 Welcome to the 17th meeting in 2018 of the Culture, Tourism, Europe and External Relations Committee. I'd like to remind members and the public to turn off mobile phones and any members using electronic devices to access committee papers should please ensure that these are turned to silent. Our first item of business today is a decision on taking agenda item 4 in private, our members agreed. Our first item on the agenda today is an evidence session with the ambassador to the United Kingdom for the Republic of Bulgaria. Bulgaria holds the presidency of the Council of the European Union and I'd like to welcome the ambassador, his excellency Constantine Dimitrov. I understand that you would like to make an opening statement. Thank you very much, Madam Convener. I am indeed privileged to address you today as we enter the final phase of the Bulgarian presidency of the European Union. It is a historic opportunity of my country, formerly a communist bloc country, to assume the presidency of this important political, economic and civilizational project we call the European Union. I'll be very brief in my introductory statement so that we have more opportunity for questions and answers that would address more directly those areas of interest or concern that you have as representatives of the Scottish people. Point number one in our priorities, even though not necessarily the most pleasant one from the viewpoint of Bulgaria, this is the ongoing process of negotiations for the departure of the United Kingdom from the European Union. We are entering an important phase A for the completion of the withdrawal agreement. Hopefully progress will be made if not by June, this month by October, so that an agreement for withdrawal could be signed, which includes a full, a full detailed description of the expected transition period, plus a declaration of a political nature that should slay down the framework for the future legally binding arrangements for the relationship between the United Kingdom and the European Union after the United Kingdom leaves the European Union in the legal sense of that word. An important element of both the withdrawal agreement and the future agreement will be the rights of EU citizens on the territory of the United Kingdom and reciprocally, the rights of UK nationals on the territory of the EU members. In a word, the progress in that particular area has been very satisfactory. We don't see any major impediments in this point of time to reaching a mutually satisfactory set of rights and obligations that would address the expectations of EU and UK citizens, respectfully. The same holds true at this point in time about the financial arrangements related to the obligations of the United Kingdom as it departs from the European Union. There are other aspects that are yet to be clarified, and if you have an interest in discussing them to the degree possible, I'll be ready to engage in a dialogue on these matters in the context of the Brexit negotiations. Our agenda is not, however, confined to the issue of Brexit. Another important task of ours is the right focusing of the initial debate on the multi-annual financial framework for the next financial six or seven-year periods in the functioning of the European Union. We are satisfied with the start and our capacity to moderate this difficult debate. We are hopeful that the budget will retain the centrality of cohesion policy, which is important for the catching up potential of countries, especially of Eastern Europe, but also of other parts of the European Union, so that the European Union is not only civilisationally cohesive, but also economically and socially cohesive as well. The same centrality we aspire to achieve in preserving in the regional development programmes of the European Union, and therefore we are looking forward also to an opportunity of the United Kingdom to continue to selectively participate in specific regional development programmes of its own choosing and co-ordination with the plans and the opportunities presented by the budget of the European Union, even after the period, after the moment your country leaves the European Union. No less important on our agenda is the future of the common agricultural policy, another area where consensus is sometimes very hard to achieve because of the different views of differing views of member states on the future and the centrality of the common agricultural policy. Also a workable budget is needed for the digital agenda. We have to work very hard and we lay down the grounds for it of the digital single market, the protection of personal data and the common efforts to fight against cyber security challenges. Unimportant priority for the presidency of Bulgaria is the reaffirmation of the European perspective for the western Balkans. By western Balkans we understand the countries in southeastern Europe that have not yet started or have just started the membership negotiations for exceeding into the European Union. We are very rewarded by the fact that the United Kingdom continues to take a very active interest in the future and Europeanisation of the western Balkans. Bulgaria hosted an important summit of the European Union devoted on the western Balkans on the 17th of May 2018 and we are looking forward to a meeting in London at the highest level hosted by Prime Minister Theresa May which will continue to develop the momentum of focusing and underpinning the perspective of the western Balkans with concrete projects in areas of transport, digitalisation, energy connectivity and indeed institutional integration. Last but not least, I would like to touch on a final important element of our prioritisation for the presidency. This is the management of migration policy, a very difficult area that is an open secret with once again differing interests by member states on whether or not the European Union will be open to more of managed migration into it through Europe or there should be further reduction into the processes or into the flows of migrants be they legal or illegal into the European Union. Another important aspect of the problem is the issue of the voluntary or in inverted commerce compulsory relocation of migrants in accordance with possibly amended texts of the applicable Dublin Convention. However, here I am sad to say that progress is very limited if at all but we are still hopeful to push the agenda for a progress on amending the existing key community of the European Union so that the expectations of all of our people, the nationals of the respective member states and indeed the international community as a whole is better met so that we combine the principles of solidarity, our commitments to the international documents on refugees and at the same time certain concerns are related to the influx of a large number of member states are concerned in a combination that reflects a balanced account of the individual interest of the member states. At this point in time, Madam Convener, I'd like to stop so that I could give a chance to the honourable members of your committee to give their comments and also ask questions if such exists. Thank you very much. You talked about Brexit and the progress that had been made on citizens rights, which is of course welcome. Can you say a little more about the EU 27's other priority issues, such as the island of Ireland, and in particular whether the Bulgarian presidency of the EU is hopeful that the Brexit talks might make significant progress at the June European Council? The issue of the so-called Irish border, which means about how the European Union and the United Kingdom could square the circle of the following points, which I will mention later on, is critically important. How to retain the constitutional integrity of the United Kingdom, how to fully translate the provisions of the Good Friday Agreement into a reality, into a post-Brexit reality without violating the spirit or the substance of that agreement, and how at the same time we respect the international legal norm of the fact that the UK will be a non-member of the European Union, whereas the Republic of Ireland will continue to be a member of the European Union. So these three elements constitute the problematic need of squaring the circle. In practical terms, in this point of time, we at 27 expect a more detailed proposal by the UK government, hopefully very soon, whatever that means, on a detailed description of the backstop arrangements on that particular point that could be applicable in case innovative solutions are contemplated by the UK government take time that is longer, might take time that is longer than the period of the transition post-March 2019, that is post the date of December 31, 2020. This is, I think, the most concrete description of our expectation, which I am allowed to mention now, and which I think is well understood by the government of the United Kingdom. We, hopefully, would receive that clear and more detailed description of their idea of how to tackle the issue, so that one of the impediments to the smoother continuation of the finalisation of the withdrawal agreement be removed. Thank you very much. I think it's fair to say that we're with you in anticipating that particular document. I'll hand over to Claire Baker. Thank you, convener. You talked about the multi-annual financial framework that has been worked on at the moment. The policies coming out of that, the expectation that the UK would selectively participate in on-going programmes. After the UK withdraws? After we withdraw, yes. Do you see the processes that are on-going at the moment? The UK's influence within the current discussions around the financial framework and the future of the CAP policy and the future of horizon 2020 funding. Do you see that the current situation is the UK's influence on those policies? My understanding with the qualification that I'm not working in Brussels is that the United Kingdom is very cautious not to overstep the mark between what it gets involved for the period up to the withdrawal from the European Union and on issues which concern primarily the work and function of the union after your withdrawal. However, we have a clear political declaration on the part of your of the UK government that there is an interest of participation on a case-by-case basis in regional development programmes that reflect, A, the interest and, B, the traditional strategic commitments of the United Kingdom to regional development programmes that enhance the capacity of East European nations including Bulgaria to catch up in their socio-economic development. We welcome this form political declaration as another testimony to the strategic commitment by the UK governments to the future of Europe, especially to the future of Europe from that part, which belongs to the former communist bloc. I was interested in your comments about migration policy and the recognition that it is difficult for the EU to deal with this issue. You'll be aware that the type of debate that we had in the UK around Brexit and around the referendum, migration with a significant issue within that debate, do you find the pressure on the EU in terms of migration policy that there's any way to use the rules as the presidency to try to keep the 27 countries united around this issue? Do you have any concerns that other countries are considering in their membership of the EU? Does this issue have traction in other countries in terms of presenting that kind of threat to the stability of the EU? My observation, and I think that it's not only my observation, is that the issue of migration, unlike maybe in certain quarters of the United Kingdom, is not a reason for people to give up on their aspirations to join the European Union. The desire by aspirant countries to join the European Union has been retained at a very high level irrespective of the challenges faced by these countries in areas of migration or certain instabilities in the eurozone and so on. I would like to contrast the problems that we have especially at 27 on rearranging the management of migration flows and the excellent climate of cooperation that we, especially as ambassadors in London, have with your home office and other institutions on the practicalities of regulating the status of EU nationals who have arrived in the UK, who had arrived in the UK and had been permanently staying in the UK before the date of the referendum, who will have already been here by the date of your withdrawal, who will have been here by the date of the expiry with the transition period. The only area of relative obscurity remains the status of EU citizens who will arrive in the United Kingdom for the first time after the end of the transition period. But it's very natural that we haven't covered all aspects of the future relationship. We are yet to adopt a political declaration, we're yet to begin working on the concrete legally binding texts. So overall, whereas to sum it up, the problem of migration flow management, that concern, primarily the 27 nations accepting the UK, the ongoing dialogue with the British authorities on the status of EU citizens in the UK is generally considered to be satisfactory, which is a very good news for my compatriots, for example. Thank you. Thank you. Jimmy Green. Thank you, convener. Good morning, ambassador. I'm really fascinated to hear your comments this morning and following on from your previous statement around the reciprocal arrangements for our nationals, both here and those who may arrive during the transition. I would also like to focus on the issue around seasonal workers perhaps as well, which is an important issue around Scotland and indeed the UK's rural economy. Given your confidence that there are satisfactory arrangements in place around the status quo, notwithstanding any changes that may happen in the future, which are the unknowns, why is it in your opinion that there has been a reduction in the flow of seasonal migratory workers specifically from Eastern Europe, many from your own country? Just to give an example, a lot of Scottish farms who rely quite heavily on that have seen drastic reductions to the point that farmers have been flying over to Bulgaria and other countries to try and recruit to cover people's costs to come here. One cooperative of farmers in Scotland has recently quoted saying that they believed that the Eastern European tabloid media had been painting a very bleak picture of the situation at the moment, and given that there are no legal restrictions on people coming, what do you think the social issues are around stopping people coming here even today? In my view there are a number of factors for a relative decline, but I wouldn't call it an absolutely dramatic decline, a relative decline in the interest of Eastern European seasonal workers to come to the United Kingdom. One of them is that those who have already arrived and began working legally as seasonal workers have been able to adapt themselves on a more permanent basis in the United Kingdom and to change the type of profession that they would like to exercise while residing in the United Kingdom. Secondly, contrary to the idea, the perceptions of parts of your public may be fueled, these perceptions are fueled by some of your white circulation newspapers, let me put it this way. Contrary to this belief that the United Kingdom is a great magnet for the law skewed labour force, there is an element concerning the standard of living in the United Kingdom. It's relatively expensive for East Europeans to live in the United Kingdom compared to opportunities in other more less expensive in inverted commerce European Union countries, especially having in mind that some of those countries overcame the most acute faces of the economic crisis they have been living through after the problems with the eurozone and in the financial crisis of 2008-2009. That's the second element and the third element maybe is the element of insecurity about their long-term status in the United Kingdom, especially if they are yet to arrive, even though we are technically speaking at the end of your full membership, we haven't yet entered your transition period, still in the perception of the average national, there always lingers the question, am I sure if I commit myself to the United Kingdom if I'm not given the same status that my compatriots have who have already arrived, is it worthwhile the risk taking on top of it? It's a seasonal work without guarantees for any long-term employment, if you will. Maybe these are the factors that in a specific way combine in the minds of those who show greater reticence to commit themselves to repetitive seasonal work in the United Kingdom, at least that is my explanation. We have a supplementary from Richard Lochhead. Thank you very much. Can I just ask a supplementary to Jamie Greene's theme there? I expect that many of your nationals are seeking official advice from your Government. What official advice are you giving nationals who ask about status in the UK, or whether or not they should come to the UK in seasonal work? The procedures to be adopted by your Government in dialogue, as I said, with us, the Member States and the representation of the European Union in London, and probably also in Edinburgh and in Belfast and in Wales as well. These procedures have not yet been finalised, and therefore we at this point do not embark upon an active information campaign as to the way in which people could revalidate their legal status from a permanent status, as we call it now, into a settled status that may be called after you withdraw from the European Union, so as to avoid confusion, to create false impressions about the actual rights, starting from the content of the questionnaire that should have to be filled in, going on to issues related to family reunification, pension benefits, social benefit and so on and so forth. May be by the end of the summer we will have greater clarity on the total plan of the United Kingdom Government, and thereafter we are ready to engage into an explanatory campaign, both through the sources, digital and other sources of the Bulgarian Embassy, but also inside Bulgaria, and that seems to be the expected plan of action of other countries whose nationals are among the economic migrants into the United Kingdom. At this point in time, it is a bit premature to engage, as I said, in an information campaign, because it may be a bit misleading before the plans of the UK Government in co-ordination with the European Union have been finalised. Thank you. It was really just in terms of some of the identified priorities that you had for the presidency and also in relation to some of the comments that you made in your opening statement about the multi-annual financial framework. It was really just to get your views on where the main opportunities lie within the new framework, because I believe that one of your priorities was on the future of European young people and I believe that the budget for Erasmus is due to double. The Erasmus Plus programme is something that the committee has done a report on, because we believe that Scotland still wants to continue to be a part of. It was really just to hear about some of the opportunities that you think will exist within the new financial framework, for example in other areas that we might wish that we can take part in. I know that there are some areas of concern within the new budget, particularly around cuts to rural development funding, so it was really just to get your views on that. Starting from your final point, I mentioned the common agricultural policy because there are problems there. The retention of the level and the categorisation of the funding in the common agricultural policy is something that the fight is yet to enter its acute phase. We are at the initial phase of the debate on the multi-annual financial framework, but we would like to retain the levels of agricultural support, while at the same time agreeing to the need of reforming the principles of financing agricultural farmers especially whenever we talk about support for smaller scale farmers versus the obvious advantage that throughout the years larger scale farmers have been enjoying as a result of the current architecture of the common agricultural policy. Erasmus is an important priority. We support its centrality in the multi-annual financial framework. We are also happy that the United Kingdom and also the devolved institutions of Scotland are very much interested in continuing an active participation in the programmes of Erasmus post Brexit. The academic and scientific excellence of the United Kingdom institution is something we will continue to treasure and as far as Bulgaria is concerned will be most welcome to guarantee the access to buy UK institutions or non-governmental bodies. Research centres, universities, laboratories and so on to the Erasmus programme projects and vice versa helping your research and technological capacity to develop as a result of the cooperation with the European Union because we think that the retention of a cutting age role of the United Kingdom in specific scientific areas is also important to retaining your stature as one of the leading forces inside the G7, the P5, the permanent members of the European Union with a determined interest in retaining the strength, cohesion and geopolitical weight of Europe. By Europe I mean not necessarily only the European Union but Europe has a civilisational identity in difficult and competitive times. Under the Bulgarian presidency has there been any activity undertaken to try to deal with the rise of the populist movements across the European Union countries with a target of trying to safeguard the existence of the European Union in future years? Thank you very much. That is an extremely important question. Whereas it seems to be a question related to domestic politics or international party politics, actually the European Union can do a lot through one particular angle in my view. And this is the angle of managing without unlawfully controlling the digital space against attempts of waging a hybrid warfare, propagation of fake news, manipulation public opinion by distributing non-facts, mixtures of facts and lies because all of these elements of the information warfare have to do with the capacity of populist movements to build up support for their doctrines based on a lack of proper solid knowledge about truth of reality in the heads of many of their potential voters. And that is why the European Union through its organized institutions and program to strengthen cyber security, to combat fake news, and to enter in a far more simplified in language terms but a more detailed debate about why the European Union with its current set of values is more conducive to the prosperity and security to the individual. This is where the European Union has a role to play, and that is how EU on top of the national efforts could combat the extremely dangerous extremities of certain populist movements all over Europe. Excuse me, certainly in the future when the UK does leave the European Union, it is important that there is that strength of an organisation and that grouping of nations who genuinely want to work together to be beside this country in order to try to have a better level of security but also to try to have an understandable level of trading arrangements and the Erasmus scheme that Mary Gougeon spoke about. It is important that the European Union survives for many years to come. I totally share your view. We expect that the agreement, if it is one agreement, I am talking about the future agreement, it should contain a trade pillar, a security pillar, be it subdivided into justice and home affairs pillar and common foreign and security and defence pillar, and if it is a comprehensive agreement, if it is a sweet generous agreement not with any routine third country but a special case of privileged and deep partnership, that would I think be a kind of outcome of this Brexit situation that would reflect the interest of the majority of the nationals of the United Kingdom but also I would say the majority of the nationals not only in Bulgaria but in most countries of the European Union. It is, however, the next step and I stress it once again your government and especially some of the supporters of the majority in the United Kingdom parliament should understand that before we have finished step number one it's difficult to move straight officially to step number two. So we should concentrate on the finalisation of the overall agreement and on the finalisation of the characteristics of the transitional period, including its deurea or de facto length. Alexander Stewart. So your view, your excellency, about what the selective participation might well be going forward, the challenges, the barriers and also the opportunities that the United Kingdom would have to ensure that there will still be participation although we're no longer with the but we would still have the opportunity to tap into that and the expertise that we have and the expertise that you have would be still being able to be assessed and processed across the countries that are participating. So your view on how that would succeed? Well it will be part of the future arrangement, the way in which the United Kingdom could participate organisationally financially on programs instituted by the European Union for the period after your withdrawal and the obvious areas are regional development programs, projects regarding the cohesion strengthening of regions and countries from the less advanced range of countries within the European Union. The issue of participation in operation under the motto of common security and defence policy of the of the European Union, of course having neither the UK will not be part of the decision making format but it will be somehow incorporated into the decision shaping consultative phase of the conceptualisation and design of future operations. The UK should be also involved in projects related to the realisation of the common foreign and security policy of the European Union outside the geographical scope of the European Union and of course in areas related to science research and the ability of the European Union to give young people a chance to get sooner rather than later a good qualified job based on overall improvement of the level of accessible education. You mentioned in your opening remarks around the challenges of the refugee crisis for your I'd be interested in how Bulgaria as a country who has been involved on two main fronts understand is Bulgaria agreed to take in around 1,300 people through the emergency resettlement scheme to arrive in Europe through Italy and Greece. It would be interesting to hear what progress has been made towards that but also where it has more directly affected with Turkey, the agreement between the European Union and Turkey. How does Bulgaria as a border nation there ensure that the human rights of refugees arriving through Turkey being respected given the concerns that the union and through the presidency has raised about the human rights situation in Turkey? One has to be very precise in describing the way in which we deal successfully with this problem. We are bound by applicable international and national law to register every foreign national who crosses legally the borders of Bulgaria to register him or her and in the process of registration they have these individuals I have to say where they're coming from and what are their grounds for requesting refuge or some other form of legal, probably permanent stay in a country of the European Union. We are bound by the current convention as a country, a first entry to register all those people, all those people on the moment the entry were not allowed to wave them by for them to go to another country. This is something which we have never done and will never do even though this adds to the burden of responsibility to Bulgaria. There is however another element that we cannot force people to remain in Bulgaria contrary to their will. In other words we register them and then we are not allowed by any international treaty including European Union a key to forcibly make them stay in Bulgaria. The only thing that they can do, I mean the only permissible sanction is for them to having been registered in Bulgaria for them to be returned to Bulgaria by another country which establishes that the individual in question has come to that other country from Bulgaria. But once again the logic continues once you return the person to Bulgaria you don't put him or her into a kind of a camp. They continue to be relatively free in their movement. If they go away and if they go away from Bulgaria there has to be another return to Bulgaria and this is something which is which is not efficient. In other words we say the following thing. We have to reduce the incentives of migrants to come to Bulgaria. We have to to the European Union. We have to crack down with greater determination on the international trafficking circles sorry gyncs. We have to keep the all-important agreement with Turkey on the control of the refugee or migrant flows especially along the route from Syria through Turkey to Europe and we have to of course appeal on the greater solidarity of other countries who have a very low level of migrants presence in their on their territory but still very reluctant to even conceive of a voluntary acceptance of a kind of quote of migrants on their territory and that is where the most problematic essence of the political debates debates continue as we speak. You mentioned there at the end that countries have a very low profile of refugees arriving that would could be United Kingdom just given our geographical reality but also given the policy intentions of the United Kingdom government. What would your hopes be for the UK's participation in European responses to the refugee crisis after we've left the European Union? It is very clear that the expertise of border management is something we in Bulgaria value very much on. I think this is also the case with Greece. This is also the case with Frontex as an organisation of the European Union. Your expertise in border management, your expertise also in helping former military personnel who in times of crisis may be invited to control borders. How these former military officials could be retrained for rules of engagements with non-combatants because the refugees even the most aggressive ones who want to cross the border illegally cannot be equalized to say jihadist terrorists in Afghanistan. They are civilians of quite another category, quite different category. You cannot employ rules of engagements that are applicable to to a combat situation. So therefore the United Kingdom is one of those countries who have a very good training expertise for former or current military women and men. How they could be retrained to perform functions that are more characteristic to border guards in situation of extreme pressure on the borders of a respective country by migrants or refugees? So these are the two areas where you could be very useful in terms of co-operation. You, I mean the United Kingdom. Thank you very much. Now we have very little time left but I've got one more member to come in if I could ask questions and answers to be as brief as possible. Thank you very much Tavish Scott. Mr Ambassador, can I just ask you about US trade policy and aluminium and steel? Will your presidency maintain the same very strong line the European Union so far taken towards President Trump's tariffs that are clearly seen as protectionist in terms of trade policy? Just in two sentences this is something we have left to be handled by the European Commission. What we want, what we advise the European Commission to do is to exhaust all possible channels of dialogue but once the dialogue has proven to be futile we have to be ready to employ proportionate and that's very good counter measures that in themselves do not provoke a further escalation of the reciprocal trade sanctions because I know what all our trade war is something that would be totally detrimental for all sides in this unacceptable situation. Thank you very much. Ambassador, it has been a great pleasure to hear from you today, not only as the ambassador but also as a former member of the Bulgarian Parliament's European Affairs Committee. Thank you very much for coming to give evidence today. It's very clear that the Bulgarian presidency has made progress as well as faced significant challenges during your six months but thank you again for coming to speak to us today. We'll now suspend. We will take evidence from STV to discuss the strategic plan, which was announced in May this year. Representing STV, I would like to welcome Simon Pitts, the chief executive and Bobby Hain, director of channels, and I'd like to invite Mr Pitts to make a very short opening statement. Thank you, convener, for inviting us here today. Bobby and I very much look forward to answering the committee's questions and to begin with, as you say, I'd like to make a very brief opening statement to address the concerns raised in Parliament directly. We have never had better television than we have today but television is also changing fundamentally. We're all watching differently, especially younger audiences and the traditional players are under huge pressure from new global competitors like Google and Netflix. As a result, every broadcaster in the world is diversifying into new areas in order to survive and to thrive and STV must do the same. When I arrived in Glasgow in January, I met every member of the STV team. Based on what I heard, I've now set out an ambitious growth strategy, which is designed to re-establish STV as a creative force. This is what the board appointed me to do. They are backing a significant investment of £15 million over the next three years, far more than we are saving in any cuts, to set up STV for the future. This is not a strategy to prepare STV for sale to ITV or to anyone else. If that was the case, we simply wouldn't be investing. I didn't leave a great job to become CEO of a company that just sold itself. I came here to build a successful future for STV, a healthy, profitable business serving Scottish viewers, headquartered in Scotland and showcasing Scottish creativity to the world. However, to do that we've had to take some difficult commercial decisions, and I am very mindful of their impact on people's lives and people's livelihoods. Closing STV 2 is one of those. Local TV has struggled right across the UK. Our channel launched as STV Glasgow over four years ago and has made a significant financial loss every year since. The disappointing truth is that despite the best efforts of our talented STV 2 team, very few people are watching the channel. Our news team deliver the best news service in Scotland and we're very proud of it. However, TV news audiences are in decline, and if we want to avoid going the way of the newspapers, we have to properly embrace digital, just as our competitors have already done. That's why we're proposing changes. Our intention here is not to ask the team to do more with less, we're asking them to do things differently. I do understand the concerns expressed here, though. Change like this is never easy and it needs to be done in the right way to protect our people and to protect the quality of our journalism. But virtually everyone told me the same thing when I arrived here, that STV doesn't invest enough in original programming for Scottish audiences, that we need to be famous for more than news, tag it and take the high road. That's exactly what we're going to do. As you know from your recent inquiry into the Scottish screen sector, what the Scottish TV market needs more than anything, our high-quality returning series, made in Scotland by Bonafide Scottish production companies. We have a wonderful opportunity here and I intend STV to be right at the forefront, making new programming for ourselves and other broadcasters and generating new jobs that keep creative talent in Scotland rather than losing them to London or America. The biggest threat to STV's independence and prosperity is to not be taking decisive steps like these to grow our business. I am absolutely convinced that the plan that we've set out, investing in creativity and in digital, while making some tough choices, is the best way of securing STV's future as an independent business and a genuine Scottish success story. We all understand that companies need to diversify and change in order to grow, and we accept and know very well from our inquiry that TV in-screen is indeed changing. I think that the concerns that are raised in Parliament across Scotland are the cuts to content and the cuts to creative jobs during the creative industry, and how can you expand your creative content if you're cutting jobs? Our intention isn't overall to cut jobs. Our intention is to create jobs in the medium to long term. You're dead right. What this creative economy needs is investment. What it needs is returning programmes made in Scotland by Scottish creative teams. At the moment, there are very few of those programmes. We don't punch our way as a nation across the TV sector. I'm sure that's the evidence that you've heard in your recent inquiry. You can name the number of shows that are made in Scotland on one hand, Homes Under the Hammer, Antiques Road Trip, our own show, Location, Location, Location, Eggheads, but you can't name them any more than that. There are hundreds of returning shows right across the UK networks. It isn't good enough that we only have a handful. The way to create a sustainable, independent production sector and a real success story in Scotland is to invest. That's exactly what we're doing. We are making in total £2 million a year of savings. We're doing that in news, and I'm sure that we'll come back to explaining the rationale for it. We're doing that in STV2, but we are reinvesting all of that and more. We're reinvesting £5 million—three more than we're saving every year for the three years of our plan—precisely into new programming for Scottish audiences that we can then sell around the UK and around the world, but that costs money. At the moment, STV beyond news doesn't make much of its own programming, and many people have told me inside STV and outside that it's a shame that we don't do that and ask me why we don't do that. The truth is that we have an enormous opportunity here. We have the biggest shop window in Scotland through our main channel, which gets a 23 per cent share of all viewing in Scotland, which is 80 per cent of all Scots, to make shows famous, to pilot them, to a whole country, to then create a track record for those shows and sell them around the world. I'll give you a quick example of how positive the impact of a new returning show could be on the Scottish economy. We are currently having just finished filming for a new BBC One peak-time drama called The Victim. It will come out later this year. It's a series set in Scotland legal drama. It brings in 100 new jobs, 100 people have been working on it, 87 of them are Scottish or permanently based here, almost all of the cast are Scots, Kelly Macdonald, John Hannah, almost all of the backroom staff, whether it's the director or the exec producer. Those are the sorts of shows if they return regularly to the Scottish economy that are the bedrock of a business and the bedrock of a sector. We have another one in Anteach Roadtrip, almost a year-round jobs, because we made 60 episodes of them for BBC Two just last year. We have £3 million into the local economy. Those are the sorts of shows that we need to do more of. It's a real shame that we have so few of them in Scotland's name. My primary objective is to make sure that STVs at the forefront are very resurgence in Scottish production capability and quality. That will be the test of whether STVs have been a success over the next few years and whether we can do much more to drive the local creative economy. Where is this £15 million over three years going to come from? You've identified it's going to come from the £2 million that you're saving each year. That obviously leaves a shortfall, so are we going to see more cuts in your core business? No, we're not going to see more cuts. What we've done is redirect other spend from other areas. Which other areas? We currently spend a certain amount of money each year on what is called the block plan, which is to fulfil some of our licence commitments where we commission a number of shows. We are going to treat those shows rather differently. We're going to treat them as potential pilots for new shows that can be sold around the UK and around the world. Just to explain what we do with our profits, because what we do is reinvest and that's what we're doing here, too. There's been a lot of discussion that STVs are profitable business and why make cuts. We made £18 million of profit last year. Immediately £9 million goes into paying the pension deficit, which is the right thing to do, obviously, but that's straight away £9 million. We then have investment, including things like new programming, but in technology and buildings and other things. Then we have dividends, which are paid out to our shareholders, and our shareholders hadn't seen a dividend for seven years. That was reintroduced in 2013. What we have to do as a business is make sure that we can continue to invest while continuing to move forward commercially. Otherwise, shareholders get impatient. However, we have a set of shareholders who have been very keen to support the investment plan, and that's what it is. It's a net investment plan. I've read a lot that has characterised what we're doing here as only cuts. That's a reinvestment of a net £3 million a year into the sector that we love and that we want to do better in and that Scotland deserves to do better in. Are there any details of where the investment is going? In terms of jobs and expansion, there's no detail at all. I understand the question. Let me start to expand some of that detail. We have set out in the statement that we shared with shareholders and everyone two weeks ago that all that money was going into three areas. It was going into new programming for STV and for STV player, our digital service, which needs to get better. Are you recruiting new people to provide that? Yes, we have already started and you need people to make shows. How many new people? Well, this is a process because I'll tell you how many. We have started by creating what's called a format unit within STV productions and this team will be purely dedicated to developing new shows, the first wave of new shows for our main channel. We have published a structure that has seven new roles. That will be the engine room of our piloting strategy, but it's not the full story. Once a show gets commissioned, that's when it becomes a real thing and you need to get in many more people to make the show. We'll have a permanent head count initially of seven. As soon as a commission is one, you scale up just as we do on the drama that I mentioned to 100 people, to antiques road trip, to 60 people. The potential here is for many more new jobs if we're good enough, if we get it right. A number of jobs that would dwarf the number of jobs that we are putting at risk with our current plans. That isn't to say that this isn't very difficult for those people who are affected by news. I totally understand that. Those are very difficult decisions and there is considerable uncertainty as a result. However, if we get it right, the rewards are very big, not just for us but for the Scottish creative sector as a whole. Obviously, part of your public sector, Rima, is to provide news. One of the issues that the NUJ has raised with us is that you haven't provided any costings in terms of the plan to change news, for example, that will, as you have said, require additional technology, it will require training. What are the figures for that investment? I'll pass to Bobby for some of the detail, but we will still be spending £9 million on news at the end of this. It will still be the most significant investment that we make in content, more than double any of the other genres put together. We have said that there will be investment in technology, in connectivity and in training. We are serious about that. It is necessary for the new plan to succeed. You haven't given a figure. We do have a plan, yes, and we know how much the individual elements of it cost, and we know that it adds together to around £9 million of investment, which is £1 million less than we have been spending in the last couple of years, but it is still significantly more overall than we spent on news in 2015, 2014, 2013 and 2012. It is an enormous contribution to news, and it is enough to deliver high-quality news, the most comprehensive news, right across Scotland. Do you want to expand a bit? Yes. I think that the plan that we have laid out with the £5 million per year of investment across the three years, which is the £15 million to create better content, to create new pilots, includes £1 million of savings from news and another £1 million further saving from the closure of STV2. It is fully costed, and the news budget, which we have been very open about, will remain around £9 million, so it is roughly twice what we are spending on everything else, so it is by far the single biggest investment in any content that we make. When you are cutting your news offering in the national capital of Scotland, how can that be considered to be an advance in quality? I think that the news that we have all around Scotland is differentiated by its localness. We broadcast news from four different news centres every night. We have contributions from other places. The contribution that we have from Edinburgh is one that we are very proud of. It reflects the capital and the east of Scotland. It sits alongside the programme that we have for Glasgow. In fact, what we are going to do is reconstitute the central belt offering so that people will still see a very rich offering of material from both east and west. They will see the presenters that they know, anchoring stories, and of course, we will continue to have dedicated coverage and a specialist unit based here in the Parliament. We will continue to have a very localised and very different offering on television that will move forward, but it will be a slightly different presentation of that. However, we are retaining the studio base and we want to change the templates of the programme because we want to reflect changing times. Can I just say why it is that we are making these changes in news? I would rather move on to other members, and I am sure that you have the opportunity to say that and reply to other members. Thank you, convener. Good morning. I do not think that anyone in the committee would argue with the ambition from STV in increasing production. However, it does not look like a company that is in any financial difficulties. The enumeration package that is being offered to Mr Pitts in terms of the annual salary plus the golden hello that accompanies that, the £18 million pre-tax profit that you have spoken about already, the inflated dividends to shareholders, which I understand returned in 2013, but are on an increasing level in the past few years. It does not look like a company that needs to make this level of cuts. It is difficult for STV to justify the cuts in particular that have been made to the news service. To me, it looks like people are losing their jobs in order to pay for the outlined increases to shareholders and annual salaries. Are you able to justify the situation that staff are facing at this time? That is not the case. As I say, we made last year £80 million of profit. There is not just a chest that we put all that money into and keep for later, or hand back to our shareholders. Immediately £9 million of that profit goes into paying down on the pension policy. However, there has been increases to shareholders. There has been increases in dividends. At the same time that people are looking for, we can face it redundancy. What we have announced overall is that the amount that we will return to shareholders under this new plan will reduce. We have announced a small increase to the dividend, but at the same time, as you have seen from the release, we have reduced the overall amount of the share buyback scheme that we had committed to last year under previous management. It was going to be £10 million. We have said that we are not going to give £10 million back to shareholders over a period. We are going to give £7 million, and we are going to put £3 million back into this new growth plan. We are giving less money back to shareholders under this new plan, but it is right that we distribute our profits in an even way, first and foremost, to the pension plan, where many members are still in employment or have retired. That needs to be robust and paid for. I have already outlined investment. That is where additional money is coming from, to invest in new programming and new technology, and also to our shareholders, who have been very patient, who sat without a dividend for seven years and had that reintroduced. It is fine and right that it should be introduced progressively over the next few years. However, there are one of many recipients of the profits that STV makes. The most important point here is that we are investing more into the economy as a result of these changes, not less, as has been characterised here. When it comes to my pay, you know from the letter that was sent to you by our chair, Baroness Ford, that I do not set my own pay. What happens is that the board and the remuneration committee set the pay and recruit in a competitive market in the way that they see fit. My total remuneration is in line with the remuneration that was received by the previous chief executive for the last 10 years. It is totally in line with the remuneration policy. It is supported and approved by our shareholders. My focus here is to make difficult decisions in order to grow a business. That is exactly what I am trying to do. It is a strategy that overall will deliver an independent, successful, sustainable STV that builds for the future and that, if we get it right, will create more jobs and more prosperity and make sure that we are independent long into the future and take real advantage of what is a wonderful opportunity to put the Scottish production sector right back on the map. It is a pity that there is no one here from the board this morning. Perhaps you can recognise the argument that, while there is an argument that you will receive what is in line with national pay structures, the cuts that have been made to the news service will look like it is reducing the Scottish news service to a regional news service rather than a national and that the status of the pay does not reflect the direction that the news coverage is heading within. At the beginning, you said that change needs to be done the right way. Is it the case that staff found out about the proposed cuts when the press release went out at the same time that MSPs found out about it? There were also staff who were told about redundancies as they were due to go on air. Can you understand the anger and distress that has caused among the new staff with STV? Yes, but let me give you my side of the story, which is slightly different to that. First of all, the team did not hear about it first in a press release. I spoke to them first directly on that same morning. In meetings from 8 am, the press release did not go out until later than that. You know that we are under an obligation as a listed company to be publishing information at the same time. We took a view that we could talk to our teams first. That is exactly what we did. I spoke to the STV2 team first because their news was somewhat more definitive. I spoke to the news team straight afterwards. Can I just make a point about the STV2? It was also the case that staff were involved in on-going discussions around the future of STV2. At the same time, there must have been negotiations with that media about selling on STV2. That was confirmed on the morning when the press release went out. That is not true, either. We exhausted our conversations about the future of STV2 with our teams. We had working groups thinking about the future, not just of that channel but of our overall viewing proposition, whether it was STV2 or something else. We involved many different people from across the organisation to give their views. Once we had come to an internal conclusion and we had taken that conclusion and recommendation to our board, we then commenced discussions in order to sell on the companies that hold the licences for STV2. However, no, you are not right that those two things were happening in parallel. That would not have been right. I should say from the start that I am both a member of the national union of journalists but I, earlier this week, had a private meeting with Mr Pitz. Just to address the letter from Margaret Ford first very briefly because she is not here to answer to it and to be on her task yourselves to do so. The letter states that Mr Pitz, that your pay package and your welcome package is simply a reflection of market rates of going rates. However, as the chair of a board of a company, Ms Ford will understand that market rates are set by those in the market and that she is contributing towards that kind of upward wage pressure, the people who set market rates and the people who make the decisions that she made, including for your salary. To look at wage ratios in the organisation, Mr Pitz, you are on, my understanding, an annual salary of £400,000. There are journalists in your newsroom on a salary of £18,000, which is roughly a ratio of 22 to 1. Do you think that that is a conducive disparity towards creating top quality news content? As I say, my pay is a matter for the board, that is why the chair of the board wrote to you. I do not think that it is right to suggest that that contributes to wage inflation, not least because my annual wage is in line with my predecessor's wage and he was in post for 10 years. The remuneration strategy is approved by the board. It is completely in line with the board's recommendations. It was approved by shareholders. The specific joining arrangements were approved by shareholders. I have been brought in here to build a business, not sell a business, but build a business. That is what I am focused on doing purely. To do that, we need to invest and we also need to take tough decisions. We have taken decisions to seek to modernise our news operation. We have taken a decision to face into the harsh reality that a channel that our team was doing a fantastic job running on very little resource simply has not worked. I do not know whether people have watched STV2 around the table, but the harsh reality here is that hardly anyone was watching that channel. We get 350,000 people watching news at six. I completely accept that, Mr President, and we will discuss that in more detail. To stick with the issue of pay, you talk about having to make tough decisions and harsh reality. You this year will receive £1.2 million in total earnings. There are people in your newsroom on £18,000 a year, journalists, who are facing redundancy. The harsh decision for them is about their livelihood. It must be incredibly hard for them to stomach that when they see people at the other end of the organisation receiving the kind of renumeration that they are. Do you understand how harsh that is for them? Did you consider forfitting any of your total potential earnings for this year? I understand how difficult the situation is for the people who are facing redundancy. It is horrible. It is a very difficult situation. We have made a series of difficult decisions that have a real impact on people's lives. We have done that in order to be able to grow this business, to use the savings that we are making in order to reinvest for the future and to take some of the profit that we are making to reinvest for the future. That is exactly what we are doing. Do I understand that those decisions are very difficult for the people concerned? Of course I do, but they are necessary in order to build for the future. That is what companies right across Scotland, the UK and the world have to do every day. Pick up the newspapers every morning and you will see that this is a tough economic climate. It is the same for us. If you do not change and you do not invest for the future, do not just wait for trouble to happen. Art news, which is very well respected and well trusted and comprehensive, is losing audience overall by around 15 per cent in the last five years or so. We have not yet faced into the challenges of digital. Everyone these days consumes news in a very different way. Stories break in people's social feeds on their phones rather than in six o'clock bulletins. If we do not want to go the way of the newspapers—obviously, the reason they are losing so much viewership is that the news is already known to people before the newspapers drop in through the mat every morning—if we do not change and embrace digital properly, then our audience will leave us at an even greater rate. That is the threat that we face. Yes, it does involve making difficult decisions, but the decisions that we are taking are to go where our audiences are. Our under-55s who watch STV news consume more STV news online and on the move than they do on television. Seventy per cent of our audience for the news is above 55 years old. We have to change to engage new audiences. If we do not, we will fall behind our competitors. That is not acceptable for you as an outcome either. One of the strengths of STV in the past has been reflecting the nation's diversity and geographical needs. In terms of your news output, you are proposing to cut the news team in STV north from 42 to 33. I note that, due to your committee appearance today, there are lots of TV cameramen outside the committee room. In the north and northeast of Scotland, I am right to say that you are going to reduce the number of cameras to two to cover the whole of the north in the north-east of Scotland, which is a huge, diverse geographical area. Of course, you are going to ask the remaining reporters, presumably to become video journalists effectively. Does that not just simply lead to less news outputs and also an erosion of news output from outwith the central belt in Scotland? I will let Bobby come in on the detail in a second. We have recommitted to our licence arrangements and recommitted to two programmes from STV north and central. We have not sought through any conversations with Ofcom to change a single clause of our public service commitments. What we are doing in STV north is recommitting to a long-term future. We have just signed a 15-year lease on the building. We have detailed plans to upgrade our technology, our property, to upgrade our studio to HD. You made a point that the number of cameras would reduce. That is the number of craft cameras. Overall, the number of cameras in the field, therefore, our live capability will go up in the north from 15 to 18. We will be better placed to cover the whole breadth of that part of the country than we ever have been. The difference between the programmes that you see in the central belt and the north is indeed a very strong feature of STV's news output. As we were saying earlier on, we have two versions of the programme in the north, one that includes material exclusively for Aberdeen and the north, and one that includes material that comes out of our Dundee studio. Again, that is a USP of STV news and we are very proud of it. It is also important to remember that the north team is not creating a whole programme themselves every day. If you take the example of last night, for example, the story about the difficulty of finding housing, particularly in rural areas, was covered from ELE, which is exactly on the border as it happens between STV central and STV north. That is a piece that was carried in depth by both our programmes, in fact all three of the programmes. There was a piece about the vote here in Parliament to pardon gay men for previously illegal activity that has since been decriminalised. That was a piece that was covered on all programmes but created in the central belt. There was a piece about the woes of TSB customers, etc., which was carried by all the programmes. In the north, the sinking of the data centre into the sea, which was done out of Aberdeen, was a piece that was carried by teams in Edinburgh and in Glasgow. It had a piece on the conference around health and safety in the offshore industry on the 30th anniversary of the Piper Alpha disaster. If you are a viewer in Aberdeen, or in Orkney or Shetland or the Western Isles, you have a combination of material that is from your patch, from your neighbourhood and is done by both the craft cameras and the video journalists of the future. As well as that, there are stories that come to you from other news teams. The reliance on our team in Aberdeen is for the stories that matter in that patch. With our Inverness team and our Dundee operation, we will continue to be the most local operation in Scotland. We will continue to have the quality, but we have the richness of stories that resonate around Scotland. I get that, but from my reading of the situation, you are going to ask the existing workforce or the smaller workforce to do more with less because they will have to do the digital plus what to do just now. What you have been good at in the past, if there is a fishing issue, you do a live broadcast from Peterhead or from Lerwick. If there is a storm, you have reporters out in the storm doing the reports. You may have someone outside RF Lossymouth, my own constituency, there is an issue to do with the fleet there. I do not know how that is going to be possible with less camera men or craft cameras in that part of the country. It is not the case, Mr Hayden, that you sent an email to your staff saying that they have got to concentrate on fewer stories in the future. That kind of contradiction is a point that I want to use in more stories. Can I just answer the point about asking our team to do more with less, because that is not what we are intending to do at all. We are asking our team to do things differently. That is absolutely the case. Firstly, STV2 news will cease from the end of June. There are many bulletins during the day, including many that are made in Aberdeen, a seven o'clock show, but many hourly bulletins. We will not need that output, so the amount of overall output required from the north team but also the central team will reduce. We are also not asking our teams to make the same programme. We are asking for a different programme. We are asking for a different mix, more lives. We will have more cameras in the field, as I said, so there is more chance to do more lives from the length and breadth of the country. More interviews, fewer packages, therefore. That, by our calculations—and we are in discussion with our teams and the unions about precisely this point later today—will mean that the workload for the average journalist is comparable to what it is today. That is what we think. We are more than willing to discuss and show how that is the case. That is what a consultation is all about. We are a couple of weeks in. We have three more weeks of discussions to have. Those are the sorts of important questions that we will address. There are productive discussions, because there is a big question mark over resources. Mr Bain, if you sent an email to staff in SDV North saying that there should be a concentration of fewer stories, how does that sit with the commitment to keeping the same level of news and respecting the diversity and geographical needs of an area of Scotland that is the size of some European countries? What we are doing is putting equal emphasis on digital and broadcast. As a legacy television broadcaster, even though we have a successful and growing digital distribution, it reflects the way that people now get their news, whether it is in their Facebook feed, they see it on Twitter, they use our app. That is an increasingly fast pace of change in media distribution, and we all are aware of that. If you count all the stories that we make every day across those platforms, it is roughly 50 to 60 per day. Some of those stories have a lot of attention, and they are very important stories, and they feature prominently on television. They may not translate online currently, or we may have stories that are a different mix online. Overall, there will be fewer stories. There will be between 30 and 40 stories a day, as opposed to 50 to 60. The email that you are paraphrasing is about the emphasis on doing more stories in a detailed and different way and using those stories across both television and digital. However, the important thing here is, as Simon has said, with the reduction in output and the moving away from all of the bulletins on STV2, which is a considerable overhead, the workload will be comparable in future for people creating those stories. There will be also more video around those stories. One of the anomalies that I found when I arrived here was that we have a digital team who are focused on digital news, but only 15 per cent of the stories that they post online actually have a video attached to them. We are a television company—that should be our USP—and having more cameras in the field in STV North from 15 to 18, and that is what is going to happen. We will have more opportunity to show more video, whether it is online or in our scheduled bulletins. That is the sort of more flexible future that we want. We will be better placed to report the region and report the country as a whole. We really believe that. We have not just conjured this idea up on our own in a dark room. We have thought very carefully about this move from journalists to multi-media journalists. In virtually every newsroom, in every broadcaster across the UK and around the world, this switch to multi-media journalists is taking place, or has already taken place. I will give you an example. Eight years ago, BBC Wales retrained 200 journalists as multi-media journalists. Yes, it takes time. There is always initially cynicism about an impact on quality, because we are asking people to do things differently, but with the right support and a proper transition phase, which is what we are offering over the next few months, the output has retained its quality and is still impressive and award winning, by the way. In the yearly news awards, the RTS news awards, there is a very good mix of winners. They include craft camera pieces, they include video journalist pieces alongside each other and fairing very well against each other. There is lots of evidence that the new model has worked and will work for SDV. To be honest, while we have fantastic journalists and a fantastic reputation, in terms of digital journalism and multi-media preparedness, we are playing a bit of catch-up. Can I just come in there? Mr Pitts, perhaps we should declare an interest as I was a journalist and newspaper executive for many years before I became a politician, but it is journalists who create news. It is not the technology that creates news. I wonder if you could answer the point that is raised by the NUJ that you will be the only national news service in the UK without a dedicated digital news desk. How does that, is that correct? If so, how does that square with your approach to future proofing your new service? Everyone will be a digital journalist. That is the big change here. But you won't have a digital news desk? No, we will have someone right at the top of the news organisation who is in charge of digital output for the very first time at the moment. This came as feedback from many of our news people when I arrived at SDV. We are very broadcast focused. We are very focused for understandable reasons on our six o'clock bulletin and it does very well, but we don't embrace digital. Digital is a separate island almost. Sometimes we come together with good or fame, sometimes not. We need to put digital and broadcast on an equal footing. That is exactly what happens. With less journalists? Why with less journalists? No, they will all be digital journalists. We will have many more cameras in the field. We currently have 30. In the future we will have 40. We currently have a digital team who sit elsewhere and are not integrated properly into the newsroom. We will have an intakes editor who is in charge of bringing in the news for digital and for broadcast, and then sitting alongside them for the first time we will have a broadcast outtake output executive and we will have a digital output executive shoulder to shoulder, making sure that we are embracing digital in a way that virtually every other news organisation has already done. Thank you. If I could shift the conversation away from the news gathering aspect, first of all, I will open by saying that any increase in original production Scotland will be welcomed by the creative industry, including any new opportunities for original content, recurring content and any job creation that recurs from that. I know that it is difficult to see what the end result of that may be, but I should start with a positive and at least in that respect. I would like to move the conversation on to the local TV situation, STV2 and some of the circumstances around that. Perhaps Sunfair and Mr Pitts has recently joined the organisation, so my questions may be more direct to Mr Hain. Can you tell me what has gone so catastrophically wrong with STV's decision to enter into the local TV market? When the local TV world was announced, it was not clear what shape that would take and how it would shake out. We were interested and curious to try, along with a number of other operators. You will be aware that universally around the country there has been a commercial challenge to making those work. A lot of the operators have been flattered in their early years, if you like, in terms of revenue by money that they have received from the BBC, from the licence fee settlement, which was extra cash left over from digital switch-over, which was not spent on switch-over. People were able to apply to receive money from the BBC in order to supply new stories. STV decided to take none of that money, so we did not take any of the money from the BBC and we supplied no news stories for the BBC. The reality is that the local commercial TV model has been really flawed in how it was set up, not until we got into this and were running on a week-to-week basis. Did we understand the challenge of generating a new channel from scratch, which is like a mini version of what people know of the main public service broadcast channel? This is a mixed-genre service that has unusually considerable original programmes to make. If you think about the sky or the virgin EPG full of hundreds of channels, the first five channels from BBC One through STV down to channel five create and invest over 90 per cent of the money in new programmes, and the other 495 channels spend next to nothing by comparison. It is very difficult to create and establish a new brand in that marketplace, and one of the things that has become clear to us as we've run these services for four years since the inception of STV Glasgow is that when you talk to people in focus groups, as I've done many times, and when you do research, people say that they like the programmes. There's no problem with the idea that you can create and reflect the local areas, and I think our team has done a fantastic job in doing that. They've done live sport, they do live news programmes, they do the live magazine programme, they do creative late show programming, they really have made the most of the budget. The challenge is that if you run additional programmes and the news is a good example, what people will say is that I really like the idea of a seven o'clock news for STV news tonight, which has Scottish, UK and international dimensions, but I'm already watching the news at six o'clock and I can watch the news at 10 o'clock, and there's channel four news that's been there for decades that I can also watch. It's simply the case that the reality of peak-time television viewing is that it is very habitual, so people go to the soaps that they know, they go to the entertainment shows that they know, and they watch the big dramas that change at nine o'clock, and this is bookended at six o'clock and ten o'clock by flagship news programmes. It is very, very difficult on a commercial basis to establish a presence and make a commercial success in that marketplace, and that's the reality. Can I just share some of the figures around the chat, because I think that really helps to understand the economics of local TV and why we've made the decision that we've made, because STV, from when I came in, have certainly given local television a very good shot over the last four years and have tried very hard to make it work. We have lost cumulatively over £3 million in total from running this channel. We spend £6 million a year marketing STV2. If you watch STV's main channel on any given evening, you cannot fail to see a promotion to turn over to watch a channel on STV2, and that hasn't worked. The simple truth, although it's somewhat chasening, is that the audience aren't there for local television and aren't there for our programmes. I'll give you a couple of examples. Our highly lauded seven o'clock news service, which is a fantastic mix of international, national and local, gets 1,800 viewers. Not even 18,000, but 1,800 viewers. News at 6 gets 200 times that, at 350,000 or so. Our Live at 5 magazine show at 5 o'clock in the afternoons every day gets 2,100 viewers. Our late night talk show with you and Cameron gets 1,300 viewers. Our News at 1 gets 1,300 viewers. It's not that we just have to be patient and the audiences will grow, unfortunately. In the last year alone, our news bulletins on STV2 have lost over 75 per cent of their initial audience when they launched. It simply isn't a sustainable model. We cannot justify asking our teams to make shows that are extremely good and well put together that no one is watching. That is not the right thing to do. However, there are some green shoots here. There are certain shows that have worked well and that have transferred, therefore, on to the main channel. One example of that is the People's History show, which has transferred to the main channel and gets audiences of about 240,000 people or so. That is a fantastic model. We will be continuing with that show. There are a number of other shows such as our Edinburgh festival coverage, our appeal show or our new year show that we have asked the STV2 team to stay on and do. I mentioned earlier that we have just created and we announced a few weeks ago that we were creating a new formats unit that will employ seven people initially in order to try to win new commissions. Our STV2 team has been invited to apply for those roles. There is an opportunity to grow shows out of the STV2 model. Our decision that we have taken is that it is not economic to run a channel. It is hugely costly running a channel, satellite capacity, transmission capacity or other technology. We have decided that we are going to use that money to invest in bigger, better and fewer programming on the STV main channel. I appreciate that there are very fulfilled answers, but we are quite tight in time and I did some other questions. If I could move on, that would be great. Mr Ayn, you sound almost surprised four years down the line that this hasn't worked. Surely when you went into this, it's also worth noting that you do sit on the board of the local TV operating company. You have had an oversight of the industry in its entirety across the UK and all the various models that exist. Do you think that you made the wrong decision to enter this market? You have wasted £3 million. We are in a situation where dozens of people are losing their jobs, perhaps as a result of some of those wrong decisions. You were there at the beginning of this decision-making. Do you not accept any personal responsibility for that? Hindsight is always 2020. The opportunity in television and in media and the combination of licences that was advertised and subsequently let appeared to us to be complementary at the time as a good idea to go alongside the existing channel 3 service, which, as we said previously, is also very well known and characterised by its localness as opposed to other TV services. I think that the same is true on a wider scale across the country. This was seen somewhere between community radio and local radio and television. The reality is that nobody knew how it was going to pan out. I think that we have given it our best shot. I think that we have developed some amazing properties and I think that although we are drawing a line under STV2 itself, the spirit of STV2 in terms of production and the experience is moving on. We are going to make new shows. We are investing in content with an engine room of seven people. We will need to increase that every time we get a commission, either for ourselves, for our regional programming on STV or for other partners. That experience that we have had making STV2 shows will stand us in good stead and will stand the people in good stead as we go forward. I hope that they will continue to work with us on new shows. Not all of them will immediately, but in the fullness of time, if we grow the Scottish sector and the Scottish economy and make more shows over time, there will be more work and more jobs. My final question is around the transfer of the licences to the new operator. What due diligence and processes have you gone through for this? I am aware that the company that will be taking over the local TV licences in Scotland, do you have any idea what they are going to do with them? The director of the business that runs that company sits alongside you on the board of Comox, so how is that process done in terms of the approval from the board and indeed the shareholders of that company? What structure have you taken in terms of the approach to the transfer of the licences and what guarantees have you been given by the new operator of those local TV licences that they will still continue to provide local content, develop local TV talent, creativity in Scotland and invest in the new channels that they are acquiring from you? I feel that you have a huge responsibility in the passing over those licences to the operator that they fulfil their obligations that you took over when you took the licences on in the first place. The reality of course is that they will have that obligation and as they acquire the licences and we are in exclusive negotiation with them just now with a view to them acquiring those licences, in the event that that happens and we have every reason to believe that it will, at the point where they assume the ownership of the licences and they acquire the licence holding companies, all of the obligations will pass to them and it will be off-com quite rightly that hold them to account for the very assets and the obligations that you describe. I would like to move on, Tavish Scott. I wonder if I could ask Mr Pitts about your earlier statement regarding this strategy not being about preparing STV for sale because there has been a lot of speculation about that since the announcements were made. My understanding is that the STV's main shareholder is an activist fund called Crystal Amber. Is that so? What do they do? They invest in a series of businesses in order to get a return for their own child. The Telegraph said on 2 February about Crystal Amber that the correlation between companies that we invest in, which are subsequently taken over, is very high. Are you familiar with that? I am familiar with that. Do you have any worries about this being your major shareholder? No. Quite the contrary, they have been nothing but supportive of STVs since they became a shareholder a number of years ago. They are supportive of the new strategy and they are not supportive of the new strategy because we are telling them that we are making cuts. They are supportive of the new strategy because we have set out a plan for growth and that is what they want to see. They want to see a company like any other company on the footsie or any other stock market around the world investing to grow whether it is in digital or content or broadcasting. They have been extremely supportive both historically, as I understand it, before my time and certainly since I have come here. They have asked about investment and what we are doing to grow the business and we have responded to them, but also to every other shareholder because it is the right thing to do with a plan that invests in the future of the creative economy. Do you have any concerns when we all read that this company invests so that they can see companies taken over? That is what they say. It is on their website. I understand that. I am very clear what my job is here. My job here is to put in place a strategy that delivers an independent future for our company that is a growth strategy that takes advantage of the huge opportunity that we have. I have to say that the best possible defence against any sort of takeover is investment, is a growth strategy. The worst possible thing that I or anyone else could do in this situation is to not invest for the future, is to not face into the harsh decisions about closing a channel that is not working, to not seek to modernise our news operation. That is when you become a vulnerable company precisely because people looking on from outside, prospective buyers from looking on outside see you not making difficult decisions and know that they could easily come in, make those decisions, add the value themselves and then your independence is lost. Forgive me, but that is not what crystal amber are. They are an investment vehicle according to their own website to invest in businesses so that they can see them taken over. I can tell you our experience of crystal amber so far. You have met them quite regularly. Have you heard of them? I have met them just as I have met every other shareholder since I have got here. I can tell you our experience and before my time as well for the last five years when they have been on our stock register that they have been nothing but supportive, they think as we do that our shares are undervalued, that we have a growth strategy and potential in Scotland and around the world that is much greater than is currently being reflected in our share price. They see a real opportunity like our other shareholders for us to grow. They have been nothing but supportive and they are encouraging us to invest to grow our business for the future and that is exactly what we have done. You have no worries that they are your major investor and they are there to simply see the company grow and then sell it off. I take it as I see it and as I see it and my dealings with crystal amber so far have been nothing but supportive. They want us to invest to grow our business to realise our true potential quite like our other shareholders. Did you meet crystal amber before you became chief executive? No. Thank you convener. I really just want to come back to pick up on a few other points that have been raised previously in particular by Richard Lockhead. You said in your opening statement that your intention is not to do more with less, you reiterated that to Richard Lockhead as well, but to be honest I just feel like I can't square that with the proposals that you have laid out. We have already heard about the few stories that always alarm bells for me, like Richard Lockhead. I represent a rural constituency in the north-east of Angus North and Merns. In the briefing that we heard from the NUJ, they said that we need fewer journalists to work at the company as we will be covering fewer stories. I believe that there are currently 10 reporters on Aberdeen, four part time, six full time, and the proposals are to cut that to five full time equivalents. What the make-up of that remains to be seen. How can you possibly continue to cover, still continue to have the reputation that you state that you have, where you're a national leader, if you have less of journalists covering presumably fewer stories? As we said previously, we will be covering fewer stories. That's not because there will be shorter programmes. We'll be doing more stories in greater depth, which will provide greater coverage, and there will be a number of stories that we have on the website, which in many cases are actually not location specific, that we will translate to both broadcast and digital. The question on the north-east staffing and the STV north staffing as a whole, I think that it's absolutely right to say that we are retaining our configuration of licences exactly the same as it currently is. It is the most localised new service anywhere across Scotland. We've got a strong presence in Inverness, we've got a strong presence in Aberdeen and in Dundee, but our output will be changing. In fact, when we close STV2, a lot of the material that's currently seen on STV2 is created and prepared in Aberdeen. That's a considerable workload that will no longer be part of the daily mix there. We have in plans, most importantly, the provision to go to more cameras across all parts of Scotland. The change in technology, and this is, by the way, not that we start doing this from scratch. We already have a mixed economy of craft camera and video journalist operators, but the world of technology enables more and more people to create content, and that is only going to continue. We are embracing that and we will have more stories and more technology to help. Let me give you an example of how that works. At the moment, if our Inverness reporter goes out to cover something on what is the largest patch of any channel 3 licence in the country, they are often driving for hours to get somewhere to do a piece, and they have to drive hours back to the studio so that we can get it into our system by investing in new technology and being able to capture material remotely and then edit it on the spot and get it back to the studios or get it back to our Pacific Key headquarters, we can get material much more quickly. That's a much more efficient use of everybody's time, and it means that the amount of time travelling is not lost time for people making stories and creating material. Even with no additional workload, they're just able to do more of what they want to do and less of going between stories and all the administration that goes with it. We're very confident that, on a like-for-like basis, our new line-up and our new organisational structure will be a comparable workload but will lead to more in-depth material being filed and being presented. It's also not five editorial roles that are at risk, it's three, and we will be seeking to, and are confident that we can minimise any compulsory redundancies there through VR. It's worth saying, again, that we know this model works in other news operations. We've seen it. I've sat on the board of ITN for 10 years. I have seen this done. It is being done in Sky, in the BBC, in ITV, in CNN, in CBC in Canada. Many of them started this process eight to 10 years ago. Yes, it involves quite a lot of change and people doing things differently. What we're not going to do is flick a switch at a point later in June and say, move from the current world into new world, we have to support and train our journalists. It's also an opportunity to learn new skills for a number of journalists who might want that for their career at SDV and beyond. But we are confident not because we've made this up on our own in a room but because we've seen it done. We've spoken to many newsrooms who have also done it and been through these changes. It's not easy. At the start there is cynicism and scepticism about an impact on quality, but over time it has proven to work, it has been accepted and those teams have gone from strength to strength. That is the experience that we've brought to this and with a number of experts that we've worked with. I just have to say, though. I mean, I do think that you say that there's a comparable workload, but I just don't see how that can be the case when really you are expecting the reporters that you have to do more and there will be less of them. I know that you say that there'll be more in-depth stories but, again, I do think that the local element of that will suffer. To me, one of the main USPs of SDV has been the local element of it. I've been involved in campaigns, as I'm sure many people around this table have, that have been picked up by SDV and not touched by Reporting Scotland, which always seems to be predominantly central belt focused and you struggle to get stories from the northeaster anywhere beyond the central belt into the news. I think that the situation also reminds me of what we've seen in the print media. Angus, I represent the north half of Angus, we have, I think, six local titles within Angus that are published weekly, but as a gradualist print media is reduced, we've seen the centralisation of the staff there and we don't see any local stories within those papers anymore, it just tends to be Angus genetic. So why would I buy that paper over buying something like the courier, which covers all those stories anyway, and does so on a daily basis? I fear then that what you have as a USP, as I've already stated, that will be eroded and that will be lost if you go with the proposals that you've currently laid out. We're very confident that the strengths that you describe are absolutely underpinned by this strategy and what we've learned from the newspapers is how not to do it and that is exactly why we've reaffirmed our commitment to Aberdeen. We've got a big technical change happening in our Aberdeen studios, which will take us into the HD world. We're upgrading our Dundee facility and we're upgrading in Vernes for the very reasons that you describe in order to maintain our localness. The way that we gather news will change, but the world is changing around us. The use of smartphones to create content by everybody has been a revolution and at a similar level, the world of television news gathering is changing as well, as Simon has said, in newsrooms across the world. We're absolutely committed to the North programme for the strengths that we described earlier on, as I was pointing out to Mr Lockhead. It is, of course, a combination of stories from the north-east and from the north of Scotland, as well as stories of resonance that are important to people in Aberdeen, even though they do not happen in Aberdeen, because they are important to Scotland as a whole. That combination is our strength in the north and has been for decades and will continue to be so. I also indicated that I had a meeting with Mr Pitts earlier this week. Earlier in evidence, Mr Pitts said that you had thought very carefully about this move. As far as I can see, the entire saga has been a public relations disaster for STV. You are damaged in the community, you are damaged in the industry and you are hitting the headlines for all the wrong reasons. We have heard today from others about the lack of regional and national news, and I have not heard anything from you that gives me confidence that that is not going to be the case. We have also talked about the staff and how they have been managing the situation. I think that, as an industry, they have been very good at coping with change and having to be asked to do things, but you are now asking them to multitask even more than they ever had before. You talk about being a trusted voice in Scottish news and current affairs. I have heard nothing today that gives me that confidence that you will be that trusted voice in Scottish news and current affairs. How do you see yourself trying to get back some of the control that you have lost in the story so far? My job here is not to conduct a public relations exercise. It is to set out a plan to grow our business that our viewers, our team and our shareholders all believe in. I have a lot of support at STV to deliver this strategy. It is the right strategy for the business. It invests for the future. It puts new content, digital expansion and news front and centre in what we are doing. We want to be Scotland's home of news and entertainment. We will still be investing more in news than anything else. You are right. The prize of being trusted and comprehensive and being the best news service in Scotland is hard fought and hard won. We do not want to undermine that. We have no intention of doing so. That is why we are committing to not touch a single clause of our public service licences. What we are doing is modernising to prepare ourselves for a future that is frankly already here. People consume news. You consume news in a very, very different way to how we did five years ago and it is accelerating. It is not slowing down. I have a duty on behalf of not just shareholders but viewers and also our team to prepare our business for the future. Yes, that involves taking some tough decisions that are not always popular in every corner of the country or in every corner of my organisation. That is what I am paid to do. That is what I have done. I am very confident that with a very talented team we will deliver on that growth strategy. I am purely focused on doing that. I hope that today marks the start of a wider understanding of why we are doing this in the first place. We have a wonderful opportunity. This committee has spent many weeks thinking about the future of Scottish screen. We have a huge opportunity ahead of us that currently we simply do not make the best of to put the Scottish television sector right back on the map. We do not yet punch our weight. We need returning series made by Scottish production companies. I intend for SDV to be absolutely at the forefront of that. It takes investment. It takes skill. It takes working with the best creative talent in the industry, whether it is news or current affairs. To your point about current affairs, we have a wonderful programme called Scotland Tonight, which hopefully you all watch. I am sure that a number of you have appeared on. We are not touching Scotland Tonight. We are very proud of it. It has a long-term future. We do not do that because we have a requirement to do it under our public service licences. We do it because we want to do it and we will continue to do it. You must acknowledge the frustrations that you have created in this situation and the anxiety that is now out there. Today you have had the opportunity to come here and give us the points that you raised. You have put forward your case, but I am convinced that the case that you are putting forward is going to enhance SDV in Scotland as a news and current affairs programme. We are right that the proof of it is on-screen. That is where we will be judged. That is where every other news organisation around the world has been judged when they have made changes that are almost identical to the ones that we are proposing. Let us judge the impact on screen. I will have to move on. Thank you. Stuart McMillan. Thank you, convener. Good morning, panel. Earlier on, you mentioned working groups and discussions are undergoing. Can you provide a bit more information about those working groups when they started, who is involved with them, and when you anticipate that they will fulfil their particular role? We are in a formal consultation process that is around the changes that we are proceeding with. As a statutory basis, that would be a month. In fact, we are going longer than a month to give people more detail and more time to consider how the changes might work. That is around the structure and the detail of how people's roles might be impacted and how they might change. At the same time, we are starting to build the future vision of news from the news gathering that we have talked extensively about today and the point that we have just made, which is how that looks not just on television screens but on smartphones and websites and so on and so forth. We are going to start a number of those work streams. Our news management team has already been involved in starting to think about how we will make the next generation of STV news. When the consultation process is complete, our wider news team will join that process and work with us to build the new news products of the future. That sounded to me that you are asking the current workforce to plan the jobs ahead, as compared to the fact that you have not published your strategy and that you yourself do not really have a full plan in terms of what you want to do. Well, there are two slightly separate processes. One is about jobs and structure, which is the consultation process. Once we are downstream of that, there is the actual process of working out exactly what our news will look like in future, based on the vision and the plan and the ambitions that we have. In terms of going forward with the issue of all the roles and the jobs, when do you anticipate job descriptions and salaries to be published for those new roles? We are right in the process of doing that. We have already published job specs for assistant editor, multi-media journalist, assistant producer, production journalist, multi-skilled tech operator, SNG engineer, multi-media graphics co-ordinator. We are already doing this. We are providing our teams with the information that they need to make informed decisions about whether they want to be part of the new world of SUV news. Will those be for every single role or are they for something to be done? For the roles that are new, we have provided job specs. For roles that are unchanged as a result of the process, we have not felt the need to because those roles are not at risk. Certainly the new JDA also provided us with some information. There was an aspect that they provided us with that I was really quite shocked at. That was apparently some members of staff that has been confused in terms of whether they will or will not have a role going forward. One of the allegations was that a member of staff of the news team was informed shortly before they were about to go to a live broadcast that the role that they may or may not have a job going forward. Surely that is not the right way to actually treat people. My understanding of that, and I was not in the room when that conversation took place, my understanding of it from our team was that that person was given the option to either hear what the impact of those changes were on his or her future or to wait until after the news and they chose to hear it now. That is my understanding of the situation if it is the same example that you are talking about. We have to give people choices. Actually what we have done, there has been concern about the provision of information and these things are difficult and they take time. We have taken a couple of decisions at the start of the process that we do not regret that we are the right things to do but that have had the effect of information taking time to come out to the rest of the group. The first of those decisions was that we wanted to talk to every individual one-on-one in a private conversation about the impact of those proposals on their future careers. We did not want, we took the decision not to give everyone all information all at once in a group situation because the worry was that individuals would be able to identify that their roles were at risk. Would you rather find out in a group in front of all of your peers that your role is at risk or would you rather have that in a private conversation? We thought that the best thing to do was the latter. The consequence of that is that we had to have close to 200 conversations at one-on-one conversations, which took time. The second decision that we took was that we were going to prioritise those one-on-one meetings with our SDV2 team because the news that they had heard that day was somewhat more definitive around the closure of the channel. Again, that took time and meant that we did not get to the news team until slightly later. I appreciate that there are always concerns that you can never have enough information about the impact on your job or future career. That is also why we listened to the team and have extended the deadlines here. We extended the voluntary redundancy deadline until tomorrow. We have extended the consultation deadline by two weeks to the end of June. We do not want to rush our teams into making decisions and we will not do that. We have not got a savings target by a certain time that we are tying ourselves to or we want to manage this transition in the right way and give people the right support and training to face into the new way that we are organising news. Can you guarantee that nobody will be forced to take our pay cut with any of the new roles going forward? Yes, that is not our intention at all. This is not about paying people less for the same job or a different job. We will, when we are recruiting and selecting our new team, whether it is the multimedia journalists or others, we want a mix of skills and experience. There will be some people in the new team that have been trained already as video journalists and have only been at STV a little while and are fresh, maybe at a college or university. There will be others who have not been trained and will take a bit more time to be fully trained as a multimedia journalist but will be more experienced through the experience that they have accumulated working on STV for a number of years. We want that mix of skills in our team. We think that is a good way to run the newsroom. Have you ruled out compulsory redundancies if you do not get enough people who put their names forward for the voluntary redundancy scheme? No, we have not ruled that out. We are joined at the committee today by our former member, Jackson Carlaw. We are pleased and surprised to see you back so soon, Jackson. Would you like to ask a question? I thank you for the opportunity to convene. I realise you are short of time, so I will not cover ground this already. I am excited about the opportunity that you have talked about for the development of new drama, something that I pursued with your predecessor over many years and without much success. You referred to previous big shows, Tiger, Take the High Road. Those were commissioned in an era where the independent ITV network was still a mix of a number of smaller companies. It is now consolidated into ITV and STV. The drama commissions that you talked about, ironically, are for the BBC, which is nice, but I would like to see the BBC commission programming, if you like, from independence. From your own perspective, what are the commissioning obstacles and challenges for STV to break into the ITV network? It has been suggested that they are almost insurmountable because they see the ITV network for drama as something that is much more centralised and therefore much harder for STV to break into with new drama commissioning. Those returning series in terms of the screen enquiry that the committee is looking at are very important, along with the BBC and the streaming services, to the larger, wider creative industries in Scotland. That is a good question because it is more difficult to break into the ITV network these days. For one simple reason, ITV, but also every other broadcaster around the world, are trying to make their own shows. ITV want to commission their own drama departments and their own drama labels to make drama. Of course, they are under an obligation and adhere to it to commission on merit. If we have a good enough idea that is exciting and will drive an audience, I am sure that they will listen. Another obstacle, Mr Carlaw, is money, to be honest. The reason that we are focused, at least initially, on making drama for other networks is that the economics are easier for us. It means that BBC or another commissioning broadcaster will put up some of the money. We will put up some of the money. An international distributor will put up some money. Increasingly, you have to have a patchwork funding model for these dramas in order that they are properly financed to the level of quality that is required for people these days. We have some hope that we will be able to co-produce in the future dramas for our own channel. It will not be immediately. The £15 million is focused on other types of programming, at least initially. I do not know about you. I watch Shetland on BBC and I have mixed feelings. One, that is a brilliant show. Two, why do not we make it? It is frustrating that that is being made by a company outside of Scotland when it is so obvious that we should be doing things like that. In the face of that, we have done what we think is the next best thing. The lady who created Shetland and Vera, Elaine Collins, is a celebrated Scottish producer and creator. We have just done an exclusive deal with her. She now works in partnership with STV Productions. The next drama that she makes will be made exclusively with STV and we are extremely excited to be working with her. It is that sort of investment and partnership with talent that we need in order to make sure that the Scottish creative economy really punches its way going forward. It costs money, it takes time, it will require piloting and trial and error, but we hope to get that. I think that the key to all of this will be protecting the quality, the quantity and the plurality of independent news output in Scotland. That is what is really at risk here and that is what people are talking about. The STV journalists that I have spoken to have said that there absolutely will be a detrimental effect to the quality and quantity of output as a result of the changes that you are making. You on the other hand are saying that everything will be fine. We as a committee, who do we believe the journalists on the ground doing the work or the executive management team who are trying to balance books? I am not saying that this is easy nor is it bogby, but it is necessary. We have made judgments based on a lot of evidence from other news organisations bigger than us that have been through similar exercises. They have been through it in a similar way. At first, there is concern and a bit of cynicism about how this will work in practice. I totally understand that. It is a brand new way of working for some. For some, they have already been doing it for many years since the start of their careers. There is concern about how it will work. There is understandably concern about workloads. We have sought to respond to those concerns by saying that we will have support and training, and we will not be asking you to do the same as we are asking you to do today because there will be less news as a result of the STV2 changes. There are just fewer bulletins that we are doing as a result of a change in mix. If we were asking people to do exactly the same, the same show, the same number of bulletins with less resource, I think that people would have a point. I totally accept that some of the STV news team are not there yet. I totally accept that there is concern and genuinely felt concern about quality. That is what is driving most of the questioning, both here and also back at STV. We have to work with the teams, and it continues this afternoon with a conversation with the unions and the representatives of STV about quality in news, where we will share our understanding of how that should work, the impact on workload and the extra technology that will be at people's disposals, and we will work through those concerns one by one with the team. We are very confident that we can come out the other end with a very high-quality news service. I have just intervened in terms of Jamie Greene's question. Perhaps a solution might be to release the consultant's report that DMA media did for you, which I understand has not been shared with staff, but is used to justify the changes that you have made. Perhaps if you released that to the committee, we could see what the truth is between the two different versions of events. We will consider that, and we will come back to you on it. The news team at DMA media, who were engaged to work with us, are experts in their field. There are very few. They might even be the only expert news consultancy out there. The people who did the work are journalists who have worked on Sky, BBC News and ITV news, who have worked with many international customers down the years. It is up to you, convener, how you run your committee. Maybe you would like to talk to them about their experience of how this has worked in other news organisations. I would certainly like to see the report on STV. We will consider that and come back to you. It is not true to say that no one in the team has seen that. We have shared that with the senior news team, who have seen it and read it cover to cover. The staff and unions are saying that they have not seen it and that it has not been shared with staff. We will take that back. There is not anything to hide. We will need to have a look at how we do that. Ross Greer wants to come back in. I will be very brief. Mr Pritz, you mentioned earlier on your surprise at the lack of stories that we are going up online without video content. It has been pointed out on social media during the course of this meeting that STV used to have, a dedicated digital video team, but that was lost as a result of previous cuts. Staff were made redundant, which brings us back to this point of remaining staff doing more with less. The final question that I wanted to ask is in relation to industrial action. There are staff balloting at the moment, and I would not want to pre-empt that ballot, but as an incoming or relatively recent chief executive, I wonder if you could clarify your position in relation to industrial action, and if you could confirm that you would not employ any tactics that would undermine action taken by your staff? Obviously, we hope to avoid industrial action if at all possible. I do not think that that is what anyone wants. We are engaged in an extensive consultation with our teams and with the unions. We are providing lots of information in order for the teams to make informed decisions. I said earlier that later this afternoon we have another meeting with the unions where we are talking specifically about maintaining quality and how we intend to do that and hearing their views and other representatives' views on it. We have extended those consultation deadlines in order that we can have a full conversation. We have a full three weeks to go of discussions. I really hope that we will be able to avoid industrial action. Obviously, if it happens, we will deal with it. As regards tactics, I am not sure that I understand what you mean. We will be playing a straight bat and trying to do what is best for the future of our business. Thank you very much. If we could answer those as briefly as possible, I have a couple of questions at the end. You talked a lot about the answer to Jackson Carlaw and others about your ambitions for increasing content. ITV does not have an obligation put on them by OFCOM to have a nation's output. It has a region's output that it has to adhere to but not a nation's. That is something that OFCOM are considering. Do you support that? I have my understanding of it and I am trying to wrap my brains to remember what the obligations were. I think that they have a 35 per cent… I can assure you that they do not have a nation's. We have spent a lot of time looking at that. They do not have a nation's obligation. Would you support ITV having an obligation to commission content, proportion of content from the nations of the UK? That is something that should be considered in the round. I noticed that there is a BBC commitment and a new Channel 4 commitment. They are publicly owned organisations. I think that it is right that the bar is set slightly higher. For ITV, the conundrum is always to balance the level of the obligations. That includes the level of the obligations with the benefit of holding the licences. Those benefits are slightly in balance. Do you work for ITV any more? Do you work for STV? I work for STV, which is part of Channel 3 convener. We are under very similar obligations to the ITV network. The balance is always the value of the licence enough to justify imposing further restrictions. In this day of digital and VOD, that balance is much more coming into question. Sorry, but ITV is a separate company from STV as we have explored today. If your aim, as you have said today, is your ambition for STV as a content producer, to make more content for the network, you should be supportive of off-com— I would be happy for that to be considered. ... putting a nation's obligation on ITV. I would be happy for that to be considered, convener. So you do support it. I would be happy for it to be considered in the round. Thank you very much for coming to give evidence to us today. We will now suspend. I am going to private session. Thank you.