Recommendation 18

The Green Paper states that the Charter review will examine how the BBC can tell a unifying national story which is responsive to all UK communities, while also representing and preserving different cultural identities across the UK’s nations and regions. It also emphasises that the broadcaster must be a truly universal service – that all parts of the UK should feel represented by the BBC’s output – and able to speak to and represent the diverse communities who fund it. In the interests of better promoting Scottish culture and Scottish talent, the Committee’s view is that there must be greater emphasis on Scottish voices telling Scottish stories. This is germane to commissioning processes and regional production quotas, local news provision, and minority language broadcasting, all covered elsewhere in this report, but also to the proportion of funding from the licence fee raised and spent in Scotland. We consider this issue of the BBC’s overall spend in Scotland under the Sustainable and fair funding heading and sub-section on Licence fee (see paragraph 220).