: I guess when you look at drama there are other benefits: as we have mentioned, there is tourism and the jobs that it brings to the area. When you look at investing in Italian football, there is none of that.

John Morrison: There is—there is interest. You cannot just do one thing with that scripted drama, and then you have sport. You do not have a TV channel that just does drama. It probably exists somewhere in the digital sphere, but we need to provide a balance of programmes.

Chair: Thank you. That concludes our question session for this morning. Thank you all for coming along today. It is always very interesting to hear what is happening and to look forward to the future. I am certainly looking forward to the new Serie A, which will be great fun. Thank you all very much indeed.