 The committee has received apologies for her scoldings this morning and a welcome to the committee. Graham Cissa, as his subjugating advice, must begin to make any relevant interests to the declaration. I have no relevant interests to declare. Thank you. I will move to agenda item 1. It is a decision to take business in private. Our members cantynter i gyddyn nhw i hyn yn cyfgaredd. Diolch yn ffoseb o ddiddordeb yma yn ddechrau 2 o surelyf. Felly, nid i ddiweddu John McTheay yn ymddangos, producer of lines for cinema, television, Nicole Cleman, managing director, faircast films a David Smith, director o Screen Scotland I will welcome to you all virtually this morning, and if I could open with a question perhaps directed at Mr Smith, in how you would describe the working relationship at the moment between Channel 4 and Screen Scotland, can you give us any update of the memorandum of understanding between the two organisations? Good morning, thank you for inviting me in today. We have a very close working relationship with Channel 4, both within the Scotland team, based at the hub in Glasgow and in Horsfairy Road and nationally with the Basin Leads as well. We have not yet signed an MOU with Channel 4. That has not stopped us from progressing lots of collaborative work with them. We recently had a data and co-development project. We have just launched an initiative based around entertainment production for Christmas 2022, where we have worked with Channel 4 to secure a specific spot for a new pilot on the Christmas schedule and a new pilot for an entertainment format within the Christmas schedule that we will jointly develop with them and with the company based in the Scotland sector. That directly feeds into our work at Kelvin Hall, the redevelopment of the central vault within Kelvin Hall as a television entertainment studio. Entertainment is an area where Scotland-based producers have real capacity for growth. We have recognised that. We have developed that space within Kelvin Hall with the Scottish Government Glasgow City Council as a shiny floor stage. It is not a film studio in the normal sense. It is very much a television entertainment studio. It is almost an exact copy of Television Centre 1 in London, where Graham Horton and various other shows are filmed every week. It is a useful space that augments our capacity already existing across Scotland, including PQ, where we have two entertainment studios already. It is a collaborative approach. It is a strategic approach. One of the things that we often say in Screen Scotland is that essentially everything is connected. You have to join up all of the right parts at the right time. We feel that we are doing that on multiple fronts. Channel 4 is one of our closest collaborators. We work very well with them. I think that their work with the Scottish sector over the last five years in particular has been fantastic. We have really grown their supplier base. They have really expanded the range of programming that they are making from Scotland, and it is from Scotland. We are seeing the real Scottish representation on-screen. Nicole can speak for herself, but I think that the rescue series is a fantastic example of that project that we co-invested in alongside Channel 4, which represents modern Scotland on-screen across the UK. If I could push a little bit on that and then ask a more general question to the rest of the panel. If the plans go ahead, as detailed by the Westminster Government at the moment, how do you see that relationship changing and what would be your concerns about it? It 100 per cent depends on who buys it, but our concerns are major. I think that at the moment, we have a very functional public and service broadcasting sector across the UK. The public and service broadcasting sector are the BBC and Channel 4. We have just published an economic value report this morning for Screen in Scotland. It is the first time that that level of detail is being delivered about the sector. The role that the public service broadcasters play in our creative economy is really central. Between them, the BBC and Channel 4 account for 87 per cent of all public service broadcasters spend in Scotland. Channel 4, from memory, is 12 per cent of that figure. By comparison, ITV, which is one of the likely buyers for Channel 4, is less than 1 per cent. Obviously, ITV would argue that it has STV in Scotland, but its footprint is a UK-wide footprint. The STV service is an optic service within the Channel 3 overall licence. For one of our national broadcasters, public service broadcasters is not to play a bigger part in our national conversation, not to represent Scotland across the rest of the UK. It is a lack. ITV is one of likely buyers. They are not the only likely buyer, but the model of their behaviours that they tend to commission the majority of their content in-house from companies that they themselves own, and mostly in England. Channel 4 does not do that. It is a publisher broadcaster. It is the cornerstone, along with the BBC of Creative Economy Scotland. It is absolutely the cornerstone of the independent production sector across the whole of the UK. I think that the white-giver proposal is that the cable stop will become a publisher broadcaster, but the independent quota of 25 per cent will be maintained, but that is across the whole of the UK. I cannot remember if the white-giver said anything about the nations and regions quotas, but I suspect that they would also be at threat. Quotas might feel like a bit of a blunt instrument, but they genuinely work. Broadcasters work two quotas, and, in Channel 4's case, they work above and beyond the quotas. There is no evidence that suggests that a sale of Channel 4 to a private buyer will be good for Scotland, will be good for the independent production sector across the UK, will deliver anything positive to the levelling up agenda, and plenty of reasons to be concerned on all those fronts. I am keen to see what the evidence is that this is a good idea. I read a piece in The Times the other day from a colleague David Strachan, who used to run turn television in Aberdeen and Glasgow. His description of it was quite telling. Essentially, what the UK Government is proposing is that we remove the commercial relationship between Channel 4 and the independent production sector and we replace it with a system of grants that will level up in some way across the UK. That does not feel like a very conservative approach. It feels like a solution in search of a problem. What would you see as the major threats and other opportunities in what is proposed in the White Paper at the moment? I am gravely concerned, having read the White Paper, for many reasons. The first thing is that we all think that Channel 4 is a broadcaster, but Channel 4 is also an incubator. It is an incubator of businesses like ours. Channel 4 recycles the profit that it makes into companies like us supercharging our growth. When Channel 4 invested in our company Firecrust Films in 2017, it tripled our turnover in the first year. We have seen steady growth ever since. We employ 65 people from our office in Governe. We have made it through the pandemic and we carried all our employees through the pandemic. Channel 4 has been there for us at every stage of our growth. Channel 4 was the reason that the company started. Channel 4 allowed us to expand into current affairs. Channel 4 gave us extra grants to encourage us to diversify, and we want a returning series called Super Shoppers, which ran for eight series, providing long-term stability in the company and allowing us to grow further. Channel 4 gave us then another grant through their offer funds to diversify out of current affairs. We started developing documentaries. Our first documentary commission was with Channel 4, which was with access to the Scottish Prison Service. It was the first time a documentary like that had been made up here, and it showcased the very different way that the Scottish Prison Service was running to the rest of the UK and beyond. We had international sales on that series, showcasing, as David said about, another series of hours for Channel 4, showcasing modern Scotland to the rest of the UK and to the world. Channel 4 took an investment stake in the business, and the business has been hugely successful since then. The kind of growth and success that we would never have dreamed of. Channel 4 has been there at every stage of our growth, and no other broadcaster does that. Channel 4 has a very special place in boosting the screen economy in Scotland. Apart from the company investment that it invests in skills and growing the talent base here, there are not many documentary companies in Scotland, so we did not have an enormous talent pool to fish from when we started. Channel 4 has helped to grow that talent base at every level from new entrants to senior talent. The other reason to be concerned is that the White Paper set out in-house production at Channel 4. At the moment, Channel 4 gets 100 per cent of its production from independent production companies like us. The White Paper says that 75 per cent of production will go in-house to Channel 4, so there will only be a window of 25 per cent for companies like us, and that is companies across the UK. That can hardly have a positive effect on the sector in Scotland. I cannot see any positives from privatisation. I am trying to because I am an optimistic person and I am looking to the future, but I really cannot see any benefits. What I can see is that it is going to be very difficult for other people to do what we have done at Firecrest and to follow us because that drawbridge is going to be pulled up. Good morning and thank you for inviting me to give evidence today. I think that Nicola and David have touched on many of the key issues. Let us be clear that the Westminster Government has taken a wrecking ball to the successful British independent production sector, which is currently a £3.2 billion economy, both domestic production and international production from sales and formats. We have done some impact analysis, unlike the Westminster Government, who has done no impact analysis or published anything that is credible. Over the next 10 years, if the sale of channel 4 is to go ahead, that is a loss of £4.2 billion for the British independent production sector. Obviously, that means a massive impact on the Scottish independent sector. That is a loss of direct revenues and indirect revenues from secondary sales. That is a transfer of value from hundreds of entrepreneurial companies such as Nicole's to whoever buys channel 4. They will own the programming and the IP. If that is an American owner, that is a direct transfer of money and British intellectual property and Scottish intellectual property to the new owners. That is a disaster for the independent production sector if it is to go ahead. That will not only be a direct impact on Nicole's company, but it will be an impact on the next company who thinks that they would like to set up a production business in Scotland, because those opportunities will be diminished. Channel 4 is the key incubator for people entering into the British production and broadcasting sector, and that will be lost under the Government's current proposals. I will open to questions from the committee. I move first to Mr Ruskell, who is joining us online. Thanks, convener. I have pretty sobering thoughts from the panel already. Can I turn to the international work, particularly that Screen Scotland does, but we are going to see some increased investment to Screen Scotland for its international engagement work. How would the privatisation of channel 4 affect that sector? Sorry, on the microphone, as we said briefly, the international work is a key component of our development sector over the next 10 years. The economic value report that we published this morning recognises a gross value added impact for the Scottish economy of screening all of its forms, of around £550 million. Previous reports have indicated that the most of production for film and high-end television drama indicated a figure roughly under £100 million. I joined from the sector in 2019 and I used to run a production company in Glasgow, and I was really conscious that a large chunk of the work that we produced was never counted as part of the previous survey. A valid survey continues, because it is a historic reference point. We needed to have something that showed that Screen Scotland is not a singular creative industry—it is a whole range of creative industries, including film. I think that one of the areas that we worked very closely with channel 4 is in film for. When I joined Screen Scotland in 2019, we had just—the filming of Fungal Limbo—completely went on-screen as part of the CAM programme in 2021. That international reach for those films is only really possible in collaboration with film for or BBC film and the BFI. The independent film from Scotland is a core component of our work, a core component of our international outreach, our cultural representation and how we develop a sector of potential winners in the future. Douglas MacKinnon, who made Good Omens and Nancy Boyce, was an independent filmmaker once upon a time in the sky. He has grown to become an industry figure who can land multiple parts, multiple series, for production within Scotland. I am not going to say that every independent filmmaker has that trajectory, but you have to grow talent. You have to work in collaboration with companies like Film for or like BBC Film to develop international film. That is a reputational building thing that adds into the whole economic argument. We want to see economic growth, we want to see international development. That is in two directions. I will come back to that in a second. That is both incoming and outgoing. We also want to see cultural growth, we want to see films and film makers from Scotland, program makers from Scotland winning international business. That very much means film for and film. It also means channel for. When channel for invests in a company like Nicole's and buys a programme from them, it is a tight market. It is a quality standard that is put against that programme. It means that it is of great attractive. It has real value in the international market. It is very attractive. It indicates that it has been made to a high standard. That is crucial because it means that we, as in the UK as a whole, have a competitive advantage because of the strength of our public service broadcasters and the work that they do with the independent production sector. To answer your question, I will go back briefly to the international point. Our strategy over the next 10 years is to grow the growth value added impact of Sweden and Scotland from roughly £550 million to roughly £1 billion. That is only going to be possible with significant growth in or continued investment skills in growth in infrastructure. That will deliver international outreach, that will deliver inward investment productions. Channel for has a role to play in both of those. Before you come back in, Mark, can you tell me if you have pushed it on the situation where you were doing production in Scotland but it was not counted? Could you explain a bit about that and struggle to understand an example of what that would be? With those counts, we are focused on filming what is called high-end television drama. You are talking about drama that is worth more than £1 million an hour in terms of production costs. The majority of production activity in Scotland was not captured by that count because it was below that figure. All day-in-day television production, all factual production, all entertainment production, more or less, was missed from previous counts because it did not reach through that tax barrier of £1 million per hour for drama and it was not a film. That figure, that count, was valid. It did show what screen Scotland was focused on at that point in time, which was growth in film and high-end television drama. Screen Scotland, as it was reformed in 2018 and went forward from that point, has a much broader reach. We are interested in all forms of production across film and television. We are interested in the business of broadcasting from Scotland, cinema and film exhibitions, skills and infrastructure development and education. They are all part of our briefs. The new study is a much more full-spectrum study. I haven't been able to take it on board yet, but it was on GMS this morning, the production of the report, which sounds really interesting. Thank you. Apologies, I'll bring Mr Ruskell back in. That's fine. Nicolle, can I ask for your reflections on the international work? Of course. The international part of our business is becoming more and more important. That is the intellectual property, the IP that we retain. When we make programmes for channel 4 or for the BBC, we are allowed to keep the IP of those programmes. That's really important for us, because then, when we go on to sell international distribution, as David says, having made programmes for a broadcast like the BBC or channel 4, that's worth a lot in the international market, because of the premium quality that international buyers know that will have. When we sell those programmes abroad, we can then use the profits from that to reinvest back into our business, into our staff and into developing future projects. The problems that we've had over the last few years mean that it's very, very difficult now for our business to make any margin on production at all. When we make a programme here for the BBC or for channel 4, we more or less break even on production costs. It's very, very difficult to make any margin. The profit that the business generates that pays for the development of us thinking up new programmes in the future all comes from our international sales. It's really critical for us that we retain IP and that we have international sales. That's the only way that business can grow. What would the impact of privatisation be in terms of those international sales then? It's difficult to know because it's difficult to know without knowing who the buyer of channel 4 would be. My reading of it is that we would have much fewer opportunities to make programmes for channel 4 because they're going to take 75 per cent of production in-house. We'll then be limited by who our customers are. Although it's good business to have business with streamers, streamers like Netflix and Amazon retain IP because when you make a programme for them, they put it across their platforms internationally. We don't have that, so we have to make sure that we do a good deal with them at the start so that we're compensated for the IP. However, it would be a risky business if you only made for companies where you gave up your IP at the point of commission. Over the past 15 years or so, thanks to the fact that, since 2003, British independent producers have legally been able to own the copyright and the programmes that they make for the public service broadcasters, we've seen a boom in international activity. Over half of the revenues for the independent sector in the UK comes from international activity. There's three components to that. One is sales, as Nicolle has just talked about, in terms of selling programmes, and it's vitally important that you can get sales because, as Nicolle has said, that is often your margin. That's called your back end. That's where you generate revenues from selling the programme or it's selling the intellectual property. Format rights, which is like reality programming or game shows, which are highly valuable and the UK's leading creator of formats internationally. Of course, what we've seen developing over the past five years or more is that British independent producers have been commissioned by international buyers to make new programming. If you think of things like Goldrush and other ones on Discovery, that's become a very important part of our international business. I'm just back from a major event in California called Real Screen. We had over 40 British independent producers there. It was the first of post-Covid event and, without the Brits being there and the Scots and the Welsh and Irish, that event would not function. The North American buyers looked towards the UK as an R&D lab for global creativity. The fuel for that is our original commissions in the UK because that's where we develop the credibility, where we can develop our business, where we can reinvest, and Channel 4 is an important part of that. The knock-on effects of the Westminster Government's plans are multiple. They are not just a direct loss of revenue, they impact on long-term growth and reduce our competitiveness internationally. That is something that the Government has not been willing to listen to. We have produced our own analysis on that in order to try to explain why that is such a bad idea. I fear that with the Government's plans that the independent sector, which has been a shining light in the British creative industries, we will move to become more like a service sector rather than being creative entrepreneurs owning and controlling IP. We will just be guns for hire. We will be line producers who are hired by the new owners or global streamers to sell our creativity and work for a fee. I do not think that that is the right place to be in a 21st century economy and it diminishes ambition and creativity overall. As you said earlier, there is no impact assessment going from the UK Government on any of this. There is no impact assessment on frozen funds internationally. None at all. The assumption is that Channel 4 needs to compete with Netflix. That is completely the wrong premise. Channel 4 needs to do something different from Netflix. We do not want to just watch lots of Netflix. We want to watch shows like Nick Olmakes about the Scottish Prison Service. We want to watch things on UK television, which reflects and investigates and interrogates who we are as a society and all our multi-views on that. I think that the idea that Channel 4 should become a homogenous competitor to Netflix is one economically undoable but culturally diminishing. We want to see different perspectives in order to have no problem with Netflix and with all the other streamers. They bring some amazing product, but they are doing a different job to the job that we want Channel 4 to do. As Mark has said, he has given stark evidence. I would like to turn to David Smith. You were quoted earlier this year by saying that Channel 4 and BBC are key stones. You used the word corner stones today in Scotland's growing film and television production sector. Without those public service broadcasters, we would have no independent production sector and highly rewarding jobs that they create would be lost to us. You have touched on that as has John McVey in his figures. Can you elaborate on that and explain your thoughts on what that change could mean for the independent production sector in Scotland? Very much, probably, on the comments already made by John and Nicole. Our report out today, one of the figures in it, is that £196 million was spent by the BBC and Channel 4 on content production in Scotland in 2019. That is over half of all content that is spent in Scotland in that year. The reason why we are looking at 2019 is that the studies to kill content tender to sign complete and Covid have an impact on our progress. We are currently working on 2021, and that should be published early next year. That figure of £196 million has an additional impact, which is the £61.1 million that the BBC and Channel 4 spend on their operations in Scotland. The majority of that has to be said from the BBC. They have a big presence of Pacific Key in Scotland. They run a lot of departments out of Pacific Key. Channel 4 also has a presence in Glasgow with its creative help and dual street, I think, is on your next session. The loss of that commissioning value, that transfer of value that John described, will be a single buyer who will then self-commission 75 per cent of the content, as it will have a huge damaging impact on the sector as a whole, on independent production across the UK, on independent production in Scotland and on our Scottish creative economy. We, ambitiously, have set our proposal to build to double GP by 2030. That is dependent on skills and infrastructure investment. It is also dependent, to a large degree, on continuing commissioning from the PSBs. Without them, we will struggle to reach that figure. As Nicole said, it is about investment in businesses as well as investment in programmes. It is about investment in skills and training development. We work very closely with Channel 4 on multiple projects to a body called TRC Media in Glasgow. We developed the RAD diversity programme, format lab, supersizer, factual fast track and the international programme. Those are all programmes, personal development programmes that are business development programmes because, in the film and television sector, there is not much—production companies do not hold much infrastructure, they do not have much capital—capital items on their balance sheet. It is mostly people. We have to develop through the people to develop with businesses. Channel 4 has recognised that for years and worked very closely with Wiskins Scotland and its predecessors to develop the sector here. TRC Media is one example, effective vision and another example where we collaborate, but Channel 4 also has its own diversity scheme that directly implants new trainees into production companies across Scotland across multiple genres and helps them to build not just their confidence in their career but their connections with Channel 4's broadcaster. It is a people business. You have to have those relationships. You have to have the confidence to express your ideas. Channel 4 is a partner in all that. Thank you, David. John, I am interested to get your thoughts as well. You mentioned the loss of £4.2 billion to the UK creative sector with regards to television and film production. Interested to know, we talk a lot about the ideas, the producers, the directors and the researchers. What does that mean for the technical side as well for these different roles within television and film production? We are currently for freelancers for the labour market. Basically, as freelancers, you get hired when independent producer gets commissioned or BBC studios get commissioned in Scotland to make a show. It follows that if there is less commissioning of Scottish independent producers, there will be less work for Scottish freelancers. Film and TV production is very interesting. It is one of the few activities that uses more of the rest of the creative industries than any other business, because we need designers, sound recorders, fashion and make-up and wardrobe and all sorts of other creative industries are involved in creating a finished film or TV product. It has multiple ripple effects across the broader creative industries. It is not just about the money, it is about the skills and the long-term investment. I am sure Nicole has fantastic relationships with leading freelancers in Scotland, so she will nurture and develop them, she will rehire them for different shows, they will then develop their careers and they will then bring on assistance. Those are the downstream consequences of any diminished spend. It is very hard for us. We have mapped and done an impact assessment on the direct consequences, but the downstream consequences are profound. That is a company that would be set up. That is a set of relationships that will not happen because they will not be getting hired by Channel 4 to make that show for them. That is why it is counterintuitive from the Westminster Government to think that this will make a contribution to levelling up our economic growth across the UK. Whoever buys it will hire those freelancers, but they will be making the shows themselves. It will be a different set of relationships to the ones that they would get from multiple companies doing that, as they were commissioned to make shows for Channel 4. That is something else that the Government seems unwilling to talk about or consider. John McEw is making a good point there in terms of the industrial process of screening production. The most aimed-out television production does not rely on large sets, large crews of people, but the high-end work really does. Channel 4 will work with STV studios to really break ground in Kelvin Hall in a separate vault where they built the prison set for Scroop, a successful drama from Scotland, from a Scotland-based production company entirely filmed and made within Kelvin Hall. It is a phenomenal series, but it is a series built on plasters, joiners, electricians, scaffolders, drivers and security people. It is not just about those roles that you would imagine connect to television, directors, producers, writers and editors—the usual jobs. There is a massive overspole chain. John McEw is right that those people will still be employed by whoever buys Channel 4 when they produce those programmes in-house. My worry is that they will not be in Scotland. If you look at the way that ITV commissions its content, it does not commission a great deal of content from Scotland. The most recent published figures are from OFCOM for 2020, made out of London's report from OFCOM. In that period, ITV commissioned two projects from Scotland across the whole year, two programmes—Catchphrase and The Masked Singer, both of which were filmed outside of Scotland. We were from Scotland-based companies, but filmed in studios elsewhere, partly because we lacked studio capacity at that point in time. We have addressed that point. In the same period, Channel 4, across the nations, commissioned over 50 programmes, not just in England, but between Wales, Northern Ireland and Scotland. Channel 4, in that same period, commissioned 50 programmes. Those were multiple parts of the series often. There were dramas, there were entertainment shows, there were factual series. It is not just a question of whether it depends who buys Channel 4. You can guarantee that there is uncertainty. You can guarantee that, based on what is in the white paper, that 75 per cent of that content will not be made by the independent sector anymore that will be made in-house. If it is ITV or a similar buyer, it is likely that that activity will not take place in Scotland at the same extent. I would like to turn to Nicollon now, a useful segue into the independent sector. You talked very clearly about the support that Channel 4 has given you. I am interested to hear about, if you are willing to share, the support that you have given the freelancers and the training that you are able to provide and how an independent production company's business plan works, because we have heard a lot about everything being connected and collaboration and the fact that you will be pitching ideas to different broadcasters. It is a very interesting question. The way in which independent productions business plan works is very difficult for us to plan in advance. We pitch ideas, we hope that they get commissioned, but when we come to write our business plan every year for the following year, there is very little secured business that we already have going into the next year. We probably have less than a fifth of our income for the following year secured in the autumn when we are writing the business plan to start the next year, so it is an unpredictable business. One of the things that has been really important to us is to try and act as a buffer as a company and to minimise how we pass on that insecurity down the freelancer chain, because if we want to broaden the base of people who work in this fantastic creative industry, we need to make sure that we can get people from all kinds of backgrounds and not just people who can tolerate unstable employment. We have always tried to take on new entrants to the industry and more junior employees on much longer contracts than we have secure work for to make sure that we can get the best people and not just the people who can afford to work like that. Channel 4 has been instrumental in supporting us doing that, partly because they support training posts. We have had nine new training posts that are a year-long in-fire crest films, and Channel 4 pays 50 per cent of the costs of those trainees. Because Channel 4 has always taken a strategic approach to commissioning, while they commission the best ideas, they also understand from our point of view how difficult it is to grow a business and to support emerging talents. For example, with some of the returning series, Super Shoppers, for instance, they would commission two series at once so that we would have that kind of security going forward and we could make those kind of commitments to people. Again, no other broadcaster has ever done that with us. That is what makes me really anxious about how that will go forward. It is an insecure industry. It is a mainly freelance industry. How do we carry on supporting people and how do we carry on being confident about our business in the future? As I said in my first answer, it is much better for us now. We are a really strong and robust company thanks to Channel 4's support through the years. We have emerged from Covid, we have had record years the last few years and this year we are forecasting to do 50 per cent increase on turnover on last year. We can cope a lot better with the insecurity and we can definitely buff them much better and not pass that on now in ways that are really adverse. I know that that is not the same for other companies. It comes out very clearly that, at the moment, Channel 4 is doing pretty well in terms of production across the UK. It makes a profit. I wanted to focus particularly on the film sector because the films that are produced and commissioned by Channel 4 appear to be more diverse, but they also appear to be award winning across the UK. I just want a bit of a comment on that, because it feels like there is a huge potential loss here if you look at the impact on the companies that potentially would take over, because it appears that they would lose some of their own production internally. It feels like a lose-lose for everybody in terms of geography, private businesses and quality. John McPhaid, do you want to kick off first across the sector? You have quite a lot of evidence. Yes. There is a report that will be produced shortly by the British Film Institute, which is an investigation into the dire circumstances of the British independent feature film sector, not television, just independent feature film, which has been, over the past 10 years, been in steady decline in a world where more people have more access to more entertainment than we have ever seen in human history. Sadly, the British independent feature film sector is not actually competing in that market, and that is to do with some fundamental economic problems and market failures. In the UK, we effectively have three interventions in the market that support independent feature film. That is film 4, which is £25 million a year, which is invested into British independent feature film. The BBC films, which have their own budget and, of course, the BFI to the national lottery, and then, through that, the money that is devolved to Creative Scotland and others to invest in independent feature film. In the Government's white paper, there is no mention about future owners having any commitment whatsoever to independent feature film. If I was a commercial buyer of channel 4, given that film 4 is generally loss making, it is there because of its remit. I am a commercial buyer and I am looking to get a return on my investment by channel 4. It is very unlikely that I would continue to invest in independent feature film. That would be £25 million less each year that would be invested in the independent feature film sector, and that would be very detrimental to Scottish independent feature film producers, directors and actors and everyone else. You are right to focus on that. It is one of the points that has not been highlighted much in the debate around channel 4, but it would be a catastrophe for independent feature film at a time when it is already struggling to raise the finance that it needs in the market because of changes post Covid. It will be yet another loss of cultural entrepreneurship that we would expect to see being supported. It is a very depressing day for our—we have 70 established feature film companies as members are packed, many of whom have benefited from film 4 investment. That comes across really clearly. It is not often that we get witnesses saying to us that a proposal will actually be a catastrophe, so thank you for that clarity. I was wondering if Nicole Cleamon, do you want to make a comment on that about the quality of films being made in terms of BAFTA winning? Those are not just being churned out. Those are award-winning, culturally impactful films that have people being employed, whether they are actors, people behind the system that are actually making those films work. Do you want to give us a bit of a comment on the quality and what there is potentially to lose here? It is difficult for me to talk about from the business because we do not make drama, we do not make film, but I would totally agree with you that these are high-quality premium productions, they are award-winning, they are world-class, and it is a grave concern. There is no reason for doing that. There is not a problem here that needs a solution. I would certainly say around Channel 4 that Channel 4 allows us to innovate, and innovation is the lifeblood of our creative industry, whether we are in drama or in factual. Without that innovation, that is what is underpinning the UK creative economy. The streamers that the Westminster Government wants Channel 4 to be more like do not innovate, they do not do news, they do not do current affairs, they do not do investigations, they do not do observational documentary, they do not commission companies like us to take us inside institutions and showcase Scotland to the rest of the world. The factual programmes that streamers make are retrospective stories with lots of twists and turns, but they are not the kind of programmes that are key for a democratic society to make about itself and to examine itself. That is equally useful in the wider civic impact of Channel 4. David Smith, from Screen Scotland, wants to give us a particular comment on film making in Scotland. I think that that issue of quality, but also the staffing issues and the behind-the-scenes impact of having private production companies in Scotland for film making. I am reading from the notes here that film 4 has won 37 academy awards and 84 BAFTAs across their existence. That speaks for itself. That is a phenomenal record. As John said, there are essentially and I will say four potential sources of funding within Britain for film. There is the BFI, there is film 4, there is BBC film and there is Screen Scotland. Our money, I am not sure if I picked up a chunk right there, our money is not devolved from the BFI, our money is direct from the national lottery. We are at the national lottery distributor as well. We have a £4 million fund for feature film production from Scotland. We regularly co-invest, but it is impossible for any single body to finance a feature film, which just really does not happen. We work in collaboration with BBC films, the BFI and film 4 on almost every project. Obviously, not always the BFI, not always the BBC film and film 4 at the same time they operate separately, but it is ourselves, the BFI and one or other, the broadcasters film production arms at any given moment. Yes, they absolutely are the drivers of quality, they are the developers of talent. In Scotland they work with the Young Film Foundation Channel 4 and Film 4, our direct supporter of the Young Film Foundation, Christopher Young's Foundation in Sky, which is a world leader in film talent development. It is not just about the making of films, it is about the development of new talent. Because film is inherently an international pursuit, you want your films to play as globally as possible. Again, that kite mark comes into play. The fact that Film 4 had invested in a film alongside us means that when we take a film to Cannes or Venice or Berlin, that film is going to get bought, that film is going to get seen in cinemas globally, because Film 4 has that kite mark of quality that is very hard to replicate to anybody else other than, I would say, the BBC film in the UK. A couple of you have, I think, said that this is a solution in search of a problem. I just wondered from a producer's point of view, this is for John McVeigh and for Nicole Cleamon, what you see the motivation behind this exercise as being, we have heard that Channel 4 is not a financial basket case, it is difficult to see from what you have said today how these changes would help the independent sector in any way economically. So what do you think this is trying to achieve this exercise? That is it. Well, successive Governments of various political views have regularly had a look at the public ownership of Channel 4. When they do, including Margaret Thatcher, who set up Channel 4 and then reviewed it shortly thereafter, thought that the actual remaining in public ownership was for the best purposes, for the best interests of the UK economy, both economically and culturally. Sadly, the Government has not produced any evidence to explain why it should be sold right now. It is quite right and proper that any Government has a look at why do we collectively own a public service broadcaster, I think that that is legitimate. Given all the other issues that we are facing as a society with inflation, post-Covid recovery and a number of other issues, not least the war in the Ukraine, it seems to be a very strange time to want to sell off one of the national assets, which actually drives a lot of economic growth, drives inclusion and, as other fellow panellists have explained, is involved in many other issues around training and access. Of course, the Government has not put in the white paper that the new owners would have any commitment to any of those issues. I do not know why the Government wants to sell it right now. I have not seen any evidence. We have asked various members of the Government to try to explain to us why now and why in such a draconian way. We have not had an answer. I have not got an answer for that either. I do not understand why they are doing it. I have not seen any compelling explanation or rationale. I wonder if I could ask in that case a related question, I suppose, which is channel 4 provides a distinctive output in terms of news and current affairs. What do you think stands to be lost in that respect if this move goes ahead? What will be lost from the offering that exists within the UK around using current affairs? Perhaps, in this case, I will go to John McVie and Nicolle Clemen. Currently, channel 4, as Nicolle will probably come on to, channel 4 does a whole range of factual documentary investigative programming that could be broadly come under current affairs, including many of the excellent programmes that Nicolle Clemen makes. In terms of news, we do not know what the future owners will do with news. We do not know if it will be of the same scale and the same reach in terms of the reporters that they can bed around the world to report on stories that are critical to our knowledge and understanding of what is happening elsewhere in the world. If you are a commercial owner, if we look at that, you will always seek to do the minimum that you are required to do under the licence that you will be granting from Ofcom. Until we see the terms of the sale, the nature of the licence that may be required on the new owners, it is hard to say what they will do, but the new owners will probably argue to invest less in news than channel 4 currently reads, because they will be looking to make a return on their original investment and the money that they have paid to the Government to buy the channel in the first place. Nicolle Clemen? Channel 4 current affairs builds our business. We started off as a supplier making 10-minute films for channel 4 news out of my spare room. That is how the company started. We grew by making dispatchers films. All of our output was with channel 4 until we started making films for panorama for BBC One. In 2020, Firecrest was the biggest supplier to channel 4 current affairs. We made 11 hours of current affairs investigations in 2020. Current affairs is not a commercial part of the television business. Those programmes cannot really be sold overseas. Often our investigations are very UK-focused and very time sensitive. It is not something that anybody else I know has built business on. I do not have a lot of confidence that a commercially run channel 4 run-for-profit would overinvest in the way that the current set-up of channel 4 has done in news and current affairs. It remains to be seen what the off-com requirements will be on the new privatised channel 4. We know from looking at ITV current affairs that ITV current affairs is good. They have won bactas. They make a certain kind of film. What channel 4 do, BBC and ITV current affairs do not do, is take on their own advertisers. I have made films for channel 4 about Cadbury, about TK Maxx, about Poundland, about the right of reply and legal correspondence. Those people advertise on channel 4. I am not that optimistic that a privatised channel 4 would have the same bullish attitude. David Smith talked about how the purchase could involve 75 per cent of the company falling into the hands of one giant. David Smith would mean that on the biodiversity of what would be on offer culturally. We have talked quite rightly about what the implications might be of this situation economically for Scotland, but just as Derry is keen to know how Derry is represented to itself through drama, so Scotland is two and through other types of programming, what would be the impact culturally on the diversity that you think of the offering if so much of the channel was in the hands of one organisation? It would be fairly disastrous again for audiences. You are essentially talking about an organisation's self-commissioning content. It is going to commission us that content for reasons other than what is in the best interests of the UK, or viewers, and what is in the best interests of its PLC business for online. Diversity is not really served by what is proposed within the white paper. We are not talking about this as 75. We have not made this up yet and I know that it is not what you are implying, but this is what the white paper says will happen. 25 per cent will be ring-fence for the independent production sector, as it is across all the PSBs. That is a massive change. It has come across fairly unique in its approach. It is a risk taker. It tells you that it is a risk taker in almost every piece of its corporate communications, and it is true. It really does take risks. It really does, as Nicolle pointed out. It is not afraid to take on its own advertisers. It is not afraid to invest in films that represent parts of our culture that are maybe not mainstream. It is not afraid to reach out and work and do the right thing is probably the best way of putting it. Channel 4 had no obligation five years ago to open an office in Glasgow. It reached out and expanded its base. You could argue that there was some political pressure that motivated that change, but they realised that it was the right thing to do quite early on and move very quickly. The current administration within Channel 4 is the previous administration, or slightly less, to work off the mark. Alex and her team at Channel 4 have been very responsive and very good at developing a varied culture across the UK. If one organisation self-commissioned 75 per cent of its content internally, it is hard not to describe that as a monoculture. I am just watching the clock. I do not know if Mr Cameron does not have any questions. I just say from the outset that I have probably learned more about Channel 4 than I ever knew this morning. Frankly, I have just been a viewer of television rather than someone who pays any attention to who makes the programme. It has been really interesting. I have a question for each of you. We have not long, but we have about five minutes, so probably quick answers. Nicolle will go to you. Your question is, listening to you this morning and looking at what we have in front of us, your business is not entirely based on Channel 4. You have made some very successful programmes for other people, which seems to me eminently sensible. If Channel 4 was to be privatised, how would it affect your business and indeed others? Is anyone completely reliant on Channel 4? I have got supplementary to that. You were mentioning the investigative programmes that you made. Who comes up with the ideas? Is that you, or does somebody approach you? To answer your first question first, Firecrack films like A Number of Indies in Scotland were heavily reliant on Channel 4 in the early days. Companies such as IWC, Fine Strike Productions, Raise the Roof—we were all nurtured by Channel 4 in our early days. We have now grown away from Channel 4. Five years ago, Channel 4 accounted for about two thirds of our turnover. It is around a third of our turnover now, as we have diversified. Those companies that I mentioned have all followed the same pattern. Is it the newer companies that it is going to affect? Who is going to support those new companies? To answer your question about our current fairs investigations, we have a wider team here that looks at things. Sometimes journalists bring us stories, sometimes whistleblowers call us and ask us to look at stuff. I would definitely add to that that if I have a story that is in any way risky, I would always take it to Channel 4 first. That is really interesting. I am going to move to John McVeigh. It follows up on the question that Alistair Allan asked. I, as a TV viewer, if Channel 4 is privatised, how does it affect me and what is on offer to me? What will be on offer will be whatever the new owners decide you will get, but they will be using their own in-house production to do that. It is not to say that what will be on offer will be necessarily less quality. ITV makes very good quality shows as a popular commercial broadcaster, but it will be commercially focused. It will be looking at an ROI on every single slot in the schedule in order to make money to pay the shareholders off who own Channel 4. That is a very different motivation to the current commissioning that Channel 4 currently does, because it does not have to pay shareholders. All the money that it makes goes back into programming, goes back into commissioning. Great investigative shows from the coal and others in Scotland. It is not to say that you, as an audience, will see less quality, but you will see different programming. It will not be the same because there is a very different model driving the commissioning of the channel going forward. I could follow up on that, but there is no time. Quick one for David Smith. I am going slightly off-tangent near David. I was down at Leith Dux yesterday, so your massive building there would have loved to have gone inside, but you will be aware that there is a bid for free port status there. I think that you may be involved if you are not involved. My question was going to be, if it was to achieve that status, how would it help you? Perhaps it would not. We are not the operator of the studio. We are the head lease holder. First stage studios operate the studio within the Leith dock facility. You are very welcome. If you get in touch, I will speak to the team at first stage. I am sure that they will be very happy to take it inside. It is astonishingly huge once you are inside. It has just been vacated by its second Amazon production, massive production and ANSI voice. We are very confident. We can say much more, but we know what is coming in next. It is a very busy facility. I do not think that the free port would necessarily impact upon our part of it. We have a lease over the space for a number of years. It is also worth mentioning that that is not the only studio in Scotland. Since that came online, we now have the pyramids facility in Bathgate. We have Ward Park in Cumbernauld, Kelvin Hall is about to open in Glasgow and there are pioneer studios in Glasgow. It is, again, quite a varied offering. We need more. We can grow further if there are more facilities. Cumbernauld is in my region, so maybe that is the one that I should be visiting. I will leave it there. I am a bit comfortable at time if you do want to ask that final question. No, I am quite comfortable. I thank you all for your attendance at the committee this morning. It is a really interesting topic. I also thank you for your briefings prior to today's meeting. I am now going to suspend very briefly to the witnesses to change over online. A very warm welcome back. Our second panel this morning is on channel 4. Indeed, it is members of channel 4 who are here with us. We have Alex Meon, chief executive, Joe Street, head of daytime and features, and a head of Glasgow hub, and Brian Lee Robinson, senior external affairs manager. I hope that you were able to hear the first panel. I think that something that came through quite strongly for me was the importance of relationships and location in Scotland. I just wondered if you could maybe elaborate on Format Lab with a new partnership with BBC Screen Scotland and Glasgow Council and how that might impact on the output from the Kelvin Hall studios in particular. If I could go to maybe Mr Meon first. Thank you very much for having us. I am going to hand to my team, Brian Lee and Joe, to talk about that particular relationship impact, if I can. I would just start off reiterating your point that it is very much a relationship-driven industry. Perhaps that is particularly because of what you have heard from your first witnesses about the scale of companies, particularly that we work with and the areas that we work in that are about innovation, taking risk, new talent and early stage staff or young people coming into the industry or companies where we are really focused on our quite unique and vital role in how we grow those companies and how we give people a chance to develop, whether it is careers or the work that they are involved in, in a way that being a not-for-profit allows us to and allows us to take that risk. Joe O'Brien, you know specifically about that partnership. There is one of you who wants to speak to the precise impact. I can do that. For those who do not know, my department, Dataman Features, which is based in the Glasgow hub, is responsible for commissioning returnable shows, high volume and quite often formatted shows. So, when Format Lab was mooted and during the consultation about, did we need another resource? Did we need another studio? The resounding answer came, yes, we did, and what we needed to do as well was to upskill the community. We have got an amazing production community in Scotland, but we all know that the IP is the valuable resource. Formats are a very good and efficient way for companies to get good, saleable international IP. Format Lab has been a collaboration between all the agencies that you talked about in terms of us identifying talent, putting resources in place to get placements with companies. Upskill, already talented, maybe researchers, APs, but to get them thinking about shows that can be based in studio, absolutely with a lens on innovation, but also broad, popular shows that can become returning figures in our schedules, for example. To have Kelvin Hall, we have already had several shows where we just have not had studio capacity in Scotland to make the shows that we wanted to. In Scotland they have had to go down the road to Salford or be made elsewhere. Format Lab is about bringing together all the skills that we already have, leveraging the team that I have in the Glasgow hub with skills in that sector. It is an industry of relationships, as you said at the beginning, the fact that we are here, the fact that we know each other, we know who the good people are, who have the aptitudes, has been transformational across the board in a lot of the skills work that we are doing in Channel 4 broadly, but specifically out of Glasgow as well. Briani, do you want to add anything to that? I think that Format Lab is all about trying to maximise the impact of Kelvin Hall and trying to develop that entertainment space. One thing that we are looking to do is to diversify the Scottish sector and make sure that it is delivering commissions across the widest range of genres, including some of those high value formats. Format Lab is a great example of partnership with the Green Scotland, the BBC and a number of our Scottish training schemes that developed in partnership like that. It shows how we can have impact when we work together. Thank you for joining us this morning. We heard from the first panel about the status of Channel 4 overseas, what I regard the Channel scene and its productions, and how the independent sectors are a key driver of that success. I wanted to ask the same question to the first panel about how privatisation may affect the international work and the international standing of the Channel and what it produces. Good morning. I should state that I ran a large independent production company that was global for many years before being at Channel 4. In fact, most of my career has been international, so I can probably speak to that with some experience. There would be two effects. One is about IP and the other is about the image of Britain that Scotland brought. The IP is a fundamental part of how Channel 4 is currently constructed, which is that we are currently constructed as holder publisher and broadcaster, which means that we cannot own the IP. The intellectual property and things that we buy sits within all the companies that we work with. It sits within those partner companies on their balance sheets, if you like, and on ours. That has been the fundamental driver of exports for the creative economy across the UK. The companies that you heard from like Firecrust own those programmes, which means that they can sell them abroad, they can work with organisations such as Pact or Screen Scotland, and they can create their own export pipeline. That has led to a huge amount of growth in the consolidation of big production companies such as Shine or all-through-medial Endemol. The ability to make your show in Scotland and to sell it to 200 other territories or to remake it in those countries brings money and the potential to export. That has been a huge factor in the growth of the industry. The proposal with privatisation would mean that that no longer exists. The intellectual property would be owned within Channel 4 that is a fundamentally different model. The second piece is a sort of soft power point, which is portrayal and how we are represented abroad. You heard at the end of that session a particular focus on film. As you heard, we spend £25 million a year on film through film 4. BBC film spends, I think, about £8 million a year. By far the biggest funder, we focus on innovation and risk and new directors and new writers rather than making money. If you think of a film such as Limbo or Wild Rose or, of course, Trainspotting and Trainspotting 2, something like Limbo, which was shot in Uist Scottish writer and Scottish director, was exported really well. I do not think that those kind of shows would exist because they are not commercially profitable. That portrayal of parts of Scotland that the rest of the world sees perhaps would not be there. I am not sure how many other films have been shot in North or South Uist, but it is that kind of work that we do that is quite fundamental to our purpose in terms of representation of different parts of the UK that would be different. Thank you. Can I invite Mr Cameron, please? Thank you, convener, and good morning to the panel. My questions are really around channel 4 in Scotland. You have obviously launched in 2018 for all the UK strategy, which has resulted in significant investment, but I just wondered if you could help with a comparison to channel 4 in, say, Wales, channel 4 in Northern Ireland. Give us some kind of sense of the contrast between your operations here in Scotland and elsewhere in the UK. I appreciate that that is quite a general question, but an overview, if possible. Can I start with Alex Marne, please? I do not want to get in trouble anywhere else, but we have not got off the other locations that you mentioned. The first difference would be that we chose quite carefully to put the hub office in Glasgow, and we chose to do that. We looked at a lot of locations. We chose two locations for hubs—the other one is in Bristol. We thought extremely carefully about going places where we could make a significant impact on the industry as it was at that stage in the location. It was quite an involved pitch process with many—are travelling to many different locations and then pitching to us. We thought that we would make a significant impact in Glasgow and that, by choosing to locate there with the multiplicity of things that we do, we will talk about digital and about skills, as well as about commissioning and programming, that we could have a sort of bigger than 1 plus 1 equals 2 impact. Our Glasgow hub is about creating that activity, particularly about spending money in Scotland. We have located Joe Street, who is on with me today. She runs the biggest commissioning department across the whole of channel 4, both in terms of spend and in terms of hours—responsible for a bit more than 50 per cent of the hours that were on the channel last year. She is doing that for the whole organisation from Scotland, so that has impact on how decisions are made and how creative decisions are made for the whole organisation, because it comes with the perspective of someone who does not live in London. The impact of spend in Scotland, where we spend about £22 million in particular in Scotland, quoting about 400 jobs and about thousands of jobs across the industry makes a difference. Those are the big impacts that we have created by being particularly focused in Glasgow. When it comes to Northern Ireland or Wales, we are spending money in those locations through our commissioning operations elsewhere, but I do not think that it is the same volume of impact that we can make through the Glasgow office. I do not know if, Briani, if you want to pick up on the question about the other locations. Does that help to answer it? Yes, it does. I should add that another comparison is with what you are doing within England itself. You mentioned the Bristol hub. I am just trying to get a sense of where Scotland fits within the UK strategy. Can I turn to Joe Street, please? Sorry, is that Briani? Briani or Joe? Joe, why do not you start? I will start seeing as I am here. I suppose that one of the really big impacts is the very subtle and cultural change that having a head of a network department in Scotland brings to the broader production sector. Briani, if I am wrong, I think that I am the only network head in Scotland across ESBs or commercial broadcasters, and that matters. It matters to producers because, historically, there has been a culture of belief, through or not, that business is done in the corridors of Bulls Free Road or you bump into somebody in central London. Shifting that soft cultural way of working and having decision makers who are holding big budgets in Scotland matters to the production sector. What we are also able to do by being here is that we can be a hub base to colleagues in Northern Ireland to production sectors. There has always been quite a good synergy with colleagues there. I think that shifting the centre of gravity about how we think about things, how we live our lives, matters and permeates through my team, which is based mainly in Scotland, but I have team members in Bristol and in Leeds and London. The power sits in Scotland for a change, and that matters. It gives us a lens with which to look at how we commission in Wales as well. It is the start of a sea change, if I would hope. I think that all the UK is about benefiting all of the UK in every corner of the UK, and our spend allows us to do that. Having people on the ground makes a huge difference in terms of those relationships and facilitates that spend. One thing that we have not touched on is the way in which we support independent production companies. We have production companies who are on our emerging indie fund in Scotland, Channel X, Hopscotch and Black Camel Pictures, so that is supporting high-potential, relatively new emerging companies to supercharge their growth. We also have our growth fund, which takes stakes in businesses, and that is supporting three Scottish companies. We have announced another company this week, which is the scripted company, which is really positive and supports that diversification that I mentioned. By supporting businesses to grow and investing in training and skills, we are really enabling that growth in the sector, which is really positive. You have seen from the new screen Scotland numbers up today that the projection is that the sector will reach a billion by 2030. The success in Scotland is something that we are looking to emulate elsewhere. We are seeing good growth and starting to see more diversification in Wales. We have just announced a Welsh language opera last week in Wales, but Scotland is ahead of the curve in terms of that growth and that diversification and that kind of work. That is really positive and what we want to see in the other nations of the UK. My final question is about consumption of Channel 4 in Scotland. In 2021, OFCOM compiled a report that found that the main channel percentage share of the total TV audience was 4.7 per cent, which was a little lower than the rest of the UK, which was at 5 per cent. It is a pretty small margin, but I wonder what reason you could place on that. Is there any reason for just a marginally lower consumption rate? Brian, why do you start? The landscape is slightly different in Scotland. Obviously, the SDV has a slightly higher share than its equivalence in some of the other nations, so perhaps it is behind that slight difference. However, that linear share is just one viewing metric. That same report points to 40 per cent of households in Scotland using all four. Channel 4 is the youngest skewing PSB, so we are pivoting to digital more rapidly than our competitors. If you looked at younger Scottish audiences, that figure is likely to be higher. We know that about 80 per cent of 16 to 34 is a registered non-four, so it is important to look at those wider metrics, particularly digital viewing, when you are thinking about Channel 4's impact. I do not know if any of our other witnesses want to comment on that, but that is fine for me. I start my first question with a quote that David Smith, director of Screen Scotland, said, that Channel 4 and the BBC are key stones in Scotland's growing film and television production sector. Joe, I remember you from BBC Scotland, so I would be interested to get your thoughts on that specifically, perhaps both from a BBC Scotland perspective and a Channel 4 perspective, and how both broadcasters support public service broadcasting in Scotland. The relationship with Screen Scotland has been revelatory for me since I moved across to Channel 4. It coincided with David Smith's tenancy as director of Screen. The first thing to say is that it is incredibly collaborative. We are able to work closely and strategically. There is a shorthand to saying, where is the skills gaps? What are we missing? How are we going to support together to leverage the power of Channel 4 and how we are investing in the production sector, production companies, but also individuals, young people coming into the industry? We are both bonders of TRC, I myself sit on the board of TRC. We can be incredibly aligned in projects and initiatives that both parties will promote and support. In a practical and operational way, the first thing that I did when I joined Channel 4 is that we did a Screen Scotland initiative in daytime, which resulted in a 15-part commission for a small Scottish indie that will hit air later this year, Beezer's Tool Club. This year, what we have been able to do is encourage colleagues so that entertainment is doing a similar initiative. David spoke to that earlier in the sessions, but that will be a show at Christmas with a view to that being a returnable entertainment format. There is that closeness of working together, identifying opportunities, gaps and being a genuine and collaborative meaningful relationship is really important. It means that we can spread the benefit. I think that what I observed when I was in the BBC is that it is a bigger machine to navigate. It was going through a central thing that I was not part of, having much more control and autonomy, which is part of that Channel 4 risk-taking mentality that Alex and my boss invested in me taking this job. It is important that all your sleeves up and get things done. It speaks again to the legacy of relationships, of being in Scotland and of having that presence and understanding the sector and the people that we are talking about. That is really helpful, Jo. Thank you very much. There are two things that come together in what Jo's saying and also in Mr Cameron's last question, which is the role that Channel 4 plays in what we are trying to do now, which is to represent the whole UK. The question about why an audience is watching as much. I hope that, as you adjust shows over time and as you make them more representative, you get that uplift. Last year, after I got a hard time from another Scottish committee, we put a Scottish family into Gogglebox. Lo and behold, the programme has gone up 3 per cent in Scotland. That is not rocket science, but that is exactly what we should be doing. The other piece that you have heard from your previous witnesses is that we are there at the skills, training and the small and the risky point. That is our role. We find that fundamentally an important part of our role. You will see that, in the white paper for privatisation, the provision to do skills and training has been deleted as part of our organisational remit. You have heard that we would not be required to be present outside of London. However, it is that combination of things that is really, really important when industries are a fledgling or a building up or a scaling point. As you know from the report that came out about the future of the industry in Scotland, that work takes decades—not a sort of one year—and you are out. It takes time. When it is done well, it comes together in a network of things that work together to build an industry and give a sustainable route for young people into it in ways that they would not otherwise get. However, it does take quite a lot of quite precise, fine and expensive work to build up companies to a scale where they can survive by themselves. Thank you for that, Alex. I think that your graphic at the end of programmes, which shows where your programmes are made, is really obvious. I did notice that the Google Box one now covers the whole of the land mass. Thank you for doing that. Following on from what you have just said, we got some really powerful evidence from Nicole Cleman of Firecrest Films talking about the benefit of collaboratively working with Channel 4 and the support that you are able to give in training, longer commissions, et cetera. It would be useful to hear perhaps Brian A from your perspective as the external affairs manager how you see that working and the benefit that Channel 4 being that nimble, innovative organisation has been able to do? We work with independent production companies in lots of different ways. Joe is the expert, because Joe is doing this day in and day out. Firecrest is one of our great fund companies, but we have worked with Firecrest right from their inception. Channel 4 is often a route for a first commission for a lot of new companies. I think that that is an important role in the industry. A lot of Firecrest's initial commissions were with us. We supported them with what was Alpha Fund, which is now our emerging energy fund, so there is some support to help them to do more development to grow. I think that they have had nine production trainings. Our production training scheme is all about improving representation in the industry, but it is about working with our supply chain. Channel 4 only has about 1,000 employees ourselves, but our supply chain has more than 10,000 jobs. Supporting skills in our supply chain is really important and valuable. We pay 50 per cent of the salary and we provide wraparound training and do the recruitment of things that can be a bit of a blocker for indies. We have had some brilliant production trainings that are helping to bring great people into the industry, but also people from different backgrounds. That has been a benefit for Firecrest and for other companies in Scotland. We are currently recruiting for three more positions. If you look at the last two cohorts, about 20 per cent of the placements on that scheme have been in Scotland, which I think is really positive. Firecrest also joined our growth fund where we have taken a stake in the business, which is about getting to that next level and providing wraparound support for the business to grow. We are trying to support businesses through all different stages, with two rivers through another growth fund company. We are supporting them to move more into the digital space, because that is not a space that they have done a lot of work in. The way that we work with different indies is really bespoke, depending on their needs and how we can work with them to add value. I think that Joe can probably add more. I am happy to. I have already mentioned the kind of work that we do very closely with TRC. We have currently got a funded placement as part of the factual fast track working in the Glasgow office here as a commissioning executive. I signed up the other day to junior members of the office here to work with GMAC to do some outreach work in schools locally, because, again, as part of a drive for underrepresented groups in particular, the presence of Channel 4 in Glasgow of having people here doing jobs at every level is really potent for that pipeline of the next generation of talent and those opportunities. Brian He has mentioned the work that the production trainee scheme places people in indies. We have a big returning drama, Screw, which we will be filming in Kelvin Hall later in the year. That has training schemes in there for ex-offenders. It is a prison drama. It is a really innovative way of Channel 4 making a difference in Scotland. We have an apprentice in our office who never in a million years thought that she would have an opportunity to work in this industry. She had a six-month review yesterday and is absolutely cherishing every opportunity that she is getting. The people in this office, we work with Strathclyde Unis, Stirling, City of Glasgow, University of West of Scotland, and all of my team, wherever they are in the UK, there have to be more of them in Scotland, we have mental mentees, we work with organisations to keep that pipeline going. It is that thing in parallel again between all the very official corporate emerging indies, all of that investment and that on the boots on the ground work because we are here and visible with that open door policy. One of the joys of Channel 4 being here, I genuinely think now that it is possible to have a career in Scotland through the door as a runner to running a department and never have to move anywhere else. I think that it is only because Channel 4 is here that that is absolutely possible, because they have made the investment into Scotland. It has been good to hear your evidence today. I was really struck when I read the justification for privatisation from Nidine Doris herself. It would give Channel 4 the tools and freedom to flourish and thrive as a public service broadcaster long into the future, yet the evidence that we have had today is that although you are not for profit, you make money and you made £74 million last year, which was reinvested into the sector. We have had a lot of evidence about really positive impact in Scotland, production, quality of filmmaking, training and skills, diversity. I was wondering to kick off Alex Mann. Could you put on record for us today what Channel 4 has presented as your alternative to privatisation? I understand that you have made that feedback to DCMS. I think that it would be just good to get it on the record to say how you would want to go forward to deliver the success that you have had in the past. Last year's figures, which we have released, were even better than the ones that you quoted. We have made £1.2 billion in revenues, which is an absolute all-time high-end record. We have made £101 million, which we call surplus, which just gets reinvested. We have about £272 million in cash sitting on the balance sheet. We have no debt and are unbelievably record-breaking in terms of our financial success. We are in an extremely strong financial position, the strongest that we have ever been in our 39.5-year history. We will hopefully make it to 40. As you have heard from some others, we have had huge success with young people, particularly as we have switched to streaming. Involving 16 to 34-year-olds and making sure that they see proper and regulated impartial news and fact-based programming, we all know that that is more important than ever before in today's society. We laid out an alternative plan to privatisation. You will know that 96 per cent of the consultation responses were negative on privatisation. We thought quite carefully about what we should lay out as an alternative plan, because we believe that we should never be standing still for the record. I do not believe in preserving the status quo. I come from a background of running privatised organisations for profit. I thought quite carefully about if one was not to do that, why. I really focus on how we would increase our wider civic impact and create a bigger public dividend as a reason to remain public. We laid out a set of key things. One was a bigger commitment to the nations and regions, so becoming even more representative of the UK, so putting formally in place a regulated target to spend 50 per cent of money outside of London, shifting to a few more hundred roles outside of London so that we would be a truly national broadcaster. Perhaps more excitingly a real double down of focus on skills and training individuals. We are at the moment a year into training 10,000 young people a year to come into the industry, but we propose to double that investment to create opportunities over the next decade for quarter of a million young people. That creates two billion worth of value because of the investment in those people in their careers. We are also committed to setting up a four-skill school, like a physical-skill school. The only one that exists in the UK for this industry is the NFTS, which is in Beckinsfield outside of London, but we wanted to set up another school somewhere outside of the south-east in the north, presumably, which would be a career centre for people. I want to say that, if you are young and you will know this from your work as a committee, if Scotland is to grow like that, it needs the young people that are trained to have the skills in the sector. If you are 14, which is when a lot of people make their exam decisions about what they are going to do, so effectively pick their careers, if you don't know anyone in the media and you've never met anyone in the media, it would never occur to you that you could do that. I grew up in Scotland, it never occurred to me. I didn't know anyone in the media. The only industries that are more socially exclusive are law and medicine, which is really shocking that media would come third. The work that we do of working in schools, starting to work in schools in Scotland next year, that work really changes the perspective and the perspective hopes for young people, because once they meet kind of war people and they come into our schemes, they feel that it's a brand that they can access, they feel an affinity to the brand in the way that maybe they don't have posture broadcasters. We can really make a difference there. We really thought about that skills point. Clearly, part of our plan was to remain not-for-profit, to remain, if you like, recycling the money into other companies and remain as a publisher broadcaster. As you will know, that is not the plan that the Government wished to pursue. We laid out the economic case of the next episode. It would generate 11 billion of GVA, including 3.5 billion, specifically in the nations and regions. It would create another 13,000 jobs, 40 per cent of them in the nations and regions. It was very much a plan focused on skills training young people. It was focused on how we could spread the creative economy around the UK. Of course, it was focused on continuing to remain British as a company and investing in Britishness in terms of the IP that we put on it. That is very helpful summary. At one level, it is building on success. I find hard that Channel 4 is successful, particularly for all the UK. It is almost like levelling up in practice with the evidence that you spread investment across the UK. I will mention briefly the issue of the quality of film production and the importance of that on the ground in terms of the people in the film sector, in terms of the artists, the people behind the cameras and the impact of that diversity of programming. We got from other witnesses the number of BAFTA wins. Do you want to say a little bit about the success of the film side? It is critical, given the difficulty in doing film production, because it is very expensive to be able to do that in a not-for-profit context that makes profit. Can you say a little bit about that? Yes, certainly. Of course, there are fundamentals that are the same between film and television, which are risk taking. Let us unpack what risk taking is. It is normally innovation and creativity. It is news stories, new writers, new directors, new ways of putting things. We get to do that—we are not for profit—but we also get to do it because it is part of what is written down as our purpose is to be challenging and to come up with new opinions. Of course, that is often what gets us into this kind of trouble, but that is the purpose of the organisation. Therefore, we seek out to work with diverse and new filmmakers. That is fundamentally what my team in film for do. There is a team of development professionals who spend all of their time looking for the new, untested, the people who have not been given a chance, the stories that have not been represented. When you are running an organisation for profit, that tends to be the exact opposite of what you do, because you have to make a profit. What you are searching for is that things that you can prove will make money. The untested, the untrialled and the brand new and the fledgling are often not that. Directors such as Steve McQueen or Danny Boyle are now hugely successful, but they started off with us when they were unproven and untested. That is a fundamental part of our model. We are in all kinds of little films—new filmmakers, funding their short films, working with them to help through their careers. That kind of work is quite nurturing. It is about encouragement and working hand in glove. It is not about closing down things that will not work. It is a very different way to approach the film industry. It can result after three or four projects in tremendous success, but you must have the three or four projects that might not go anywhere first and are wonderful pieces of work. We approach the film industry that way. You can hear from hundreds of filmmakers who have worked with us in that way. We also take risks on projects. On the television side, for example, we had on last year Putin a Russian spy story—three episodes. I know from the producers there that no other broadcaster would touch that and no streamer would touch that. It is classified as too dangerous—that kind of documentary—too dangerous, too worrisome. That is the kind of risk that we run headlong into. It is about what the stories are and why should that be exposed and why is that important. My fear would be that, if that were to be eliminated, you would not see the new work come and then we would run out of British or Scottish talent who have been developed. I know from conversations that Netflix and Amazon are expensive and wonderful as they are. They regard us as a quarter of a billion-a-year research and development shop. Thank you very much for developing those people. There is nothing wrong with that, but you need the research and development shop and that innovation costs money and has done that a lot. It is a critical part of the industry going forward. You are creating jobs, you are creating talent and it is diversity that we are not getting from anywhere else. It is really impactful. I am a wee bit conscious of time, so I could try and be succinct, Dr Allan. I suppose that that is for Alec or anyone else who wants to join in. We have talked about the benefit that there is economically for individuals culturally in what Channel 4 does in terms of bringing in new people on. One thing that we might not have talked about so much is writing. We have talked about how it is important to portray Scotland, to portray places in Scotland. Part of that surely is about encouraging writing old and new in Scotland. I wonder, A, what is happening on that front and, B, what privatisation would mean for it. Joe, do you think that you are the best place to take that? Thank you very much. Well, I do not work in scripted, so it is a view rather than an expert position. In terms of the fact that we had Murder Island last year, which was an Ian Ranking project, so strong Scottish writing screw, I think that it is a phenomenal success for the Scottish writing community, because it is a returning drama. My neighbour, I know, is writing for it having moved from BBC projects. I think that it is about opportunity and risk taking again on the pipeline of talent. I think that, Briani, it is not a genre that I have a lot of knowledge in and out with the two projects that I have mentioned. Happy to come in. We are supporting Scottish writers in a range of ways. For the first time in the last year, we have had our production training scheme have a specific scripted cohort. Four of those placements are in Scotland, three with Black Camel and one with two rivers. They are partway through those placements now. That is all about new Scottish scripted talent. We also support the Young Film Foundation's work. There is a year-long programme working with seven highly potential new Scottish writers. It has a number of partners involved, but it has a residency on Sky for a week. This year, for the first time, there is support from the broadcasters for them to write a script—each to write a script for one of the broadcasters for a feature film or a scripted programme. We are doing a lot around scripted. There is something like a film for two. Limbo has been mentioned a few times today. Limbo is the first speaker from Ben Sharrock. He is the director and writer. There are lots of different ways in which we are trying to bring through new exciting Scottish voices. We have not touched on as much as we could. We have a digital commissioner based in the Glasgow office, and she is trying to find exciting new voices, including in the comedy space. There are lots of different avenues, but those authentic voices are really critical, because we do not want to be just spending money in Scotland. It is about representing Scotland back to Scotland and to the whole of the UK globally. Alex, you mentioned working with schools. Can you say a bit more about that, where their schools are? As part of our four skills programme, we are doing a set of training initiatives that bring 10,000 young people a year into the industry. Sometimes that is apprenticeships, sometimes that is specific courses, funding with partners for working with ex-offenders or working with teenagers without qualifications, but sometimes that work is earlier in the key stages in schools of going into schools and doing a programme there so that younger kids—I think that it is a key stage, sort of six—so maybe like 12, 13, 14 understand what a career in the media might be and they get a sense, as you have just heard, that you could write and be in television and film, or that you could be a digital native, which is people younger than us, and be trained enough to know that there is a career for you in the media, but you need to learn how to polish those skills and to hone them and not just be on Snapchat all the time, but that you can use that knowledge to build a career. It is exposing kids to that at an early enough stage that they see that as a possibility. We go into schools and do a specific programme with them to do that, and sometimes it is our own staff going in to speak, sometimes it is designing that, sometimes it is giving them a film into our day-in-the-life work so that they think that it is a possibility and we work with specialist partners to do all that. We have been doing that in schools elsewhere and we start in schools in Scotland in 2023. It is changing the perspective and the potential for young people as they think about careers and what they might do. OK, that is great. You mentioned earlier some figures and you have obviously been doing really well, so trying to understand the motive of the UK Government in this. Is there any advantage to the UK Government of having Channel 4 financially or not? Channel 4 does not cost the Westminster Government anything. It does not cost the public anything. It is financially independent. Our balance sheet is not backed up by Government, so we do not cost anything. We earn all our money from mostly advertising and, effectively, we recycle that money into other companies. The concern about the consequences of doing that, privatising the organisation, is what drives the interest and the noise that you hear from the industry. There is no financial benefit directly in terms of a dividend or other things to the treasury. The financial benefit is in the gross value added in terms of the impact of all those other companies on the sector. Depending on whose evidence you look at, removing Channel 4 into private hands would have an impact of somewhere between £2 billion and £4 billion negatively over the next decade, because the profits would go into the hands of a private shareholder instead of further into the industry and being recycled. The benefit is across the UK creative economy. The benefit is also in those 10,000 young people or a quarter of a million young people that we would train. If we were sold and reached a price of between £0.5 billion and £1 billion, depending on the conditions put on the sale, we spend more than £700 million every year in the UK economy, so you are about 1.2 or 1.3 years till that is evened. People say that it is an odd concern, given that I have worked in private business. My concern is that we have applied proper legislative scrutiny to this, because I think that the consequences may be unintended, but they are certainly not unforeseeable. We must all of us just think through what the impact assessment is, what legislative scrutiny is required, ensure that there is enough time to discuss and debate such an action, because we are a critical part of the UK's creative economy and you have heard certainly of the output on-screen, and you have heard about our work with young people and our work in terms of levelling up. You can probably see that we all believe in that and we are quite excited about it. I think that we need to think through, as an industry, what is the impact and what is the scrutiny that requires to make sure that we do not do anything that in five years will be regrettable. The final question points very well made there. Have you spoken to Nadine Dorris about this and will you invite her to your Glasgow hub? I will always invite the Secretary of State to all things. The support of the DCMS is very important to us and I am sure that they very much believe in our levelling up mission. Have you spoken to Nadine Dorris about this? Yes, absolutely. We are in good dialogue with the DCMS and we have pitched very hard to them about our levelling up plan for the next episode. Ms Mayan, Ms Street, Ms Robinson, thank you very much for your attendance at committee this morning. Particularly Alex, I have enjoyed having a bath down in the room. We do not normally experience that in the Scottish Parliament, but thank you very much for your attendance this morning. I am suspending for five minutes and we will return for a final session this morning. I warm welcome back and our next item of business is gender item 3 on Scotland's census. From the national registers of Scotland, I welcome to committee Paul Row, register general and chief executive, Peter Whitehouse, director of statistical services and ancillator, director of operations and deputy registrar general. I invite the registrar to make a very brief opening statement. Sorry, I was just waiting for my mic to be unmuted. Good morning. Thank you, convener. Good morning, committee. Scotland's census is a highly complex programme in combination with many other modern censuses that consist of a number of different elements. It brings together high-quality census returns, coverage survey, peer reviewed statistical techniques and use of high-quality administrative data to provide additional quality assurance. Our approach to delivering the census was informed by stakeholder engagement, work with other census-taking bodies and user research. Our responsibilities were to implement the legislation and put in place the tools and support to enable citizens to meet their personal legal obligation to complete their census. 2022 census provided more options and greater flexibility to complete the census than had been available before, whether online, paper or assisted completion. Over 2 million households or 89 per cent of respondents selected the online route, showing a clear public preference for this approach. However, paper questionnaires were widely available and, during the course of the census, more than 600,000 were issued. In advance of the session, we have provided the committee with some facts and figures about the activities of Scotland's census. I think that he has demonstrated the phenomenal effort of census staff to support the public to complete their census. I thank everyone involved in delivering the census and the many organisations and individuals who have engaged with us. As you are aware, the cabinet secretary announced to Parliament until 28 April that the census collection would be extended by one month to provide an additional opportunity for households who have not yet done so to complete their returns. On 31 May, the public awareness campaign came to an end and our field operation ceased. In line with practice and other UK censuses, we continue to accept late returns for a short period afterwards. As that yesterday, the national return rate was 89 per cent, with more than 2.3 million household returns. The month-long extension to the collection period has had a very positive impact on return rates, with a national return rate increasing by 9.8 per cent since 1 May. 30 out of 32 local authorities are meeting the NRS's 85 per cent local authority response target, but there was only one at 1 May, and indeed 18 local authorities meeting are exceeding 90 per cent. The most notable difference was in Glasgow, where the return rate had increased by 12.4 percentage points. I regret that we were not able to quite secure the 90 per cent or better that we have advised your predecessor committee. It is clear that there have been issues with lower returns than in 2011, and it is important to understand the reasons for this and what that means for future census exercises. However, at 89 per cent, we are very close to what we set out to achieve. My international panel of experts have confirmed that we have a solid foundation to move to the next phase, and that is what we are now doing. The census coverage survey, which is the second largest social survey undertaken in Scotland, is now under way. The CCS has been used in the last two censors in Scotland, and it is critical to understand who has been missed by the census collection and allows our statisticians to estimate for both the volume and characteristics of those people and households that are missing from the census. It underpins, as part of other measures, the production of high-quality estimates, the size and structure of Scotland's population. I look forward to answering your questions today. The census work is not yet complete, although the deadline has gone. Can you give us a bit of background on what remains to be done and possible timescales for when we might have a report back on the learning points from this year's census? The next phase is the census coverage survey, which is getting under way at the moment, and will run until the end of July or early August to the survey, two-step survey of approximately 50,000 households. That process is under way at the moment. We are continuing as part of a programme to gather lessons learned. In common with previous censuses, we will prepare an evaluation of the census that will go to the Parliament that will usually be produced after the first output results from the census are achieved. That will probably be in 2023, but we will obviously be happy to keep the committee up-to-date with learnings and the information that we gather in the intervening time. Thank you very much. It is very useful to get the paper in evidence. Can I ask you a couple of questions about the timing? I understand that almost a third of the population when asked were not aware of the census, particularly given the change of timing to look at the digital issue. My understanding is that in the rest of the UK, when the 2021 census was carried out, there was a safety net approach to try and include people. You made a big deal of the digital response rate, but to have to send out 600,000 paper versions, not going for the safety net approach to target areas where you would have lower income households, disproportionate older population and rural areas. Can you give us a bit of a comment about that? Can you give us comparable stats on local authority turnouts in terms of households and individuals? I am just making sure that the data that we have is comparable in terms of local authority turnouts. In particular, how will you go below the local authority level to make sure that people do not miss out, who either did not respond to the census or disproportionately areas? Will you be producing evidence or analysing the census output areas so that we get accurate knowledge about who is missed out in the census? Thank you for that. I think that three questions are there, so I will pick them up in turn. The first one on the information that you quoted was based on a survey of people at the end of the census who had not completed the census. It was not a general survey of the population to assess their understanding or awareness. I just wanted to clarify that point. Obviously, the largest group of people reported that they were too busy or just did not have the time to do the census. That was 35 per cent of responses, and then there were other reasons stated. There clearly are a number of issues in terms of why people in that final group who did not participate did not return their response. We need to understand that. There will obviously be things that we as a census taken organisation can take into account and build into the future design of the census and the lessons that we learned from that. I think that that also flags potential changes in public attitudes and societal attitudes, which will also require close thought for how censuses are launched and running in the future. In terms of your point on O&S, you are absolutely right that at the very start of the census, O&S issued some paper forms that were targeted. We did not do that, but from 28 February we had a capability for people to request paper forms well in advance to census day on 20 March, and we received in excess of 360,000 requests for paper forms through that route alone. We did however issue proactive forms taking into account some of the circumstances that you are talking about, such as digital exclusion and various other factors. We issued over 115,000 forms proactively to that group. That was not on day one, but some weeks later. Our field teams also issued forms. They issued about 92,000 forms. Some of those forms were posted through doors where there were responses. Some of them were because householders requested the forms. One of the biggest enigmas in that is that of the 600,000 forms that we issued, we received less than half of them back. Even if we were to focus in on the 363,000 that were requested, somebody proactively got in touch with us and said, can I have a form, please? Only about two thirds of those were returned to us. On the final point about sub-local authority data, I will hand you over to Pete Whitehouse, my chief statistician, to give you a bit more information on that. Good morning, everybody. I hope that you can all hear me. The question has understood that it was around return rates, local authority and below that. Thank you for that question. What we have presented at various points through the programme and continue to do today and provide to the committee has been at local authority and national return rates. We have a household register at which we send out forms and invitations to take part in the census. It is against that and the work that our field force is doing to make sure that we are gathering all the households that are in scope so that we are not including, for example, vacant properties or businesses or that we are picking up, say, conversions where flats or houses have been changed in the nature and the size of the number of homes that are within that location. We do a lot of work to understand who our household group is. That is what we report on. It is the return rates, the responses that we have gathered from the households. What we are then doing, and as I say, that is at local authority level that we present those figures, what we then do is, as Paul has mentioned, is that we carry out and are carrying out at this moment a census coverage survey that all the census bodies across the UK have been using as a statistical tool since 2001. What that allows us to do is to get a good understanding of the households or the types of areas in which returns have been lower than we were looking for. Helping us to understand any gaps in the census data. We will then add to that our administrative data that we are continuing to develop and evolve. Many people on the committee will be fully aware of how administrative data is now a much more fuller part of the analytical base of statistics across all dimensions of the economy and society. We are working there with colleagues across the UK, but particularly in Scotland, to make sure that we get use of all that information. For example, knowing from the pupil census the number of school-age children in a particular area helps us to understand how many the census should be covering. If we do not see some of those figures, we know that we need to use some statistical techniques to make sure that we cover that. The technique is gathering the information from the returns from the households, using the census coverage survey to understand where we need to make adjustments, using administrative data to help us with those adjustments and any biases that may be in the data. We present our outputs, our census, our statistical estimates and the things that will be presented at census output areas and our low-area geographies. That will be our estimate of the population size and characteristics. As you aggregate those areas, you get more and more detail. That is another area where we are about protecting confidentiality and privacy. The smaller the area that you look at, the less data you get. You will get population estimates. As we aggregate all of that, you start to get much more of the richness. I do not quite answer the question, because what I was asking was the comparable figures from local authority-level data from the 2022 census and the 2011 census. I am particularly interested in that in terms of credibility, because I have looked at the statistics. I wanted to double check that my interpretation was right, because the gap is quite significant. Western Bartonshire is 11 per cent down from 2021, but I want to check that I am using the right figures in terms of households and individual responses. I want to go back to that information about people not knowing either about the census or their personal responsibility. It is even more of an impact if it is several weeks into the census programme that a third of the population is still not aware of their obligations or the impact of the census. All that goes back to the credibility of the 2022 census, given the aspirations to hit around 94 per cent. What does that do for the effectiveness and the usefulness of this year's census? At the moment, the data that we have on 2022 is household returns. You may have in front of you the population returns. We do not have the 2011 stuff, and I do not have that to hand, but the comparison is a bit to be made. We will do that later on in the process. It can be made between individual population returns from 2022 and 2011, but what we have at this point in time is the household returns. The point that I would also make around that is that the census is increasingly not just an administrative count. In 1991, the census was run as an administrative count, and what we got is what we got. What we understand is that there was probably an undercount of the population. Since 2001, the work that ONS and Nisra also do and other global census organisations across the globe is that we take those census returns. We have done lots of work, particularly during the extension, to make sure that coverage is as across Scotland and in all the communities as we can, and then we do our census coverage survey and our administrative data work. It is the combination of data. Comparisons between return rates from 2022 to 2011 or earlier are of some use for sure, and they are of interest, but they are not the sole measure of the quality of the census outputs. What we are trying to do is build on our census returns, add in the knowledge that we get from our census coverage survey, add in administrative data and use that to produce the high-quality census outputs, and it is those pieces of evidence that we will be bringing together. That is where we are getting the advice from our international steering group around different statistical methodologies and how we maximise that. The question about awareness of the census, as Paul says, is that the information that was gathered was gathered by the field force on the doorstep as they were seeking final completion. That information is not of the population entirely, but of the people who at that point, right at the end of the census, had not yet managed to complete a census. Of those, a third of them said that they were too busy at that point. We know, as I said, that we have had 2.32 million returns. That is a very significant amount of the population knowing, but, as I said, it is not just the census returns, it is all the other valuable work that we add in, and that is what happens across all censuses now that run that kind of modern approach to gathering the data. In terms of our presentation of our outputs, we will produce high-quality population estimates bound by our statistical confidence around those to allow users to understand the variability in that, and that will also be how we present all of our other data. There is not an issue about the credibility of the census in your view. I went out and visited with your enumerators, and I was so struck by the fact that it was a very significant area that I was in. Just under two weeks to go, there was a turnout rate of 57 per cent, and it just did not take the box off 94 per cent. It is just how those missing households and missing people are going to be accounted for so that their needs are not ignored by future investment or government policy. I come away with that, even with today's answers, with quite significant worries. I was very grateful to you for coming out and seeing the experience of field force staff. I can entirely appreciate the concern that you have illuminated in other places. The census coverage survey goes out to some of the same places and gathers information, and its purpose is to fill in the gaps where people have not responded. The first thing that I would say is that the extension period increased the response rate across Glasgow by 12.4 per cent. We focused a lot of our effort at our field teams. We put additional people into Glasgow and additional focus over that four weeks, particularly to target the places that had the lowest response rates and bring them up. I could have done a very cynical exercise where I could have sent field force staff out to low-hanging fruit areas across the country and got myself a 92 per cent response rate, but it would not have been a good quality census because I would not have good quality data about the communities and the areas that you are quite rightly concerned about. That is not what we did here. We picked the areas where we had the lowest response rates and where we needed to know more. We targeted our focus and resource into those areas to drive up the response rates and gather more data. If we look at the shift in response rates, we will see that they are the most significant in places such as Glasgow, Dundee and other places where deprivation are factors. That is the approach that we took. I agree that that still means that there are some differences between what was achieved in 2011, but in 2011 there was also variability in different parts of the country. The census covering survey and the additional data and the work that Pete has talked about is very much used to address those gaps and those issues. We do not see any issues with the credibility of where we are at the moment. I understand the public interest in that, which is why I brought together an international expert panel of individuals to look at what we had done. We had a number of sessions where we presented what had been achieved, what we were doing, how we had done it, where we had got to and what we were planning to do next. I saw that as an important bit of independent assurance to anyone who did have concern on the issue. They very much said that we have a solid foundation and that it was right for us to move on the census coverage survey, which is what we have done. On the final point about lack of awareness, we have all picked up on the point that this was gathering views from people at the very tail end the last week of the census. It was not a few weeks in and people hadn't responded. We also have to remember that everybody in the country received a letter on how to take part. 2.7 million letters were issued. It wasn't a digital or email approach. Everyone received a physical letter around 28 February. For people who didn't respond, there were up to five reminder letters that were put through the doors. There were hundreds of television adverts and thousands of social media adverts and physical advertising. There was work with a range of different partners, local government and others, who also put out communications across their areas and the different groups that they work in. There was a very extensive campaign to reach it. It's always difficult to exactly measure reach, but the communications industry does have measures for this. They anticipate that, in the first phase of our marketing campaign, which was the first five weeks of the census, approximately 98 per cent of the population had access to a minimum of at least six advertised messages about the census. I don't think that this is an issue about lack of public awareness. I think that people were reached in a range of different ways in combination. Thank you very much, convener, and morning to the committee panel. I would like to ask you about the target, because there was mention this morning and in your letter to us of yesterday about a suggestion that 90 per cent was the target or thereabouts. Would you accept that, in the November 2019 document from which one of the KPIs use site comes, you defined as an overarching definition of success a person response rate of at least 94 per cent? Further, you referenced an evidence session in September 2020 to our predecessor committee. In that, Mr Whitehouse mentioned the figure of 90 per cent, but he went on to talk about the 2011 figure of 94 per cent, which gives us what we are aiming for, and also went on to talk about a good mid-90s response. So, do you accept that there is a target, both in evidence to the Parliament and on paper, 94 per cent was where you were aiming for? Thank you, Mr Cameron. What I would say is that there is a document that quotes that figure, somewhat predates my arrival in the organisation, but it is based on replicating the response rate in 2011. It is not based on an assessment that, if the organisation or Scotland's people fail to return 94 per cent, that the census suddenly becomes worthless, because it is not an either or argument. I think that the cabinet secretary, Ms Hislop, at the time and in our evidence, is saying that we articulated that we were looking for something of 90 per cent plus. We will always want to get as high a rate as we can because that improves the quality of the data, but we are not in a position at 89 per cent at the moment where we do not have a credible response and more than sufficient data. It is very challenging territory to suggest that when over 2.32 million Scottish households have responded to the census, the last census data is of no worth or no value. Do you not think that it is reasonable to expect a response rate in 2022 of at least the response rate that you achieved in 2011? No, not necessarily. If you look at the 2001 census, it was 96 per cent. There was a 2 per cent reduction in response rate in the following census, so there is fluctuation around response rates. It cannot necessarily be expected that you will always replicate the same rate in the census before. Can I turn to Mr Whitehouse? Given you said in September 2020 that 94 per cent gives us what we are aiming for and you then spoke about a good mid-90s response. Do you stand by those comments? As I remember, the evidence was around the context of where we might be if we were trying to deliver in 2021. There were conversations with committee and elsewhere about our concern that we would be in the 60s and 70s per cent return, so my language around 90 was a broad message that that is where we want to be. The performance indicator was set as a programme performance indicator on the basis of what was achieved in 2011, but what is absolutely clear and perhaps I absolutely put my hands up, I could have been clearer at the time, is that this is about getting as much census returns as possible within a reasonable timeframe that then allows us to move forward, add the data that we are gathering for the census coverage survey, add the administrative data, innovate and add our statistical estimation methodology and produce bounded statistical estimates about the characteristics and numbers of the Scottish population. The key performance indicator is perhaps unfortunate that there is a focus on one of those as opposed to the fact that there is also one around an 85 per cent threshold, which is all set out at the beginning. Over half of the local authorities are above 90 per cent, 30 are above 85 per cent and with Glasgow being the lowest, which is just under that. In terms of that indicator, we are in a good place. I am confident that with the census coverage survey and the administrative data and our statistical methodology, we will deliver those bounded high-quality census outputs that we are all driving to achieve. I turn to the question of the safety net that Sarah Boyack was asking you about, because I think that this is an important distinction between what happened in England and Wales and Scotland. In England and Wales, as we have heard, where the take-up of online completion was expected to be low, i.e. in digitally excluded areas of deprivation, rural areas where there was perhaps a disproportionately high elderly population, the ONS sent paper copies out at the outset, and I think that they sent them to about 10 per cent of households of whom half responded by filling out the paper copy. In Scotland, that was not done. Given that the eventual return raise, do you accept that that was an error? I think that the issue here is that there was an issue of timing and that we did it a few weeks later than ONS. There isn't any evidence to support the assertion that that was a critical difference. We will obviously see if we can determine and learn lessons from it. It is a difference, but equally, in Scotland, we issued considerably more reminders to people than happened in ONS. There are a number of differences in the design and approach of some things that we did earlier, or we did in higher quantities or more frequently, and things that ONS did. However, as I said, we issued large quantities of proactive forms to that group of people where, within the timescale for people, they would respond to the census. However, we will certainly look at the effectiveness of what ONS did as part of our lessons-learn process. I am not sure that I have anything further to add to what Paul has said. Mr Loh, you have twice referenced a solid foundation with regard to the census results. I am a layperson. Can you explain what that means and what that message is from the international searing group? As we have articulated in evidence to the predecessor committee on the decision to delay the census due to Covid, we anticipated that we would achieve response rates somewhere in the 60 or 70 per cent range, which we assessed as far too low to provide a credible census return. We have an understanding of where a credible return, which we can then take and use other elements versus something that would not render something of the quality of a census. Our senses that we were looking to deliver a census were the response rate of 90 per cent plus and to get as high as we could. We have ended up at 89 per cent. Our internal assessment as an organisation is that that is a very high level of response. I think that anyone would struggle to think of any other exercise of public engagement where you will get that level of response rate. However, because of the scale of the public debate and some of the criticisms about the census response rate in Scotland, I thought that it was important to provide additional reassurance. It was not just our advice or being seen that we were marking our own homework, but that we brought in some very credible worldwide experts on census and coverage surveys to look at where we got to with the census. They could have come back and said that the census return rate was inadequate. You should continue to keep collecting census data. The quote that you reference is from Professor James Brown, who is a professor of official statistics in Sydney, who is the chair of the panel, but was endorsed by other panel members, which is that we have reached a reasonable, sensible and credible point to stop the census collection and move on to the next phase of the census. That is essentially what it is trying to capture. If I understand what you are saying, you are saying that the level of returns and the information that will be able to be gathered from the census returns is a suitable level for the decisions that are required to be made by the census to be made. Absolutely correct, yes. Thank you very much, convener. Mr Lowe, let's see if I just picked you up correctly. You said when you were considering whether to go ahead in 2021 or not, you expected if you had gone ahead that you would get a return rate of 60 to 70 per cent. Am I correct in that? Yes, you are nodding. Of course, the census did go ahead in the rest of the UK and was more successful than the Scottish census has been, which was delayed by a year. You go that wrong, didn't you? No, because that is comparing two different things. The context of the evidence to the committee that I am referring to was in relation to the fact that in Scotland there were a number of different circumstances that existed, which would have resulted in significant changes being made to the census design, which would have resulted in a lower response rate. What was happening, if you recall, in 2020 with the pandemic at the time, was that we didn't have mass testing, we didn't have clarity on when we were going to get a vaccine. Our colleagues in the United States were running a census during the pandemic that had run into considerable difficulties and they had to extend their collection periods by double it. Other events were obviously being rescheduled, including the local government elections at that time. The census is not something that you can take a decision a day or two before that you cancel it. You either take a decision to run it or you take a decision to reschedule it and you have to do that far in advance, so we are having to take some decisions based on the evidence and information that was available to us at the time. The ONS were also undertaking similar considerations, but their circumstances were different. They estimated that, if they were to reschedule their census by year, it would cost £265 million, which was about 39 per cent of their total programme costs. They also, as the National Statistics Institute, had a resource of 6,000 people and a budget of close to £1 billion in which to manage the additional pressures and issues that resulted from the pandemic. The final element that was relevant to them was that, independently, they had been working for many years on the development of administrative data. That was related to their wider functions in economic and social survey statistics, but, as the Covid pandemic hit, they started to look at how they could use that data. If they encountered a situation with low response rates, they could mitigate that by using those administrative data resources. In Scotland, as is confirmed by the chief statistician for Scotland, that data was not available. Each organisation was looking at that on a risk-based decision. There were a number of things that were different in England with the ONS and the case in Scotland. In Scotland, we could not have run the census. We had exhausted our contingency time. We were dealing with other demands, including the production of Covid statistics and also moving resources to deal with the radical changes that are being made to the registration system at Scotland at the time of the pandemic. If you may recall, there was a huge concern about the ability to manage and register the deaths of people from Covid at that time. I am responsible for the death registration system. The ONS is not responsible for the death registration system in England, so I had to pivot resources and people to deal with those tasks. I did not have a 6,000 strong organisation that I could just borrow additional people from to do that, so choices had to be made around priorities and what could and could not be delivered at that time. You are saying that it was impossible for you to have run the census in 2021? Impossible. Who took that decision? Was it yourself or was it ministers? Ultimately, it was ministers. To clarify that process, we undertook a detailed impact assessment analysis of the threats and risks of Covid to the delivery of the census programme. Having undertaken that exercise and we published a summary of the results back in 2020, we reached the conclusion that we could not deliver the census as conceived for March 2021. We did not have the time or the people left in order to do that and deliver it in a different way. There were also a set of circumstances about the public response and reaction to the possibility of gathering the census data at the time of Scotland being in lockdown. Again, if you recall, in March 2021 Scotland was still in lockdown and England and Wales had come out of lockdown, so there were differences in the restrictions. We looked at alternative options to deliver the census, which would have maintained the date that involved an all-paper approach using an online approach only and using both but without a field force. However, our conclusion on all of those is that we would have seen a massively significantly reduced response rate. There are questions today about concerns about getting to 89 per cent and how and is that good enough or what does that mean? We would have been in a position where there was a considerably lower response rate in Scotland than anything that we have achieved at this time. To be honest, there would have been real credibility issues about the nature of the census data gathered at that time. We were taking decisions based on the information available at the time, the risks that existed, the fact that there were differences between Scotland and England and Wales as part of that risk-based decision making and recognising that censuses are extremely costly to cancel at the 11th hour and extremely costly to run a follow-up census if the results are not achieved. I am aware that other members will want in, convener, but the work concerns raised at the time when the decision was taken to delay for a year various experts who do not need to list them. You will know who they are, came out and said that this could have an impact. Indeed, that appears to have been the case. We will always speak about lessons learned. Do you think, moving ahead, that Scotland's census and the rest of the UK census could get back into lock step next time round? Yes, thanks very much for the question. Just to clarify, this was not a political decision. This was an analysis undertaken by NRS as a census-taking organisation based on the threat to the delivery of the census in Scotland for all the reasons that we have talked about. We made those recommendations to ministers and ministers agreed them, but it was not ministers asking us to delay the census by a year. Ultimately, it is not a decision for the Parliament as to when the next census is taken, but we have to reflect that the census has only been moved out a step twice in its 200-plus-year history, one of which is for World War 2 and Scotland for the pandemic. I appreciate and understand entirely why comparisons are being made by what happened in England and Wales. We have to remember that 71 per cent of the countries in the world who were planning to take a census in 2020 and 2021 delayed it. That included Ireland, Germany and Italy. It was not an unusual decision that was taken here. It was a decision that many nations across the world, including western democracies, were taking at that very same time for that very same reason. On that point, I wonder, firstly, a hypothetical question, but based on what you have been talking about if the decision had been taken to go ahead with a census at the very low point or high point, however you want to look at it, of the restrictions around the pandemic. You have indicated how difficult it would be from a practical point of view to organise that, but would it also have created some very strange data for historians looking back as well? Thank you. That is a very insightful question. One of the purposes of the census is to gather data that asks the same questions of people at the same time, but is also reflective of society as it exists and is then usable in future years. One of the challenges, and obviously a source of criticism by some academics of censuses that took place during pandemics, was that they gathered data at an unusual point in society. On one hand, people can say that it is really helpful to get data about that really unusual thing that happened. On the other hand, others will say that that is not representative of society, it is representative of society in a lockdown or a near-lockdown position. You do get into difficulties because, for example, students are not in the same place that they would be normally. If it was to take a census in 2021, the population of St Andrews would look and feel very different. People were working at home so that the data that you get in relation to where people work, how they travel, how they get there that informs transport decisions and other decisions is skewed. I know our colleagues in O&S, one of the things that they have had to do, and they are a hugely capable organisation, and they have done it, is to make adjustments for the fact that the population were not in the same places doing exactly the same things during the pandemic in 2021. My other question, convener, was about household visits. I see in the data that you have provided, it suggests that there were over 1.5 million household visits across the country by field staff. Can you maybe explain for us what a household visit constitutes? For instance, in my own local authority area, it suggests that over half the households had such a visit. What did that constitute? I will perhaps hand over in a sector to Anne, who is our operations director and managed the field teams. However, 1.7 million address visits were undertaken, so that could have covered situations where people were not in at the time and can talk about the protocols and what was done under those circumstances. I hope that everybody can hear me, but let me know if you can. Our field force would get a note of the addresses that they were to visit on a daily basis. A household visit would mean that the field force person would go to the household and have no attempt to make contact with whoever was living there. If they did make contact, they would talk to them about the senses and the different ways that that can be completed. Before the extension period, they were directly contacted by our contact centre. If there were issues in doing telephone data capture to assist digital, they would offer the household a pay-per-form and they would be able to make sure that they knew how to complete the census online. They were making sure that the household was aware of all the channels. They were also exploring whether householders had any barriers to completion and what else they could do to help them. In some instances, the household would complete the pay-per-form questionnaire and the field person would arrange to go back and collect it for them and post them and all sorts of things like that. If the householder was not in when the field person needed contact with the doorbell or whatever, they would put a calling card through the door that had some information about the senses on it and the phone number for our contact centre if they needed further help. However, we had a system that recorded that there would be no contact made, so that address would then come back and to be subsequently enumerated hence, as I mentioned in other explanations, that often householders had to have more than one visit. Certainly, in the first instance, there were roughly about 70 per cent contact, 70 per cent non-contact, rather, and 30 per cent contact. That dropped slightly when we moved into May. Possibly, as a result, there was better weather and things, and often more people were out. I hope that that gives you everything that you need to know. I'm just going to go online for the final question, conscious of time, though, as Mr Ruskell wanted to ask a question. Yeah, thanks. I appreciate the technical nature of the evidence this morning, and, as you're saying, it was a technical decision to delay rather than a political one. I think that most of my questionnaires have already been answered, convener, but I did want to pick up on one thing that Paul Loh alluded to earlier on, and that was just to perhaps change attitudes within society towards these kind of censuses. I don't know if you could expand on that. Did I pick you up correctly that there may be a changing attitude at all? Yeah, I mean, I have to be careful that some of this is understanding of other data with the census, but I probably have to reflect that there are a significant number of events that have happened in the past year or two. We've had over two years of people living under very considerable Covid restrictions and having to follow government guidance and government rules and instructions. There's some data out there that suggests that that's starting to have shift society's attitudes and how they interact with government and officialdom. There's also information that people are currently or recently distracted by a number of different things happening in their life—the post-Brexit landscape, what's happening in cost of living crisis and various other things. Going back to that survey, that survey was based on 1,213 households who agreed to answer in the last week of the census, and 35 per cent of those people just said that they were too busy to do the census. Certainly that also chimes with some of the feedback that we were getting at the doorstep. People didn't see the census as important enough to them to do or that they would do it, but they would do it at a later time, but that later time never came. We changed the design of the census as we ran because we saw this starting to happen. We ended up issuing five reminder letters to people who didn't respond. We were originally planning—an O and S believed to—a couple of reminder letters. We added in three additional layers of reminder letters, and we had to extend and add in additional advertising activity that we hadn't planned to do. In particular, our colleagues in O and S hadn't had to run with. There are a range of things that we had to build in to try and deal with the fact that we weren't getting the response rates that we expected, but I'm highly surprised that about a third of the high-proportioned people phoned up or contacted us to request a paper form, who then didn't return it. Those are people who are very proactive in requesting them but didn't send them back for whatever reason. I think that there are some really fundamental questions that might not just inform future censuses but, indeed, future engagements with the public and a range of different policy issues and how we do that in the future. If you were to sum it up in one word, would you say that it is a sense of fatigue? I think that there is certainly an element of that at play here, yes. Mr Loh, I thank you and your officials this morning for attending the session. We will quickly close as we have a further agenda item in private. Thank you very much.