The BBC lets down Scotland - again - over Commonwealth Games
Despite promising to do better for Scotland, the BBC is delivering fewer local output hours, reduced news coverage, and substantially less investment in original Scottish content than at almost any point over the past seven years. The row over the Commonwealth Games has added to the anger.
Many Scots enjoyed watching the Commonwealth Games on BBC Alba, which has given the channel a boost in viewers - and Gaelic scholars the challenge of inventing new terms to describe minority sports. But if the event had been taking place in London, few doubt the coverage would have been on BBC One.
The Sunday Mail reported last weekend that the BBC “lowballed” their offer to win rights to show the coverage on BBC One. Katie Sadler the Chief Executive of Commonwealth Sport said the BBC bid just “a fraction” of the bid by paywalled channel TNT Sports. The anger spilled onto the airwaves where BBC Radio Scotland Breakfast presenters Martin Geissler and Laura MacIver defended the BBC from angry responses from listeners.
Meanwhile, a new report from media regulator Ofcom shows total public service broadcasting across Scotland was down 10% - and the BBC was solely responsible for that, as other broadcasters’ spending held steady or went up. In the last licence fee round cycle which ends next year, the agreed plan was for the BBC to move money and control out of London to deliver more for Scotland and the other parts of the UK. That has not been delivered.
The Scottish people don’t have any say over how our licence fee investment, which is more than £311 million a year, is spent by the BBC. The BBC is a Londoncentric and Anglocentric organisation. How money is spent is decided by the Executive Committee and the BBC Board. Of the 27 posts across these two bodies, only one represents Scotland, currently Muriel Gray.
Scotland has a much smaller media industry than other similar-sized independent countries. The siphoning of resources by a London-centric organisation is a key part of that. An independent country could invest its money more effectively, as countries like Denmark and Ireland do.
Where is the BBC cutting funding in Scotland?
The Ofcom report shows that in 2025, first-run BBC output in Scotland fell by 88 hours to 1124 hours. This represented a decrease of 7.3% and was “the lowest annual total since the BBC Scotland channel launched in 2019”.
BBC Alba saw funding fall by 9% and first-run programming down by almost 15%. Scottish TV news coverage was down even more, by 22%, primarily because of the loss of the BBC’s digital show The Nine.
Writing in the National, columnist Richard Walker commented:
“Let's not forget that no-one had actually asked BBC Scotland to launch a new digital channel. It was a BBC diversion to distract attention from the fact that it was once again refusing requests that its main 6 pm national news programme should be edited from Scotland rather than London. The BBC would literally do anything to avoid broadcasting its main news programme every evening that gave Scottish news its correct prominence instead of adding a “news where you are” segment portraying Scotland as nothing more than a UK region.”
It is also very difficult to work out how much of the money that the BBC claims to spend in Scotland is actually spent here. Richard Walker asked:
“Why is it so difficult to work out how much of the BBC money raised in Scotland is actually spent in Scotland? To even attempt to piece together an accurate picture involves picking different pieces of information from an array of official and media reports. Is it too much to have all the relevant information in one place and presented in a transparent and easy-to-understand format?”
TV director and campaigner Peter Strachan argues that unless the BBC is prepared to make meaningful structural reform, it will continue to drive inequality for Scotland. He accuses London of eagerly “hoovering up” money earmarked to nurture Scotland’s creative industries.
The BBC has also been forced to issue corrections much more in Scotland than in other parts of the UK, mainly because of framing news in a Unionist way.
Here are a few issues Scots have with the BBC
1 - Support for emerging Scottish artists has collapsed
Musicians are angry at BBC Radio Scotland’s decision to swap out the late-night curated music shows that nurtured emerging Scottish talent in favour of generic easy listening.
Singer-songwriters Iona Fyfe, Emma Pollock, Dean Owens, Findlay Napier, James Grant, Kim Edgar, Carol Laula and Kris Drever accused the publicly funded broadcaster of “cultural vandalism” after specialist music programmes hosted by Iain Anderson, Billy Sloan, Roddy Hart and Natasha Raskin Sharp were taken off air. Research by the band Constant Follower, led by folk musician Stephen McAll, found that plays of music by independent Scottish artists collapsed.
2 - Reduction in Scottish content across the board
BBC Radio Scotland recently axed a daily arts segment by young Scots poet Len Pennie. At the same time it took out the popular presenter Michelle McManus and arts journalist Nicola Meighan.
Last year, the long-running drama soap “River City” was axed, depriving its crew of stable jobs. Rather than replacing it with another long-running show with long-term jobs, the BBC is scattering the money.
Herald writer Alsion Rowatt castigated part of the replacement for this, a “crude” podcast called “Situationships” as cheap TV.
3 - The biggest “Scottish” show “The Traitors” has few Scots in the crew
The BBC counts The Traitors' budget as Scottish spending on the grounds that it is filmed in a Scottish “castle”. But fewer than half of the production crew are Scottish.
BBC Scotland director Hayley Valentine refused to say exactly how many when giving evidence to a House of Commons committee. She said it had gone up by about 10. She conceded it was still less than half, and it may be much less than half. According to LinkedIn, the production company Studio Lambert employs just one person in Scotland, in Glasgow.
Last year, the documentary filmmaker Peter Strachan investigated and found that just 4.17% of above-the-line roles - creative, director, producer - are filled by off-screen talent based in Scotland. On below-the-line roles - that is day-to-day filming and editing and the like - just 6.25% are north of the border. Over 80% of the production team are based in London.
4 - Unfairness towards Scottish independence
BBC Scotland has issued more corrections regarding errors in the last three years than BBC Wales, BBC Northern Ireland and all regional English BBC bureaux combined.
In 2025, BBC Scotland errors included a June episode of Debate Night shown on the eve of the Holyrood by-election in Hamilton, Larkhall and Stonehouse, which had three Labour-supporting panellists out of five.
In another example, the BBC was forced to issue a correction in October after it echoed almost word-for-word a Tory press release claiming without fact checking that “over £1 million [had been] spent on sending Scottish ferry staff to Turkey”.
In fact, only £23,000 had been spent on the Turkish trips to monitor the construction of new vessels, with the remaining £1m being normal staffing costs over three years, which would have been paid regardless.
The BBC also made headlines after falsely claiming that one-third of Glasgow's schoolchildren are not fluent in English during a Question Time debate on comments made by Reform UK leader Nigel Farage. However, as this output was UK-wide, it was not included in the BBC Scotland error tally.
Then, this January, the BBC initially refused to correct misreporting on the Scottish Budget. It claimed that “more than half of workers in Scotland will pay more tax than if they lived elsewhere in the UK” The facts are the opposite: more than half of workers in Scotland will pay less tax than if they lived in England. After initially refusing to correct this, the broadcaster finally U turned.
In a Herald column entitled “The BBC has a serious Scotland problem, yet nobody is talking about it”, Herald columnist Neil Mackay wrote: “There seems to be something of a wall of silence when it comes to most media outlets picking up on concerns held by Scottish nationalists related to the BBC’s news output.”
5 - Other independent countries have much stronger film and TV sectors
Scotland’s film and TV sector has been valued at £700 million a year - that is far smaller than that of countries like Denmark and Ireland. Ireland’s annual media revenue is above 7 billion euros. Denmark does even better than Ireland with a 10 billion euro sector.
Why does Scotland perform so much worse in this important area? It is not because Scots are massively less talented and capable than people in similar-sized independent countries. It is because of the huge imbalance of resources mentioned by Peter Strachan.
Conclusion
The essential problem is that the Scottish people pay their licence fee investment into an organisation that is centred on London and when resources are in short supply, London comes first. Broadcasting is not devolved and the Scottish people have no say over how the money is spent. The decision not to buy the rights to show the Commonwealth Games on an English language channel is one example.
BBC Scotland performs like what it is - a branch office of a London-based organisation without much commitment to or understanding of Scotland as a country with its own culture, history and linguistic heritage.
They don’t see the difference between servicing London and engaging with and supporting Scotland’s cultural and media ecosystem. They reject any attempt to make this point with blanket denials.
The Scottish government has raised its budget for culture. But the BBC licence fee has also gone up. So the amount of money Scots hand over to the BBC each year is in the same ballpark as the entire culture budget of the Scottish government.
Scots have a right to expect that this money is spent not just on serving existing taste with generic offerings that could be made anywhere. It has to be about broadening the possibilities, engaging with the depth and richness of Scottish culture. That has to come from a place of knowledge and understanding and - on current showing - the BBC does not have that.
An independent Scotland could direct this money much more effectively - as neighbouring independent countries do.
