Scottish Affairs Committee
Oral evidence: STV cuts, HC 1398
Wednesday 9 September 2026
Ordered by the House of Commons to be published on 9 September 2026.
Watch the meeting
Members present: Patricia Ferguson (Chair); Maureen Burke; Dave Doogan; Lillian Jones; Douglas Lumsden; Mr Angus MacDonald; Douglas McAllister; Susan Murray; Kirsteen Sullivan.
Questions 107 - 209
Witnesses
I: Cristina Nicolotti Squires, Group Director, Broadcasting and Media Group, Ofcom; Glenn Preston, Director, Scotland, Ofcom.
Witnesses: Cristina Nicolotti Squires and Glenn Preston.
Q107 Chair: Good morning and welcome to this meeting of the Scottish Affairs Committee. We would like to discuss with our colleagues from Ofcom issues relating to STV and probably a little about Gaelic broadcasting as well. I am very grateful to you for coming along this morning and giving us your time. Could you just briefly introduce yourselves and say what your role is?
Glenn Preston: Thank you very much for having us, Chair. I am director of Ofcom Scotland and head of the Ofcom Scotland team, which is based up in our Edinburgh office. We represent Ofcom right across our regulatory responsibilities and I am Ofcom’s senior leader in Scotland. We have about 130 colleagues based in Edinburgh now who do a whole range of jobs across Ofcom’s regulatory responsibilities.
Cristina Nicolotti Squires: I am the group director of Broadcasting and Media at Ofcom, so I lead the team that carries out our regulation. I joined Ofcom a couple of years ago, after 35 years in journalism.
Q108 Chair: Thank you both very much. I will just start by asking a couple of questions about Gaelic broadcasting. First, it appears to us that there are several bodies involved in Gaelic broadcasting between Ofcom, MG ALBA and the BBC, and the Scottish Government have an interest too, of course. To what extent does that complexity create governance challenges, or does it create governance challenges? Would there be a risk that, because that responsibility is shared among so many organisations, no single body has ownership of the long term future of broadcasting in Gaelic?
Glenn Preston: That is an interesting question. I was reflecting on the session that you did with MG ALBA and the BBC last week. I have been in this job for about 10 years so I find the clarity of roles and what we have to do relatively straightforward, but that might be a passage of time point rather than necessarily if you were looking at it from the outside when, as you say, you could understand that it is a fairly complicated picture. It runs pretty smoothly, to be honest with you. We would describe Ofcom’s duties as largely fiduciary in nature. You will likely already know that we make appointments, or we certainly make recommendations for appointments, to the MG ALBA board; it is Scottish Ministers who take those recommendations and are formally responsible for the appointments.
We hold the Gaelic media fund: the grant in aid that is paid by the Scottish Government to MG ALBA comes via Ofcom, and MG ALBA then draw that down for both the operational and the content sides of their business. There is an MOU that exists between the Scottish Government and MG ALBA as a matter for them. We have no involvement in the preparation of that but we meet the MG ALBA executive quarterly just to look at performance issues and how it is performing against the obligations that the Scottish Government place on it under the MOU that it has. That all works relatively smoothly—it is quite well oiled—lots of the people involved have been doing it for a long time. Then obviously the UK Government and UK Parliament have the responsibility for the overarching framework.
That is where those kinds of questions that you were discussing in last week’s session around, for example, the adequacy of funding or the statutory nature of Gaelic broadcasting, sit. Those are not matters that we engage directly with as the regulator; we do not have responsibilities for MG ALBA funding decisions or its status on the statute book, for example, but it works relatively well for us.
Q109 Chair: That leads me on nicely to my second question, which is around the BBC operating licence. From the evidence we were given, we understand that Gaelic broadcasting largely operates through that prism of the BBC operating licence, and I wonder whether you think that is sufficient from a regulatory and policy perspective?
Glenn Preston: Yes. I saw the comments that the chief executive made about the number of lines that MG ALBA or Gaelic broadcasting gets in our annual report on the BBC. That was a fair comment, but the whole point of what we do with our annual reporting on the BBC is it is a holistic view of how the BBC is performing against the specific conditions and the operating licence across all its services, and how it is fulfilling the mission and public purposes. We do not tend to do kind of deep dive stuff into individual services such as BBC ALBA as part of that: no service really gets particular treatment in the annual reports that we do.
It probably underplays the amount of work that we do with MG ALBA on questions of performance. We other analyses of developments in the market, for example we have just published our annual Media Nations Scotland report in the last few weeks. There are two or three different sections in that looking at what has happened in Gaelic broadcasting over the last year; for example, there is a bit of analysis of the brilliant live free-to-air Gaelic language coverage of the Commonwealth Games that was done through the partnership. We look at all the first run origination data—the hours, spend and so on—and do some analysis of that. This year we had stuff in there about the quality of Gaelic podcasting that was going on, for example, including through Radio nan Gàidheal as well. You could look at that BBC annual report in isolation and legitimately say that there is not a huge amount in there; if you look at it set against the other things that we publish and all the other work that we do with the MG ALBA board and executive, there is a lot more going on there.
Q110 Chair: The question really comes back to the point that BBC ALBA is not explicitly mentioned in the operating licence. Is the current framework sufficient to give both visibility and proper regulation to the organisation and if not, what changes would you like to see in that framework?
Glenn Preston: I should say that the operating licence contains specific provisions about hours and spend, for example, that you would have to have on the BBC ALBA service. But you are right that that would be an assessment of the BBC’s performance against its mission and public purposes, and particularly the Public Purpose 4, which is the one that would be relevant for BBC ALBA.
Whether the governance and operation of MG ALBA itself has that adequate scrutiny is actually an interesting question. We fulfil the fiduciary duties that are quite narrow in the Broadcasting Acts of 1990 and 1996 and the Communications Act 2003, and we would say we are content with the way those are working. There is a legitimate question about what the scrutiny is of the MOU arrangements between the Scottish Government and MG ALBA, for example, which is something this Committee or the Culture Committee at Holyrood might be interested in. There does not tend to be an annual assessment, for example, of MG ALBA’s performance against things like that. It lays its annual report and accounts, and that is actually something that has to come via Ofcom. It does that here and at Holyrood as well. We notify the Ministers and the Parliaments that that is happening, so there is an opportunity there to look at the performance of MG ALBA specifically, through that lens.
Q111 Kirsteen Sullivan: We are now going to move on to Ofcom’s decision about the STV changes. As you know, Ofcom was due to announce its decision on STV’s proposals before Easter this year but it was delayed until after the Scottish Parliament elections. You will understand this caused quite a bit of consternation, with the National Union of Journalists calling it “astonishing.” Can you explain why that decision was taken, please?
Cristina Nicolotti Squires: Yes. This was a difficult decision to make and we wanted to give it full consideration. We had a lot of public response, quite a bit of it generated by AI, which was a novelty that, as a regulator, we are all getting used to, and so we needed to make sure we went through the consultation responses carefully and gave it the fullest consideration. There was no other reasoning behind the delay.
Q112 Kirsteen Sullivan: Did you not factor into the initial timescales that the proposals would generate a lot of responses due to the levels of concern?
Cristina Nicolotti Squires: We knew that there would be a lot of responses and we knew how people felt because a lot of it had been expressed, but we had to go through each individual consultation response. If I am right, it was the first time we had such a volume that had been generated by artificial intelligence, which again, was something we wanted to be very careful how we handled. We were very keen to make sure that this was a consideration that was given full deliberation and analysis, and we did not want to rush into it.
Glenn Preston: I am struck by the point you make about what the NUJ said. At the beginning of the process, which was about mid-October last year, we actually had representations from a number of organisations—including the NUJ—that we should not rush the decision because it was too important. Then, when we reached the point just before the election period where actually we would not typically publish anything that had any kind of political ramifications, we were told we were too slow. So at the beginning of the process we were being told to slow down, and then we were being told we were too slow towards the end of the process.
We might get into this in the questioning, but I would observe that we got our first submission from STV in mid-October, had engagement with it about that, then it sent us a second submission towards the end of November last year. We published the consultation before Christmas, 19 December, I think. The 16th was it? Thank you. I am being corrected by one of your members. That concluded in mid-February and we then published on 1 June. As Cristina was saying, we had never had an AI-assisted campaign response such as we did for that particular consultation, when 90% of the responses—just over 1,100—came to us through an AI-assisted tool.
There was a campaign called Save STV North, and people were able to pick from a menu of possible responses and send stuff to us. We had not had something like that before. It also included a free text capability for people that generated an email to Ofcom from an individual’s account, so it gave us all sorts of personal data for people as well, which we had to manage quite carefully. We undertook to go through all those 1,100 responses in addition to those that came individually, to make sure that we were not missing any of the free text responses and that there was a proper full analysis of the evidence available to us. That is what took us the additional time. We had wanted to conclude this prior to the Scottish election period so that there was certainty for STV about who, how, and where it would be broadcasting from but we were still going through those 1,100 responses during that period, which is why it took us that additional period of time.
Q113 Kirsteen Sullivan: On that point, MPs are well used to dealing with campaign emails so I appreciate the volume. However, the concerns about the time taken and the delay are well founded: people expected a quicker response, particularly given the level of concern. I am really struck by the point you just made, Mr Preston, that you would not publish anything that had political ramifications. Are we to take from that that the election, or the level of political opposition to the changes, influenced the timing of the decision?
Glenn Preston: No, you should not take that from it because Ofcom essentially does not do publications across its entire regulatory remit during an election period.
Cristina Nicolotti Squires: Irrespective of what they are.
Glen Preston: Yes.
Q114 Kirsteen Sullivan: We all know when the Scottish Parliamentary elections are, and you previously stated that you would publish before Easter. Why was that statement made if there was no intention to do it immediately before the election?
Glenn Preston: At that point we did not have all those AI-assisted responses that came in to us, and it took us a long period of time to go through each individual response.
Kirsteen Sullivan: Before Easter was still in the lead up to a Scottish Parliamentary election.
Glenn Preston: Yes, absolutely.
Q115 Kirsteen Sullivan: Why was that timescale given if, as you have said, you would not normally put anything out before a Parliamentary election?
Glenn Preston: It was our hope that we would be able to conclude it by that period. What we had not accounted for is that large number of AI-assisted responses that required that particular type of consideration. It took us several weeks to go through those.
Q116 Kirsteen Sullivan: I understand that, but the point still remains that you initially said the decision would be out before Easter when that election was already on the calendar, so the two things do not really match up for me.
Cristina Nicolotti Squires: We hoped to publish before Easter. That was before we realised we would be getting that volume of AI-assisted responses. We publish our responses afterwards and, as Glenn said, we had to remove all the personal data. There was an awful lot and we had to go through each individual one. At the point when we said we would publish at Easter we did not know the volume and the manner in which the consultation responses would be delivered. As Glenn said, we do not actually publish anything across Ofcom during an election period because most things can be taken as an issue, so that is what the delay to that was.
Kirsteen Sullivan: Okay, the timescales do not marry up for me, but I will leave it at that.
Q117 Chair: Yes, and I plan to pursue that. What would you consider an election period to be?
Glenn Preston: It is the formal election period in the sense you get the dissolution of the Parliament for however many—four or five—weeks. It was towards was at the end of March.
Chair: It probably would be the end of March, I think Easter was in April this year.
Glenn Preston: Yes. So the point for us was that we closed our consultation in February and we had hoped to conclude the analysis of all the responses that we got between the period of closure and then when the election period would normally start. We did not know until closer to the time what the specific dates of the election period would be, but then in that window that we had we did not get through all the consultation responses.
Q118 Chair: To go back to Ms Sullivan’s point, Scottish elections are fixed. We know when they are and we know how long the election period is, we know when parliament will dissolve. I find it difficult to understand why, if you have a rule or a guidance that says you will not publish documents during an election period, that that calculation could not have been made. How many consultation responses were received in total? I think you said it was 90% were generated by AI.
Glenn Preston: That was 1,196 AI, that was about 90%. I think it was just over 1,300 in total.
Q119 Chair: Okay, so what weight were those AI-generated responses given in comparison to those that were not AI generated?
Glenn Preston: We do not work in that particular way. We look at every individual response to make sure that we are doing a full analysis.
Cristina Nicolotti Squires: Yes, we do we not do not say, “Oh, it’s AI, therefore it’s worth less or more.”
Glenn Preston: Yes.
Chair: That is reassuring.
Glenn Preston: This was a really interesting experience for us because it was not AI generated. The Save STV North campaign and website gave people a list of options that they could choose from in relation to the different areas of the consultation, as well as free text options. That is different from AI generation, which might be coming up with the arguments itself. It sent to us individual responses from named individuals—it could have been me or you—with named email addresses and so on. We treated them as individual responses. When we looked at them, people almost exclusively did not use the free text option, they only used the pre-generated list options. You could start to look at it thematically, for example, but it was still necessary for us to go through each individual response.
Q120 Chair: Okay. As Ms Sullivan says, we are all well used to those kinds of campaigns so I do not think any of us would be surprised by that, but if this was new and unexpected, what mechanisms have you put in place to make sure that in future you are able to cope with those in the time frames that you have established?
Glenn Preston: We are doing quite a lot of work on this at the moment. We are not unique in this regard. As you say, MPs, local authorities, and other public bodies are increasingly seeing consultation responses and complaints, either through AI generation or AI-assisted tools.
We are looking at our own technology options to be able to filter through those sorts of numbers of responses that we are likely to be getting for consultations in the future as well. There are a few tools on the market at the moment that you can put these things through to allow you to be able to work out whether they have been AI generated or, as in this case, have been AI assisted but are still individual responses. We are confident that we will be in a better position if something like this happens again.
Chair: It might just be a slight irony that an organisation that is involved in broadcasting, which is a very technologically driven field, was surprised by the arrival of AI-generated responses.
Q121 Dave Doogan: You have slightly beaten me to the punch there, Chair. Having listened very carefully to both of your responses to these questions it seems quite clear that you dropped the ball with the phasing of your publication of the consultation, which I am sure you will dispute but it is nevertheless very clear. You clearly did not get the date and the phasing of that right. Then, apparently because you got 1,200 AI responses—that would not phase a single MP around this table and their staff of five or six people to process—it apparently put a spanner in the works of Ofcom. The Office of Communications was caught on the hop by getting some AI responses. There is a vicious irony there that does not reflect well on your organisation, or am I being unfair?
Cristina Nicolotti Squires: I do not think we were necessarily caught on the hop in terms of the volume and the feelings that the people were expressing because we did an extensive amount of stakeholder engagement.
Q122 Dave Doogan: You were surprised by the AI lobby, were you not?
Cristina Nicolotti Squires: I would not say surprised. It was the first time that we had had such an enormous amount. Some 90% of the responses had been generated by AI, and it was the first time in all of our consultations that had happened. As an organisation we needed to work out not only how we do that but also the cleansing of that data by removing all the personal information, which was something that we had not had to do before.
Q123 Dave Doogan: That is process. You were late publishing because you were not expecting the volume of AI that you had to go through. Have I misunderstood; were you late processing because of the volume of AI?
Cristina Nicolotti Squires: It was the volume and the fact that it had been AI generated rather than generated by individuals without using AI, so there was a lot of data that had to be removed from it.
Q124 Dave Doogan: You only received 1,300 responses, so with the closure of broadcasting from the north of Scotland how many were you expecting?
Cristina Nicolotti Squires: I was not surprised by the sheer volume but it was the nature in which it was delivered that was the thing. Maybe we were over-ambitious when we said we would publish before Easter and maybe we should have been a bit more cautious in our timeline.
Dave Doogan: I do not think anyone’s ever accused Ofcom of being over-ambitious.
Q125 Douglas McAllister: Just on that point again about the over 1,000 AI-assisted individual responses, were these all published and treated as individual responses?
Glenn Preston: We have treated them as part of the analysis of the evidence as individual responses. There is a whole section in the statement that we have done on how we have handled all these sorts of things as part of this process. I will need to double check this for you, I am happy to come back on it, I do not know that we have published every individual response. That is partly because they have come to us with personal data on it as well, and people have not given us permission to publish that.
Q126 Douglas McAllister: Personal data can be removed. There is a suggestion that these over 1,000 responses were treated as a single response. How many responses did you publish then?
Glenn Preston: I do not know the answer to that.
Q127 Douglas McAllister: Was it almost 100?
Glenn Preston: I actually do not know the answer.
Q128 Douglas McAllister: You do not know how many responses were published in relation to the consultation exercise. If I was to suggest it was 1,300 responses received and you published less than 100, would that be accurate?
Glenn Preston: I am sorry, I do not know.
Douglas McAllister: You do not know?
Q129 Chair: Would it be possible for you to write to us with that information please? It would be helpful.
Cristina Nicolotti Squires: Yes, we can.
Glenn Preston: I assume that you have information about what has been published on the Ofcom website?
Douglas McAllister: I assumed you had that information as well.
Glenn Preston: We will have it and we will give the Committee that information.
Q130 Douglas McAllister: My concern is that you have taken over 1,000 individual responses from members of the public, viewers, and you have published it effectively as a single response simply because it is AI assisted as if somehow that is not a response to a consultation.
Glenn Preston: That is not the way we treated it and that is the reason we took a stand over—
Douglas McAllister: You cannot say that because you cannot tell me the figures.
Glenn Preson: What I do know is that our teams have gone through every single individual response that we had to the consultation.
Q131 Douglas McAllister: How many did you publish?
Cristina Nicolotti Squires: How many were actually published on the website? I am afraid I do not know the number, I can write with that to the Committee. It is important to weigh up how we responded to the consultation response. People as individuals, whether the responses are generated by AI or assisted by AI, is part of our decision making and we used a number of different factors including economic issues and impact assessments. Sentiment and public opinion is a very important part of it but there are other measures as well that we have to weigh up when making decisions.
Q132 Douglas McAllister: In relation to the amount received, how many were in favour and how many were against?
Cristina Nicolotti Squires: We had very few against.
Q133 Douglas McAllister: You had very few against?
Cristina Nicolotti Squires: Yes.
Q134 Douglas McAllister: But you don’t know the figures?
Cristina Nicolotti Squires: I do not know the exact number, I have not brought those exact numbers with me today but I can, of course, give them to the Committee.
Q135 Kirsteen Sullivan: Just to keep on with the AI-assisted responses, you have put quite a lot of weight on the fact that it was the volume of AI-assisted responses that delayed your self-imposed deadline of before Easter. What difference did an AI-assisted response make in the consideration of the responses? For me, 1,300 responses in total is not a great number, given the importance of the subject. I would easily have anticipated at least that, if not more. I do not see why it takes longer to go through the AI-assisted ones as opposed to individual responses. Can you help me understand that?
Glenn Preston: I do not think that is the way that we treated it.
Q136 Kirsteen Sullivan: You placed a lot of weight on to the fact that the AI-assisted responses extended past the original Easter deadline, so I do not understand what additional complexity those added or why it took the whole process beyond that original deadline. Other than that, did you not expect to get at least 1,300 responses?
Glenn Preston: I do not think we knew how many we were going to get before the consultation closed. Clearly a significant proportion, 90% of them, came through that campaign tool. We read every single response, whether it was through that campaign tool or whether it was sent directly to us formally as part of the normal consultation method of just submitting to an Ofcom address. It took us that period of time to go through all the responses, not just the 1,100 AI-assisted ones.
Q137 Kirsteen Sullivan: The AI-assisted response in itself did not add any additional pressure, it was more the volume of them; is that what you are saying?
Glenn Preston: It is a volume point, yes.
Q138 Kirsteen Sullivan: In which case you did not expect at least 1,300 responses, if not more, for changes that were so contentious. I say that as an MP who literally gets hundreds and hundreds of campaign emails on particular topics. None of this is unfamiliar to anyone sitting around the table. I struggle to understand why an organisation such as Ofcom could not deal with 1,300 responses within its self-imposed deadline.
Cristina Nicolotti Squires: With hindsight, which is a fantastic tool, the self-imposed deadline that we had set was perhaps unrealistic.
Q139 Kirsteen Sullivan: Did you not anticipate that volume of responses?
Cristina Nicolotti Squires: As I said, we did not anticipate the handling; with the AI thing, there was a lot of data in there that would not normally be provided, as I understand it, had people taken the more traditional route. It was the treating of that data that was an issue.
Q140 Chair: When people put in responses to consultations do they not normally provide their name, address and personal data?
Glenn Preston: It differs. They are asked to, certainly, with the tools that they provide, but there is also then an opportunity for them to say whether they want the response to be published or they want personal data to be removed. None of that happened with the AI-assisted tool because it had come directly via the website. An Ofcom pro forma would have your name and your email address, for example, and then an option as to whether it would be published or whether you wanted your personal data removed.
Cristina Nicolotti Squires: Which this did not.
Glenn Preston: None of that happened with the AI-assisted responses.
Q141 Chair: Did you say it did not happen?
Glenn Preston: When people filled out their options from the site and it generated an email from them, there was nothing that was provided by the campaign tool that allowed them to say that they either wanted it to be published, not published, or that they wanted personal data to be removed.
Q142 Chair: What did you do? Did you go back to those individuals and ask them?
Glenn Preston: We did not go back to them as individuals, no.
Q143 Chair: You would then make a decision about how it would be handled, in that scenario?
Glenn Preston: Which was to read every single one of those responses.
Chair: I am not questioning that they were read, I am questioning how they were then dealt with. I am genuinely trying to understand why it took so long, but I am clearly not asking the right questions.
Q144 Lillian Jones: You seem to be reading my mind this morning, Chair. It is concerning that an organisation, Ofcom, has taken so long to read or deal with such a small number of responses to a consultation, given that in this digital age people are turning to other methods to share their views. It is concerning that those with the campaign were not contacted to ask whether they were for or against. I find that really concerning. Am I right to be concerned?
Glenn Preston: I am not sure about the last point you were saying, about being contacted to ask about whether they were for or against?
Lillian Jones: The Chair asked you about those AI responses, and you said that there was nothing within the campaign tool that suggested they were either for or against.
Glenn Preston: No, I do not think it was about that.
Cristina Nicolotti Squires: It was whether we could use their data or not, whether we could publish who they were and their data. It was not whether they were for or against it.
Q145 Lillian Jones: Right okay, but you did not contact them?
Glenn Preston: No, we did not go back to the individuals that had used the AI tool.
Q146 Lillian Jones: Those responses were not published as a single response?
Glenn Preston: No.
Q147 Douglas McAllister: Just on this point again, the explanation that Ofcom gave for delaying the decision was that—correct me if I am wrong—you, “Wanted time to engage with representations we had received throughout the process.” That was the explanation given by Ofcom for the extension and the delay to allow you to publish in June. You have now told the Committee that you did not engage with those representations.
Glenn Preston: No, that that is not what we said. We said that we did not respond to the individuals who used the AI-assistive tool, but we did read every single representation.
Cristina Nicolotti Squires: What you mean by engaged was we were not engaged with the individuals; we were engaging with what they had said and making sure that we had been across it all.
Q148 Douglas McAllister: How did you engage with the audiences during this consultation process? To my mind, those over 1,000 would be the audience. How did you engage with the audience? You asked to continue publication to allow you to engage with representations received. You received over 1,100 from individual, I presume, audience members. You are telling us that you did not make any contact with them. How did you engage with audiences before reaching your decision?
Cristina Nicolotti Squires: Before reaching our decision we did a number of engagements directly with a wide range of different organisations from the newsrooms affected.
Q149 Douglas McAllister: And audiences?
Cristina Nicolotti Squires: In terms of audiences we did a large amount of research. From the amount of passion felt by this programme you would have expected it to have much larger audiences than it does. The actual figures show us that that programme has been in decline in terms of audience numbers over the last five years, which have gone down quite significantly. Last year it was a 14% share. This programme was not being watched by people and its audiences have been continually going down over the last five years, in line with a lot of public service broadcasting news programmes—we know that audiences are going down. They are actually fragmenting and going in different ways.
We engage with audiences very much through a lot of research that we do that continues throughout the year. Glenn mentioned Media Nations, which was published a couple of weeks ago. We have our News Consumption Survey that comes out next week, which we can obviously make sure you all have copies of. It shows us that people are increasingly turning to social media and digital resources to get their news. That is not just a young people thing actually, older generations are turning to that as well.
If we look at what has happened in the six weeks since the changes were made to these programmes, the audiences have stayed roughly the same: they have not gone up or down. One of the reasons why we made this decision was so the STV would be able to make sure it was delivering the news where people were consuming it. The digital video views before these changes was about 64 million a month, and it has now gone up to about 80 million in the last couple of months. It is really important to look at it in the context of, in terms of the audience, yes, there were a lot of people who felt very strongly about these changes but they were not watching the programme. The programme’s audiences were declining and continued to do so.
That is not because the programme or the content is no good, it is because audience habits are very much changing. We are seeing a fragmentation right across all public service broadcasters. People are consuming their news in different ways. When we made this decision we were very mindful of the fact that we had called public service broadcasters to make sure they were delivering news in the form that people are getting to it. I hope that gives you some sort of context in terms of how we engage with audiences in terms of our research, but also the evidence of the numbers of audiences that were watching the programmes and still are.
Q150 Chair: We are going to move on to another question but I will just make a slight comment, which is that it is making quite a sweeping assumption to assume that the 1,200, 1,300 people who responded were not part of the audience or not the audience. I would have thought they were.
Cristina Nicolotti Squires: I am sure they were.
Chair: You suggested they were not watching.
Cristina Nicolotti Squires: I was not talking about those individuals, but in terms of the population watching that programme over the last five years, fewer and fewer people have been watching that programme.
Q151 Chair: You actually said the people who responded were not the people who were watching.
Cristina Nicolotti Squires: I am sorry I am sorry if I misspoke. I do not know if the individuals who wrote to us in whichever way they communicated with us were actually viewers of the programme. I imagine they probably were.
Q152 Douglas Lumsden: While listening to that I was looking at the data: you had 1,340 responses but you actually seem to be using the data on the audience figures going down to make the decision. I guess a lot of people will be thinking, for the consultation, “What is the point?” With 1,340 responses the vast majority of them were against the changes that were proposed and the decision has been made anyway, so for future responses, is there any point in people actually submitting anything at all?
Cristina Nicolotti Squires: Absolutely there is. It is important to remember that, as part of all of this process we have moved STV from its original position. What we have ended up with is not what it originally proposed, so we were able to use that sentiment. As I said, audience and people’s response to our consultations is really important, but they are among other factors. Again, it is important to take this in context. Public service broadcasting is struggling financially, as we have said publicly. STV’s revenue was published last week, and it has gone down by 27% over the last year. Channel 4 will be announcing a reorganisation this morning, or later on today, about which it is reported that a considerable number of jobs will be going. The BBC has another £500 million to save.
Public service broadcasting and regional, local, and national news is in a very difficult place. We were very mindful that we wanted to make sure that STV continues; we want it to flourish and thrive. I do not want to see STV not delivering to audiences at all and so we had to balance very carefully the sustainability of public service broadcasting in Scotland and the exact manner in which it is dealt.
I have been in journalism for 35 years; I started in local news. I am passionate about news, that is why I have come to Ofcom: I want to preserve it and for people to be able to get accurate, impartial news wherever they are. I personally believe in that, but the long-term sustainability of that service was a factor in our decision making.
Q153 Douglas Lumsden: It still gets to, what was the point of the consultation? You have maybe 95%, 96% or something of the people who have actually taken part in that consultation who have just simply been ignored. They will be thinking, “What is the point in future?”
Cristina Nicolotti Squires: They were not ignored; all those responses were carefully read and considered and taken as part of the evidence.
Glenn Preston: One of the challenges, particularly through the large number that were generated online as well, is there was not as much engagement with the actual questions that were in the consultation, and there are these broader contextual issues that Cristina was just describing as well. People were really kind of countering the evidence that we have been presenting, that Cristina has just articulated. There is a real concern for us about waiting to a kind of point of crisis for having to have to act with STV; the situation is quite difficult for both the STV News at 6 pm, the numbers are quite similar across central and north. Sometimes we think about this only as an STV North licence issue; it is not, it is an STV North and an STV Central one.
Cristina Nicolotti Squires: It is the same for central, yes.
Glenn Preston: Where we have seen that decline in linear across central and Scotland successively over five years with the share, as Cristina said, at 14%. That is concerning for us. We know that the costs of running the news service for STV are always likely to outweigh the amount of money that it is making, we said that in analysis back in 2022. It is a very precarious position, not just for STV but the other public service broadcasters in the provision of news, and we would not want to be sitting here in a year’s time, for example, and you saying to us, “You’ve been asleep at the wheel and not been making changes that should have been made.”
Cristina Nicolotti Squires: Going back to your point about the consultation responses being ignored, the point of a consultation is not just to get people’s sentiment but it is also to look at evidence. It was clear in the consultation responses that nobody had come up with different evidence that changed the story. There was sentiment and feeling but there was no actual evidence, and we have to make decisions based on evidence.
Douglas McAllister: Ofcom said it was minded to approve STV’s proposals even before the consultation began.
Chair: Mr McAllister ,we are moving on.
Q154 Susan Murray: The supplementaries have obviously raised wide-ranging responses from yourselves, but does Ofcom accept that STV’s new service will be a weaker offering than the one that is currently available?
Cristina Nicolotti Squires: I do not, but you would expect me to say that. As I said, if you only judge it through the narrow lens of a 6 pm programme then I would not say it was weaker, so far it seems to be over-indexing on the 30% of bespoke content for that particular area. It has increased its provision of news digitally, which is where people are getting their news from.
All I want is for people to get impartial, accurate news where they are consuming it. Yes, it would be fantastic if they did not have to make any financial savings, nobody had to make any cuts and we could continue, but people are getting their news in different ways. I will be honest; the work we did with STV was to make sure that it was delivering the news digitally. I met a very nice woman in Aberdeen who said to me, “I’m a journalist, I want to carry on being a journalist. I do not want to move to Glasgow and I want to be able to deliver the news. As well as on the linear programme I want to be able to do more digital stuff.” She actually said that to me, and that has enabled her to do it. I do not think it is a weaker proposition, it is a different proposition and I wish STV well in continuing to do this.
We will be very carefully making sure that it sticks to the requirements we have given for this and, as I said, the numbers speak for themselves. The linear audiences have not gone down, so people obviously feel that it is worth watching, and the digital engagement has gone up. The evidence shows that no one is getting anything weaker.
Q155 Susan Murray: We have heard a number of times how many communications MPs get from their constituents and, as elected representatives of those constituents, the First Minister and MSPs from several parties opposed the changes. How did Ofcom consider these views and take them into account as part of the decision?
Glenn Preston: We have treated them all the same. We have gone through every individual response that we have had, and the collective ones, including the one that you have just articulated, and that is part of that broader evidential picture that Cristina has just been describing.
Cristina Nicolotti Squires: In terms of engagement, we went and gave evidence in Holyrood; when was that?
Glenn Preston: January.
Cristina Nicolotti Squires: In January. Since the decision was published I have been to meet the Culture Minister in Holyrood to try to explain and unpack a bit of the thinking behind it and, as I said, give a bit more context to the decision we had made.
Glenn Preston: We also had quite extensive engagement with the previous Culture Secretary and the Scottish Government prior to the election period, so Cristina, our chief executive and ourselves have met them. We meet Scottish Government officials regularly just to talk through what we are proposing to do.
As Cristina was mentioning earlier, during the consultation period we were in Dundee and Aberdeen. We were particularly interested to hear from STV’s own staff, so we saw the newsroom in Dundee, Cristina and other colleagues saw the newsroom in Aberdeen and there was engagement actually online, not in person, with the newsroom in Inverness. It is worth saying about that that the licence obligations that STV are now under, post the changes that we announced in June, still require that kind of regional diversification and, critically, they still require it to have physical news resource in those sites in the north and central Scotland.
Cristina Nicolotti Squires: Yes, the news gathering resource has not been affected by this. There were no compulsory redundancies and we very explicitly said that the reporters and journalists still have to be there. There are as many of them there now as there were before, they are just delivering the news in a different way.
Q156 Susan Murray: Is Ofcom confident that the decision is sustainable, given the apparent opposition from the political spectrum?
Cristina Nicolotti Squires: I accept that it is a decision that politically people have not supported and, as was said to me when I was in Edinburgh a few weeks ago, it was a decision that we made that people do not agree with. The decision was made because it is really important that STV is able to continue to exist, frankly, and it is really important that Scottish audiences have a commercial PSB, as well as the BBC. ITV, which STV is not a part of, feels it cannot survive and it wants to be bought by Sky. I want to be able to do everything I can to ensure the long-term existence of STV and its provision of news to audiences right across Scotland, wherever and whoever they are and however they consume their news. It was a politically unpalatable decision, I get that, but we had to make a decision that was the best for audiences wherever they are and however they consume their news, and for the long-term sustainability and future of STV. The test of that will be whether it is still around in 2034 when its licence runs out. I very much hope so.
Q157 Mr MacDonald: The centralisation of services and the provision of less good services for people in rural Scotland is my number one issue. Yesterday, I got a memo from someone in the BBC outlining the cuts in Inverness and Stornoway; I do not know if you know about that. My concern is that we are seeing a centralisation of news services that disadvantages the highlands. As an amendment—you may know about this better than me—I believe that the Westminster Government give funding to the regional press in England, but no such funding is available in Scotland, which disadvantages the rural press. Do you have any comment on those two things?
Cristina Nicolotti Squires: Questions of funding from the Westminster Government are for the Westminster Government and not for us. I do not know the details of further BBC cuts—those have not been communicated to us—but the BBC, as I have said, has £500 million worth of cuts to make.
You talk about the word centralisation. I would not necessarily say that is what has happened with STV: yes, the production of the programme has gone to a single place in Glasgow, but the journalists who are news gathering, talking to communities and telling their stories—whether online, through an Instagram post or in a package for the 6 o’clock news—are still there. To my knowledge, STV is not being centralised: I would be aware if that happened. The Aberdeen newsroom is still open, and people are still working in it, they are just delivering news in a different way. Production—the physical place from where the programme is transmitted—has been centralised, but I would not characterise the content going into it as having been centralised.
In terms of your question about the BBC, I do not know what its long-term plans are; I have read some speculation in the press, but I cannot add any more. That is for the BBC to answer, rather than us.
Q158 Mr MacDonald: If the BBC closed Inverness on the same basis the STV are closing it, which is not a proposal, presumably that would be a very big issue for you.
Cristina Nicolotti Squires: The closure of any newsroom is an issue.
Q159 Mr MacDonald: If they reduce their staff significantly, isn’t that also an issue for you?
Cristina Nicolotti Squires: There would have to be a regulatory process for any such decisions and we would look at it as we do all these things, but I do not want to speculate on something that has not actually come to us yet. Journalism is more important now than it has ever been; reducing the amount of people doing the job is always difficult.
Glenn Preston: I would add one quick supplemental: it is STV specific but goes to your point about centralisation. Ahead of coming today, I watched both editions of north and central news last night just to get a feel for how they looked after the changes. There were two stories in particular—on the Eljamel inquiry and an announcement on Spaceport funding for SaxaVord—that were run from both licences, so you could watch them on central as well as north last night. There was incredibly high-quality journalism—from staff in the north region, as I understand it—presented across the whole of Scotland because of the national interest.
When they did the more local stuff, again there was some brilliant quality journalism from the north; one of the stories was specific to Dundee but had a broader application because, ironically, it was about the use of AI in the creative sector. It has not been long, and we are going to have to assess STV’s performance over the course of next year, but at the moment the evidence is positive. It is important to emphasise that quick shift to digital news that Cristina mentioned.
STV seems to be over-indexing on the regional news online, but substantially more people are engaging with its regional news online, according to year-on-year comparisons: there have been a third more even in the last handful of months. There are some positive moves about regional news having more eyeballs on it than it had previously.
Cristina Nicolotti Squires: That is what Ofcom wants to see; we want people to get access to accurate, impartial and trusted news. We know that people who engage with local and regional news and the nation’s news have stronger links to democracy and feel more supportive of their institutions.
I am not being negative about people who do not watch the regional news or the 6 o’clock programme anymore, for whatever reason. Their ability to get that news— wherever they are consuming it—is really important, and this decision has made that possible. It is early days, but we made very clear to STV that we would be on at it about this. The evidence so far is that the viewing figures have not gone down for these programmes but have stayed the same; more high-quality content is being consumed, but in a different format.
Q160 Dave Doogan: I am concerned with two things. First, the public sector broadcasting licence was issued to STV on the basis that it provided this service; it then came to you and said, “We can no longer economically provide this service.” You said, “We’ll need to have a consultation in order to find out how we go forward.” Everybody across the entire political spectrum in Scotland—very little unites them—is against this. Everybody who is affected by it is against it. Everybody who works there was against it: incidentally, if your job moves 150 miles away from where you live, your letter might not mention compulsory redundancy but in effect that is what it is. The vast majority of people who responded to your consultation were against this, and yet it went ahead anyway. If something similar was to happen to a broadcast region in England, what would be the point of engaging with Ofcom’s consultation, when it is just going to do what the broadcaster says anyway?
Cristina Nicolotti Squires: It is important to make the point that in this particular case, we did not do what the broadcasters initially suggested. We told STV that we would not approve its original submission, and where we landed has given more than was originally proposed. We are evidence-based, and that is evidence that we absolutely do not automatically do what broadcasters tell us. If ITV decided to approach us, again we would consult. We do not ignore the consultations. We look for new evidence. That is the point of a consultation, for people to bring up new evidence that we have not perhaps considered or were not aware of. I would say to anybody, “Please indulge in the consultation process, that is what it is there for; we want to hear from you. We do not ignore it and we do not make decisions in advance; we look for new evidence.”
Q161 Dave Doogan: What changed as a result of the consultation?
Cristina Nicolotti Squires: We did not accept the initial proposal from STV. Nothing changed after the consultation because, as we said, nobody had given different evidence.
Glenn Preston: You talked about the financial situation. We did an assessment of the sustainability of the news provisions for Channel 3 licence holders back in 2022, which we have to do under statute. Even at that point we thought it would likely result in a net cost for STV. That has come to pass, and if anything that net cost has been higher as programming costs have gone up over the course of the last few years. That is a driver for STV to come to us and say, “You’ve already recognised that this was going to come at a net cost to us; it’s coming at a greater net cost and that’s why we want to talk about changing the obligations in the licence.”
It is really important to stress that when it sent us the first case for change—we have published both—it proposed 100% worth of sharing; there would be no regional distinction at all between the north and central licences. We could not read the licences in that way, so we went back to it and explicitly said, “That isn’t going to work with your licence commitments; you need to come up with an alternative that still allows us to see that regional distinction between the two places.” It has done that, and the early signs are that it has been done to a good standard.
Another point that people were specific about in the consultation responses—we have touched on this in the other questions—was the requirement to have journalistic resource still located in particular places in the north licence: Inverness, Aberdeen and Dundee. That is a licence obligation for STV as well, so it has been written in in part as a result of the consultation responses.
Cristina Nicolotti Squires: I am not aware of anyone who has been asked to commute 150 miles. I do not think people have been relocated unless they particularly asked for that.
Chair: We are going to move on to something else, but can I just leave you with a point that perhaps you can come back to before the end of this session? I would imagine you expect people taking part in a consultation to be predominantly members of the public. How does Ofcom expect members of the public to come up with new evidence that counters the evidence given to it by a large broadcaster? I will leave you to think about that until the end of the meeting and we can then come back to it. I am going to go on to Lillian Jones.
Q162 Lillian Jones: STV revised its original proposal before Ofcom made its decision. How significant were the differences between the two proposals?
Glenn Preston: They have both been published. As I mentioned, STV sent us its initial submission and suggestion for 100% of news sharing in the middle of October last year. We were not happy that that would be compliant with the licences, so we asked it to rethink; it came back to us in November. When we published the consultation in December, we published both of STV’s submissions to us alongside that, to give people the evidence they would need to respond to the consultation.
Cristina Nicolotti Squires: There was no 30% in the original submission. STV was going to do only one programme with totally shared content and no bespoke content from the northern belt at all.
Glenn Preston: That is detailed in our final statement and in the consultation that we published in December. STV came back with the revised proposal of a 70:30 split.
Cristina Nicolotti Squires: In the original submission there was no mention of any digital strategy and no mention of increasing the delivery of digital news.
Glenn Preston: One more point I would make—it is not recency bias from watching the north and central programmes last night—is that this does not stop STV using stories from the north that might be of national interest or particular interest to people in Scotland, on the central programme. The two examples I just gave you on the Eljamel inquiry and the SaxaVord Spaceport funding last night are a really good example of the type of content we are seeing that is both particular to the north but also has a wider Scotland-level application.
Q163 Lillian Jones: Did Ofcom work with STV to come up with the revised set of proposals?
Glenn Preston: No. We talked to it about the first thing it submitted; we said, “We want you to go away and think internally within STV about what it is you think would actually meet the obligations in the licence that require that regional distinction.” It came back to us in November with the one that we published alongside the consultation three or four weeks ago.
Cristina Nicolotti Squires: We didn’t tell it how to do it. As a former journalist I was tempted to draw up a plan, but, at the end of the day, editorial plans are down to the broadcaster.
Q164 Lillian Jones: Did you not work with STV on its proposals?
Cristina Nicolotti Squires: It depends on how you define “work with”. We did not create the submission, but we told it the first one was not good enough: there was no digital news plan and we wanted more bespoke content in the north than it was proposing.
Q165 Lillian Jones: Did you suggest anything that it should include within the proposals?
Glenn Preston: When it submitted the first one—this is all publicly available—we said, “This doesn’t meet the licence obligations around regional distinctiveness. We need you to come back with a proposition that specifically demonstrates that you’re still able to do things that are particular to the central region and the north region.” That is what it did. It was an internal process; it is not for us as the regulator to make an editorial choice about how news is delivered. STV worked on that and came back to us with the revised proposal.
Lillian Jones: Ms Squires stated five minutes ago that Ofcom would not have approved the original proposal from STV.
Q166 Douglas McAllister: Can I ask a supplementary on that point? Before the consultation process, did Ofcom state publicly that it was minded to approve the revised proposals?
Glenn Preston: The consultation that we put out had a minded to approve proposal in it, predominantly because it met the conditions that were in the licence for that regional distinctiveness that I was talking about, and we were getting additional commitments—as I said, those came out in the consultation responses—that journalistic resource would be retained, particularly in the north licence.
Q167 Douglas McAllister: Was the minded to approve statement issued by Ofcom before the consultation?
Glenn Preston: It was at the consultation.
Cristina Nicolotti Squires: It was when the consultation went out.
Glenn Preston: Across all our different types of consultation, it is common for Ofcom to give people a steer on what we are thinking in relation to the evidence. As Cristina says, if we then get evidence that counters it—we may come back to your question, Chair, about that—of course we will consider that.
Q168 Douglas McAllister: Did you give evidence to the Scottish Parliament during the consultation process?
Glenn Preston: We did.
Q169 Douglas McAllister: Was that in January?
Glenn Preston: It was, yes.
Q170 Douglas McAllister: How did you describe the proposal to the Scottish Parliament during the consultation process?
Glenn Preston: We described it in the same way. The consultation had been published prior to our evidence session at Holyrood in January; they had the published consultation that included the minded to approve proposal plus the two STV submissions that had been sent to us in October and November.
Q171 Douglas Lumsden: Looking at the timescales around this decision making, Ofcom renewed all 15 licences, including for STV, for a 10-year term starting 1 January 2025. Just nine or 10 months later, STV asked for that to be looked at again and tried to change the terms of the licence. Does Ofcom feel duped that STV signed up to the new licence and then almost immediately tried to change things?
Cristina Nicolotti Squires: I would not characterise it as feeling duped. I cannot think what the timescale was, but there were a lot of conversations with STV before we got a firm proposal that it wanted to vary the licence. That was well after the licence had been agreed by us. I do not think Ofcom would ever want to turn around and say, “We’re not going to grant this licence because we don’t think you’re financially sustainable.” At the time, we were happy that STV had the finances to continue delivering on its licence obligations, but changes in audience and the other things we have mentioned probably moved faster than we thought. STV’s financial position has changed quite considerably, and that has been a recent thing. Glenn knows more about the timescale of the actual awarding of the licences because the decision was made long before the licence.
Glenn Preston: It was made several years before. I have already referred to this, but in answer to your question it is probably worth repeating. There is a statutory obligation on Ofcom before the 10-year licence period ends to give advice to the UK Government about the sustainability of the licences. The UK Government then have to make decisions about whether the framework needs to be changed. That process went back to ‘21-22.
As I have mentioned, our financial sustainability testing had already identified that there were likely to be net costs for STV in running its two licences in Scotland in 2022. That was the basis on which the Secretary of State made the decision that the licence would be renewed on the same terms. That meant there were three and a half years between the original financial assessment, the Secretary of State’s decision, and the issuing of the new 10-year licence. As Cristina says, the picture changed dramatically during that period of time: for example, the cost of production, including the cost of news production, went up quite dramatically, higher than we—or even some broadcasters—anticipated. Part of the case that STV brought to us was that those likely net costs we had identified three or four years before were higher still; in consequence it would be very difficult to deliver a sustainable news service.
The other thing I would say is that there is nothing to stop any broadcaster, whether STV, ITV or the BBC, coming to us at any point to say, “We would like to change the conditions in our licence.” It might be because of financial sustainability or something else, but it is always possible for them to come to us and say that.
Cristina Nicolotti Squires: Indeed, it can be handed back. There is no obligation on STV; it could turn around and say, “We have the licence until 2034, but we don’t want to continue with it.”
Q172 Douglas Lumsden: When STV looked for the licence to be changed, did you consider putting it back out to the tender process, or was there no consideration of that at all?
Cristina Nicolotti Squires: What do you mean by the tender process?
Q173 Douglas Lumsden: I mean, making it reapply for the licence with the new information about what it would deliver, which had obviously changed since the licence was granted.
Glenn Preston: The important point about the process is that we give advice to the UK Government or the Secretary of State about the sustainability of the licence. They then have to make the decision about whether there should be changes to the licence terms for Channel 3 operators. That decision dated back three or four years prior to STV coming to talk to us about these changes. We can only reissue the licence on the basis that has been agreed by following the advice we have given to the Secretary of State. Once that process has been completed, there is no option to go back and say, “We think it should be different”.
Q174 Douglas Lumsden: If it is granted and then changed very soon after, does that not set a precedent for anyone else to say, “Hold on, I want to do something different, I don’t want to deliver on what I’ve promised, I want to change the rules?”
Glenn Preston: I completely get the meaning behind your question. It is perfectly possible that STV or any other broadcaster could come to us at any point.
Cristina Nicolotti Squires: Anyone could come to us and say, “We can’t do what we said we were going to, and we want to apply for a licence variation.”
Q175 Douglas Lumsden: Has anyone else asked for that?
Cristina Nicolotti Squires: Not that I am aware of.
Glenn Preston: That has not happened with the Channel 3 licences, but it is not uncommon for a broadcaster to come to us from time to time and potentially ask for changes to their licences.
Douglas Lumsden: When it was granted the licences, STV said, “We welcome the renewal of our licences, which provide us with the certainty to continue to invest in our business for the long term while ensuring continued delivery of valued public service broadcasting.” A few months later, it wanted to renege on the licence.
Q176 Mr MacDonald: This will be a quick question, as we have covered it to a large extent and are less than halfway through our list of questions. As we have discussed, STV says that it will maintain news gathering resources across all its bases. What do you think that means in practice? How many journalists did it have, and how many does it have now? Coming back to the BBC, do you have an idea of how many journalists it has, and do you keep a track of that number?
Cristina Nicolotti Squires: I have experienced huge changes in journalism. When I first started in local news, there would be four—sometimes five—journalists doing a story for TV. Now a regional news organisation will very often send one person to do it all. The number of people has changed as technology has changed. I will not go into whether that is good or bad, but the creation of journalism has become much more efficient. I do not know if it is about hard numbers; as I said, there were no compulsory redundancies in STV North as far as I am aware, and there are still the same number of journalists. Is the person who operates the vision mixer in the production gallery a journalist? In pure terms, no, because they are not going out and telling people stories. As I understand it, the number of journalists going out and doing news gathering and telling stories has not changed.
Glenn Preston: The answer to your question is that we do not track the number of journalists; we see that as a strategic or editorial choice for the broadcasters themselves to decide who they need to have where. With STV, we have provisions in the licence that require it to have journalistic resource, but decisions about the shape of that and the number of people is rightly for it to make. I certainly do not think we want that to be a regulatory choice for a commercial business. STV announced that the total number of jobs it was looking to reduce as part of its wider savings package, was—I think—60. What I am not sure about is how many of those classed as news journalists were included in that number. It was certainly a smaller proportion, as I understand it.
Q177 Mr MacDonald: You can see where I am coming from: I am worried that the north and west are losing their journalists. I touched on the fact that Westminster is giving money to help the regional press, but that is not happening in Scotland, as far as I am aware. Does that bother you?
Cristina Nicolotti Squires: I would not know about that because we do not regulate the press, we only regulate the broadcast media. I am not aware of whether it applies to Scotland or not.
Glenn Preston: I do not know the answer about funding.
Cristina Nicolotti Squires: One would have thought the funding might be devolved to the Scottish Government.
Glenn Preston: That is potentially the case, but the one thing we know about—you probably do also, Mr MacDonald—is that there was a pot for local democracy reporters that was essentially funded through the BBC, which had numbers of people. The point was to embed a regional representation piece along with local regional news providers, including some from the press.
Cristina Nicolotti Squires: It has not been very successful.
Glenn Preston: I do not know what the status of that is, nor—in the context of charter reform—whether it will be a feature of the conversation about the BBC’s obligations.
Cristina Nicolotti Squires: It is actually being discussed as part of charter reform.
Q178 Maureen Burke: Following on from my colleagues’ previous questions, how did Ofcom assess the impact of these changes on the representation of different communities and cultures across Scotland?
Glenn Preston: We are statutorily obligated to do impact assessments, and we published those alongside the consultation. The probable standout was a recognition—this goes to your question also, Mr MacDonald—that it was possible that areas with older viewers, which are skewed towards rural areas, would be detrimentally affected by having less local news available on the linear STV News at 6 service. We countered that with the increasing availability of things such as fixed broadband, fixed wireless broadband and so on, where it is possible for people to be able to access regional news digitally and online. The early evidence we have seen from STV over the course of the last couple of months is that even those older audiences are beginning to shift to accessing regional news online, but we need to continue to look at that and see whether it is a continuing trend.
Q179 Maureen Burke: It would be a concern for people who do not have that access, but are you saying that you are going to give that support going forward?
Glenn Preston: It bleeds into a wider conversation about other things for which Ofcom is responsible: for example, promoting more competition and the availability and take up of internet access, whether that is through fixed broadband, mobile or satellite and so on. We publish the specific numbers for Scotland separately, and I am happy to share them with the Committee if that would be useful. There is a positive upward trajectory here; as a consequence, you can see audience behaviour begin to change as older audiences access more news and other content online. It looks like this is travelling in the right direction, but you are right to ask the question. We need to continue to look at it and make sure that we do not have a group of older or more vulnerable consumers who are left behind.
Q180 Douglas Lumsden: Is STV unusual in seeking changes to the scale of regional news services, or is it an outlier? Is there something going wrong at STV that is not happening at other channels?
Cristina Nicolotti Squires: I do not know about that. I am not going to comment on how it manages its finances and business strategy; that is down to STV. Going back to the broader picture, the financial pressures are hard on all these public service broadcasters. ITV is in discussions to sell half of its business to Sky because it feels that would be more sustainable like that. As I said, the BBC is facing big cuts, and Channel 4 is cutting roles as well. Is STV an outlier? I do not know. We have not had any other proposals and no one else has come to us yet. In the past, the BBC has asked for various operating licence changes; at the moment, ITV is focused on the acquisition, so I do not know its plans for the future. There are real pressures on public service broadcasters.
Q181 Douglas Lumsden: I understand there are pressures, but I am confused as to why only STV has actually requested a change.
Glenn Preston: ITV are the holders of the Channel 3 licences across the rest of the UK, including in Northern Ireland and Wales. Cristina mentioned the BBC; over the last two or three years, we have made licence changes for the BBC specifically in relation to its news provision in Scotland. You will know that it had the centrepiece 9 o’clock news on the BBC Scotland service; it came to us because it was not getting the audiences it had hoped for. It asked to do a 7 o’clock half hour to reduce the amount of news that was on that service, and we agreed. That is an example of the BBC having to do something similar over the last couple of years.
Q182 Douglas Lumsden: If STV comes back asking for further changes that will reduce local news content, can Ofcom give any assurance that those will not be allowed?
Cristina Nicolotti Squires: I cannot imagine a situation where we would agree to that, but I do not want to say never; STV has the right to come back to us at any point. I can certainly say that we would not accept a proposal without very serious consideration, consultation, and evidence from stakeholders. As I said, STV could turn around next week and say, “We do not want to have a licence to the north anymore,” and hand it back. We cannot prevent that. I cannot sit here and categorically say that we will not accept anything it proposes to us, but I really hope that does not happen. Again, the reason why we made our decision and ended up with STV doing more than it originally wanted to do, was to make sure that it was sustainable and able to continue to deliver for audiences across Scotland in whatever manner they consume their news.
Q183 Chair: We know that viewing habits are changing; we have referenced that already. Is there a risk that an increased focus on digital news could disadvantage some viewers? You mentioned evidence that older people are perhaps beginning to catch up, but technology continues to move on. Is that problematic for you, going forward?
Cristina Nicolotti Squires: At the end of the day, we are here to make sure that all audiences get the content that they need and want. We are seeing changes in the way content is delivered across the Ofcom remit, and we do not want to leave any audiences behind. There is a risk I suppose; we need to make sure that the 20% of the population who do not get their news from social media are catered for and supplied with good quality information. We are very cognisant of that and of making sure that everyone has access.
Q184 Chair: Can I ask you about that 20% figure you mentioned? I am conscious that I still watch the news most days—
Cristina Nicolotti Squires: I do too.
Chair: I also get content from social media; is that 20% people who exclusively get their content from other sources?
Cristina Nicolotti Squires: Our research figures show that 80% of people get their news mainly from social media; one assumes that the other 20% do not. That is my explanation. A lot of people get it from both, but as the numbers show, fewer people are choosing to watch a linear news programme.
Glenn Preston: The other thing to acknowledge is the current consultation by the UK Government on their Green Paper, which specifically covers your question in a lot of detail. Some decisions for the UK Government in response to these issues—for example, about the prominence of public service broadcast news on particular platforms—might manifest in our regulatory duties.
Q185 Kirsteen Sullivan: For the past seven years, STV News at 6 has been Scotland’s most watched news programme. How important was that as a factor when you considered STV’s proposals?
Cristina Nicolotti Squires: Do you mean that it is more watched than the BBC? There are two, are there not?
Q186 Kirsteen Sullivan: It is the most watched: it is the one that most people in Scotland turn to. Was that considered as evidence?
Cristina Nicolotti Squires: It is a fact, without a doubt, but the bottom line is that the number of viewers has still gone down considerably in the last five years. It may be the most watched, but fewer people are watching it than five years ago. That has not changed.
Glenn Preston: That audience share point is quite important. As you rightly say, the percentage suggests that the numbers watching it could be high, but they are not. They have been declining successively year on year, over five, possibly even more than five years now. The issue for us is that the numbers are rapidly going down.
Q187 Kirsteen Sullivan: In reaching your decision, did you consider the overall provision of regional and local news available to audiences, including news provided by the BBC? Did you look at the mix?
Cristina Nicolotti Squires: This decision was about STV’s licence obligations and news provision, rather than balancing them out with other organisations. There are lots of very good organisations in Scotland that provide news. Unless I have misunderstood your point, the BBC does not do separate programmes; it does one programme, so we did not use that as evidence when we came to making this decision.
Glenn Preston: The other important thing is that the STV commitment was to push more regional news to the digital platforms where audiences were going to be watching or viewing and able to access it. Cristina mentioned the fact that we asked it to come back with a more well thought-through digital strategy for how it would deal with this, making sure that the regional news provision was still available to people, not just in the north, but in the central licence region as well. There is some evidence now that this is working, though it is too soon to say that definitively.
Cristina Nicolotti Squires: It has been six weeks.
Glenn Preston: STV formally started the news sharing provisions on 13 July, but there are encouraging early signs that its regional news is performing better than it has ever done, and we want to see that trend continue. We will report against that when STV reaches the end of its licence year next summer.
Q188 Kirsteen Sullivan: Is it fair to say that you are taking a narrow view of your remit in purely looking at STV’s obligations?
Glenn Preston: That is what we are obligated to do under our regulatory duties.
Q189 Kirsteen Sullivan: Can you see that there is a wider concern for the audience that perhaps they are not getting the regional news service they deserve? Communities in rural areas already feel left behind: news and services are often focused on areas with larger populations. Would you agree that there is a wider context here?
Glenn Preston: There is, and we recognised that in the consultation for STV. Yesterday we updated our Transmission Critical public report, which is looking at the sustainability of public service broadcasters and the public service media more generally. It absolutely highlights the issues you have just asked about. As an exercise, we are required to consider STV’s licence changes against its obligations, but that is not our only ongoing work. In the Green Paper that I have already mentioned, the Government are doing work on things such as regional news that might result in further legislative changes that we would have to implement.
Q190 Kirsteen Sullivan: Did you say that you recognised the wider context as part of the consultation?
Glenn Preston: The whole sustainability of public service media was a feature of the consultation.
Q191 Kirsteen Sullivan: It was not a feature in the decision, so you can understand why people feel frustrated: they gave their views, but those were not taken into account in the decision.
Glenn Preston: I do not agree that it was not considered as part of the decision. For us, the point was to ensure that STV was able to continue to sustainably provide news and regional news—
Cristina Nicolotti Squires: Of high quality.
Glenn Preston: That is in the wider context of the serious financial headwinds it is facing. We have reached a balanced position that still requires STV to have distinctive news in the two licence areas and journalistic resource in those areas as well, but which gives it sufficient financial headroom so that it can sustainably continue to function in the next few years.
Cristina Nicolotti Squires: I do not know whether this helps or not, but when we were discussing the differences, we were quite surprised that the audiences for the north programme and for the central programme were not hugely different. I naively assumed that the audience would be much bigger in one or the other, but they were actually very similar. The proportion of people in the northern belt who were watching a programme was not very different from the proportion of people who were watching it in the central belt, which I thought was quite interesting.
Q192 Kirsteen Sullivan: Do you accept that those audiences might have different needs?
Glenn Preston: That is exactly why we have written regional distinctiveness into the revised licences and required STV to retain journalistic resource.
Cristina Nicolotti Squires: It is to make sure those needs are catered for.
Q193 Lillian Jones: How important was STV’s digital strategy to Ofcom’s decision to approve the changes?
Cristina Nicolotti Squires: It is important; as we said publicly in our Transmission Critical report last year, broadcasters need to take public service content—news content in particular—to where audiences are. I have worked in a number of newsrooms over the last few years, and they all had digital strategies and were pivoting to become digital-first newsrooms. It was really important that STV had a clearer path to making digital news available because that is how people are consuming it.
Q194 Lillian Jones: To what extent did the expected growth in digital news consumption influence your assessment?
Cristina Nicolotti Squires: It was one of a number of factors. I cannot give you a mathematical formula but making sure that people get good high-quality news wherever they are was really important.
Q195 Lillian Jones: To what extent can social media and digital news services replace locally produced television news?
Cristina Nicolotti Squires: The digital content is locally produced. The journalist making a piece for the 6 o’clock news audience is the same person producing the Instagram reel or the written content. It is still locally produced journalism and it is still telling people stories from the areas where they are based.
Q196 Douglas Lumsden: As someone who lives in Aberdeen, I miss the STV North news programme. I know many of the STV North team: something that really sticks in their throats is that STV has been pleading poverty and that is why it cannot produce the regional news as it has done in the past, yet at the same time they see STV spend half a million pounds for example, on setting up a radio station. Quite rightly, they feel hacked off by that. Did you work with STV to look at other ways in which it could save money instead of that money coming from the local regional news?
Cristina Nicolotti Squires: STV’s obligation is to deliver the news to its audiences; it is down to STV how it does that.
Q197 Douglas Lumsden: That is not really the case: it operates under a licence.
Cristina Nicolotti Squires: In broad terms STV has created a radio station, which was not terribly expensive and is doing quite well, so people are getting news in a different way. As a regulator I would not want to sit down with any organisation and be involved in working out how they finance things; that is down to the individual organisations themselves.
Q198 Douglas Lumsden: You mentioned earlier that you are looking at a sustainable future.
Cristina Nicolotti Squires: We look at sustainability in the round, but exactly how they spend their money and how they run their businesses—not only the editorial freedoms but the financial decisions they make—are not part of our regulatory framework.
Q199 Douglas Lumsden: If STV comes to you and says, “We don’t want to spend money on regional news, we want to spend it on all these other things,” that is a commercial decision for it to make.
Cristina Nicolotti Squires: No. It has an obligation to provide regional news and therefore—
Q200 Douglas Lumsden: You have allowed it to break that obligation.
Cristina Nicolotti Squires: We have allowed it to change the way it delivers the 6 o’clock news on weekdays; it has been sharing content at weekends for many years. Originally STV wanted to have completely shared content across the entire week, but we landed at some bespoke content from Monday to Friday and none at weekends. We have not stopped STV doing regional news: we have allowed it to deliver that in a different way and to vary the licence in that respect. In terms of the other obligations, we are not saying that it can do whatever it wants.
Glenn Preston: It is important to pick up on the point just made that STV said it was going to spend half a million pounds on the creation of a new radio station and that meant it would stop spending money on news. That is not a conversation that we would have with any broadcaster. We do not say, “You have to spend this amount on the production of news.” We say, “These are the licence conditions that require you to deliver this proportion of news on—in this case—the weekly show.” We have inserted that or kept that regional distinctiveness between the two licences. How much the broadcaster spends on doing that is for it to decide.
Q201 Douglas Lumsden: But you have allowed STV to change.
Glenn Preston: We have allowed it to change the proportion of sharing between the two shows.
Cristina Nicolotti Squires: We have not allowed it to close Aberdeen; we have not allowed it to close Inverness; we have insisted it keeps those resources. What we have allowed it to do is to extend the sharing of a proportion of content.
Q202 Douglas Lumsden: You seem to suggest that this is because STV was not financially sustainable going forward, but at the same time it is spending half a million pounds on a radio station.
Cristina Nicolotti Squires: It has a financial challenge overall, and the cost of news is going up. Whether it starts a different service—the radio station delivers news and is doing quite well—or has a proposal that it wants to do, that will not come to us for regulatory approval. As Glenn said, how STV spends its money is entirely up to STV. If it had not created the radio station, would that have enabled it to have 100% content instead of 30%? I do not know.
Glenn Preston: As Cristina says, it could have chosen to split the money however it wanted to. We could not stop it from creating a radio station: that is a revenue generating opportunity. It is a little odd to think of a modern media organisation that is not working across platforms and trying to create alternative sources of income.
Q203 Douglas Lumsden: I understand you cannot stop it having a radio station, but you can stop it changing its obligations and the licence it agreed to just a year beforehand.
Glenn Preston: I understand the point you are making. What we are saying is that over the longer term the cost of news is going up dramatically, and the way in which people are consuming it is completely different. As a consequence it was reasonable for STV to come to us and say, “We think we’re going to have to change the provision of our news because we don’t think we’re going to be able to do this for the whole duration of the 10-year licence.”
Q204 Douglas Lumsden: My point is that it seems to be spending a lot of money elsewhere. It is spending half a million pounds on a radio station, half a million pounds on a chief executive, but it cannot afford to spend money on regional news. For me, that seems wrong.
Glenn Preston: That is for STV.
Cristina Nicolotti Squires: That is a question for it to answer.
Q205 Douglas Lumsden: But you are allowing it to do that.
Glenn Preston: We have allowed it to change the specific obligations in relation to the 6 o’clock news programme on STV, that is correct.
Q206 Chair: Just to clarify, you have no responsibility for its wider decision making?
Cristina Nicolotti Squires: No.
Glenn Preston: No.
Q207 Kirsteen Sullivan: Following on from my colleague’s point, do you think that cuts to regional news provision are viewed as an easier way to make savings, and a quick win?
Cristina Nicolotti Squires: I do not think it has been easy.
Q208 Kirsteen Sullivan: Perhaps easy is not the right word. Do you think it is one of the first things that broadcasters are reaching for when they realise they have to make savings?
Cristina Nicolotti Squires: I do not know. I have only seen one example of it and that was this one.
Kirsteen Sullivan: I was just asking for your opinion.
Cristina Nicolotti Squires: My job is to not let that happen.
Glenn Preston: I have mentioned already that the STV savings or efficiencies programme was across the entirety of the business. I do not think it was unique to news; it included areas such as studios and other operations. There were 60 jobs in total due to go across the business. I do not know what the final number is, but as I understand it the smaller proportion of that was from news; other parts of the business were cut more significantly than the news provision.
Cristina Nicolotti Squires: Again, we will see what happens. The BBC has said it needs to make £500 million worth of cuts. We do not know where those will land, but I do not think that it is politically easy for anyone to be cutting regional news.
Kirsteen Sullivan: We heard previously about investment in a commercial radio station occurring at the same time as cuts and reductions being made in regional news production; that is quite a stark contrast.
Q209 Chair: That brings us to the end of our formal questioning session. I mentioned earlier on that I was intrigued by the idea that—from what you were saying—there seemed to be an expectation that people responding to the consultation would bring new evidence that would refute the evidence given by STV and therefore influence your decision making. I am genuinely intrigued to know how you think members of the public would be able to do that.
Cristina Nicolotti Squires: We take responses from everybody. The First Minister’s response is as relevant as that of a viewer from the Hebrides. There was the ability for a lot of people to bring us evidence to show that this was the wrong decision, or not the right decision, and it was not only members of the public who could have done that; no one came to us with evidence. I take your point about what we expect of members of the public, but if you do not mind me saying, evidence is probably not what we expect from members of the public. We welcome consultation responses from everybody in whatever guise, whether they are responding on behalf of a Chamber of Commerce or Aberdeen Council, or as individuals.
I do not think there is an expectation that individual members of the public would provide evidence, but if they have it, that is great. It is a principle across all regulation: people might unearth something that we have not considered or were not aware of.
Chair: The First Minister would probably be quite concerned that his response was characterised as not giving any new evidence, but we will leave that to him to argue. Thank you both very much. That has been very helpful to us today.
Cristina Nicolotti Squires: Thank you for having us and giving us the opportunity to explain the thinking behind what was a difficult decision. I did not come to Ofcom to stop people getting regional news, and I am here to make sure they continue to get it in the way that they are getting it, so thank you for your time.
Chair: I am sure we can agree that it should not be an easy decision. Thank you.