Fewer than one in eight adults are watching the BBC Scotland channel which is being revamped due to low viewing figures
By Lucy Ashton
BBC Scotland viewership is continuing to flatline despite an extra £5 million of public cash being ploughed into the service.
The channel has struggled to gain a foothold north of the border since launching in 2019 with its flagship news show The Nine, which has now been cancelled.
New figures found that fewer than one in eight adults in Scotland watched the channel each week, and it only reached about 13% of the population, a similar figure to last year. It was also only watched for about an hour and 34 minutes a week by the average viewer.
In addition, the accounts also revealed that Scots were abandoning paying the licence fee in their droves, according to the Scottish Daily Express, with 44,000 fewer stumping up north of the border in 2023/24 than in the previous year, meaning a loss of £7 million in estimated income from Scotland, a drop from £304 million to £297 million.
The broadcaster was previously accused of a “deplorable waste of money” in January after it emerged that only 200 people watched The Seven, which is a 15-minute news programme on BBC Scotland, on Sunday, January 7.
Three days later only 1,700 viewers – about 0.1% of those watching television at the time – tuned into The Nine, its flagship hour-long current affairs show.
Ofcom analysis highlighted a worrying trend for the broadcaster as it showed a decline in the average audience from around 17,000 viewers in 2020 to just 10,000 last year.
The regulator approved plans in May to half peak-time news programming on the BBC Scotland channel from 250 hours to 125 hours annually.
These changes included regularly extending Reporting Scotland on BBC1 and boosting investment in online news services.
The Beeb insisted that these proposals would not impact costs or lead to redundancies as any savings were redirected into the news and current affairs output for Scotland.
Devi Sridhar, Steve Carson and former First Minister Nicola Sturgeon.
Overall, BBC services reached 84% of adults in Scotland each week, down from 87% the previous year. Steve Carson, the director of BBC Scotland, announced three weeks ago that he would be stepping down after seven years in charge. He is set to take up a new role with the Irish broadcaster RTE in Dublin, and netted a salary of £178,000 last year.
BBC Scotland has previously been accused of pro-SNP bias over a series of incidents in recent years. These include a presenter dubbing Nicola Sturgeon “our leader” when discussing her with former Prime Minister Rishi Sunak and reading out an excerpt from Covid adviser Devi Sridhar which criticised the UK Government and favouring the SNP.
An Post, which collects the licence fee for RTÉ, is to be given €6 million to improve its collection procedures and crack down on evasion. There has been a significant fall-off in licence fee payment since the RTÉ scandals last year, resulting in an estimated drop in income for the broadcaster of some €20 million last year.
In a deal approved by the Cabinet this morning, the Government will guarantee RTE’s public funding – the combination of Exchequer grants and licence fee income – for the next three years. If licence fee income continues to drop, the Exchequer will pay more.
However, the level of overall State funding is significantly below what RTÉ sought – some €55 million below what RTÉ had said it needed for the next three years. For next year, RTÉ will get €225 million between the licence fee and the Exchequer funding – but this is €30 million below what the station sought.