BBC Charter: Regional Television News

Jamie Stone Excerpts

Tuesday 12th July 2022 Westminster Hall

[Jamie Stone (Caithness, Sutherland and Easter Ross) (LD)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Robertson. I will bring, as is my wont, a highland perspective to this short debate. I congratulate the hon. Member for Aylesbury (Rob Butler) on a thoughtful contribution. I say to the hon. Member for Henley (John Howell) that if he is short of things to do when he decides to leave this place, he is welcome to come and do some investigative journalism in the highlands of Scotland. Twenty years ago we had a half-hour bulletin from BBC Inverness; today we just have a five minute one. That has seen an erosion of investigative journalism and the coverage that was so good 20 years ago. I regret that enormously.

Of course I welcome and acknowledge the contribution that the BBC in the highlands makes to the Gaelic language. It has a large team of perhaps as many as 20 people, who are important to arresting the sad erosion of the language, but we now have about seven broadcasters speaking English covering the vast geography of the highlands.

I make the simple point that in the highlands we have challenges of distance and sparsity of population. Investigative journalism is important to enable the functioning of democracy—be it the Highland Council, NHS Highland, or the doings of a Member of the Scottish or Westminster Parliaments—but we do not get the coverage that we used to 20 years ago. That is not a complaint about me not being on air as much as I could be. The point is, in the past, if someone was not doing their job properly, at whatever level they were at in politics or the NHS, the BBC’s investigative journalists would dig it out and flap it around.

I remember coming a cropper; I learned a very hard lesson 25 years ago as a local councillor. I went on the BBC and said that the amount of money that we were proposing to increase councillors’ expenses by was absolutely shocking—it was a proposal from the Administration. A journalist, very adroitly replied, “Will you be taking the rise, Mr Stone?” I coughed, spluttered and had to say, “No.” I learned the lesson to beware journalists. However, it was a testing question and it needed to be asked.

I point out, anecdotally, that my former party leader, Mr Charles Kennedy—of happy memory in this place—started his career with the BBC in Inverness. I remember his voice broadcasting. I think he honed many of his skills that proved invaluable in this place through that work, as did the hon. Members for Aylesbury and for Henley. It augments what these people do.

I talk about the news coverage and the aversion to what is happening, and I very much hope that one day the cuts can be reversed. It is odd, is it not, Mr Robertson, that Orkney has a half-hour coverage of news and so does Shetland, whereas the whole of the highlands has one short bulletin? I say to BBC Scotland that something is wrong with its planning in that regard and I hope it will be looked at again.

In the past, programmes were made in Inverness. There was one called “The Kitchen Café”, which was very popular, and got local people involved and on air. I see the UK like a diamond; every facet is slightly different. British people do not particularly enjoy being homogenised all together, into one exact sameness. We enjoy hearing about the different ways that things are done in Oxford, Cambridge, the highlands or Wales. We love that; it is part of being British. The erosion of regional programme making cuts into that, and I regret that enormously because it is part of the British psyche and the way in which we do things.

When I was first elected as a Member of the Scottish Parliament, I took part in one of those shows. Every Monday I would have a 10-minute slot, which was rather hilariously called “Stone of Destiny”, in which I would talk about the Scottish Parliament, which had just then been set up. It may seem ridiculous to experienced Members, but I had to explain how Hansard worked and what a pager was—we do not have pagers now. Of course, the title came to be used against me by an independent candidate in one of my elections up in Scotland, who called me the “Stone of density”. The humble crofters in the township of Rogart were rolling in the aisles at that one! Again, it was good because the new democracy in Scotland was being aired. I hope I helped to explain it to people, and that they enjoyed it.

I will add one last thing. I hear the arguments expressed on the Government Benches, and I do not know if it is about the cuts or the licence fee, but I do know that something as basically important to being British and the way we do things—British democracy—is eroded and damaged by the cutting back of regional investigative reporting.