Scottish Media Group (SMG) is axing 18 jobs from Scottish TV, raising staff fears about the company's commitment to ITV regional output.

The Scottish media company - which owns the STV and Grampian ITV licences - is cutting 11 posts from the STV studios, five producer-directors and two admin staff.

SMG is also planning to complete production of STV regional features programming for 2002 by April and not begin work on output for 2003 until October, according to the broadcasting union, Bectu.

This will allow the company to save money by mothballing some of its Glasgow studio space for six months.

The cuts in STV regional programming staff comes on top of 95 redundancies announced by SMG in October across its TV and publishing operations.

"This development is very worrying from the point of view of SMG's responsibilities for broadcasting in Scotland," a Bectu spokeswoman said.

"They will meet their minimum quota for regional programming, but they have been making more than this minimum," she added.

"It has to be bad for viewers in Scotland if we're going to see some kind of reduction."

But an SMG spokeswoman dismissed any suggestion the proposed job cuts would adversely affect STV's regional output.

"We do have a period of non-utilisation coming up in our studios, but they have never had 100% utilisation," the spokeswoman added.

"Changing methods in studio production mean that some of the programmes that might in the past have been made in a large studio can now be done in a smaller news studio."

She said it was hoped the cuts could be achieved through voluntary redundancies and that the company would try to relocate all staff affected to other jobs.

Action threat at Scottish TV

Members at Scottish TV and subsidiary Grampian could go on strike as the company tears up union agreements.

A site meeting in Aberdeen on 20 January, has already called for a strike ballot in protest at company plans to cut wages of some staff by up to £10,000 a year. A further meeting in Glasgow on 25 January is expected to vote the same way. Days before the Aberdeen meeting the union was given notice by Scottish of the company's intention to withdraw from collective agreements on wages and conditions. The company made the move in order to impose a pay cut on more than 100 "red-ringed" staff whose salaries are still paid in accordance with a previous wage agreement.

All of the staff affected were given protected status when the wage agreement was re-negotiated in the early 90s to allow new staff to join below the rates which applied at the time. They have now been given less than a month to decide whether to accept the pay cuts which take their wages down to the new staff rate, or opt for a severance package and leave their jobs.

BECTU has challenged this deadline on the grounds that the "red-ringing" arrangement is covered by the union's collective agreement with Scottish which requires three months notice of termination.

Scottish TV in fact served the necessary three months notice on the collective agreement at the same time as warning the union about the threatened pay cuts on 18 January. New wage rates provided by consultants Towers Perrin were presented with the explanation that they were "market median" rates for the industry.

The company also took the opportunity to announce that all in-house TV directors would be made redundant and replaced by freelancers, and that there would be significant reductions in the number of staff producers.

Scottish has been in the news recently after purchasing Chris Evans' Ginger Group for more than £200 million. Observers believe that the move was opposed by Granada Media Group, which has been building up a stake in Scottish as part of the take-over manoeuvring going on in ITV between the four top companies.

BECTU has warned Scottish that the management's proposals are unacceptable, and has called for an extension to the notice period being given to the "red-ring" staff. Further discussion may take place after the Glasgow meeting on 25 January, however the union believes that the company has ignored the agreed procedure for handling disputes. This would leave the union legally free to go ahead with an industrial action ballot without further negotiations.

Row over Grampian redundancies

Grampian TV has been accused of bad faith by BECTU (Trade Union) and Scottish politicians after announcing job cuts.

Only two staff are affected, both of them Producer/Directors who have been issued with redundancy notices, but BECTU has challenged top-level executives at the company because the sackings are seen as a deliberate breach of the collective agreement covering job cuts.

Politicians have also reacted angrily to the announcement, fearing that the sacking of the two last remaining staff in Producer/Director posts will prevent Grampian from fulfilling its licence obligation to make quality programmes in the North of Scotland.

Aberdeen-based Grampian is owned by Scottish Media Group (SMG), which also owns Scottish TV, and the union believes that the two redundancies breach promises made by SMG when they took over the company.

BECTU officials were hoping to meet company managers in Glasgow early in week beginning February 21. The dispute comes soon after a separate row over redundancies at Scottish TV.

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MPs back ITV's regional role

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In their response to the Government's White Paper on Communications, the Select Committee on Culture, Media, and Sport, recommended that separate licences should be retained for ITV regional companies, regardless of any changes that may occur in ownership of the network

The committee also advised that the proposed single regulator for telecoms and broadcasting, OFCOM, should set up regional offices which would measure whether or not broadcasters generally fulfilled their obligations to provide local programming.

In its evidence to the Committee, BECTU had argued that the wave of takeovers in ITV had led to cutbacks in local programmes, particularly news, and in the number of regionally-produced shows that were aired nationally.

Prior to the White Paper's publication, the union pursued a successful complaint against Grampian TV, which was accused of delivering fewer local programmes that the company's licence required.

The Culture Committee, chaired by Labour MP Gerald Kaufman, also took account of the union's concerns about training in the broadcasting industry. Noting that the industry was increasingly staffed by freelancers, which makes it "less possible to rely on in-house training", the report came out in favour of OFCOM "promoting training activites...proportionate...to the service obligations and privileges of particular licenced broadcasters".

However, the Committee stopped short of full support for training plans to be a condition of broadcasters' licences - a measure suggested by the White Paper which was welcomed by BECTU and Skillset, the industry training body.

A call from BECTU for the new regulatory body OFCOM to have a separate section dealing with content issues, was partially supported by the Committee. The report recognised the difference between economic decisions and content regulation matters that would apply within OFCOM, and called for the new regulator's structure to be debated by Parliament, with a recommendation that there should be "greater lay involvement in content regulation".

BECTU's views on control of media ownership found less favour with Kaufman's Committee. The report rejects the union's view that the government should keep cross-media ownership rules which limit newspaper holdings in TV companies, and BECTU was said to be simply supporting the status quo.

Government regulation of the Internet was also dismissed by the Committee, who welcomed a statement from Minister Chris Smith that there would be no new proposals for censorship or regulation.

Plans to exclude the BBC from the new regulatory framework, supported by BECTU, were questioned by the Committee, who described as "absurd" the argument that Parliamentary scrutiny of the Corporation would be diminished if it were overseen by OFCOM.

The report urged that the right to approve new BBC digital channels should be transferred from the Department of Culture, Media, and Sport, citing Chris Smith's decision to delay a review of BBC News 24 until after the general election as an example of political interference. Ever since the BBC's continuous news channel began broadcasting, it has been a favourite kicking stool for members of the Committee.

Public service broadcasting was given qualified support by the Committee, but the report throws out BECTU's view that any relaxation of quality and diversity obligations would lead to poorer programming.

Instead, the report lays out three principles for PSB - firstly, public service is not provided only by the recognised terrestrial broadcasters, and equally, not all the output of BBC, ITV, Channel 4, and Channel 5 qualifies for the description. Secondly, the costs of providing public service should be transparently measured, and compared against "other means of achieving the desired ends".

Thirdly, and the most alarming for current PSB broadcasters, is the principle that provision of public service content from "whatever source" is more important than protecting the "privileges of certain broadcasters".

An indication of the Committee's thinking could be evident in a recommendation that an "access fund" should be established to encourage new projects in the Community Radio sector. While this would be generally welcomed if it were funded by new money, the model of public service content being centrally funded, and sourced from a wide variety of bidders, could be devastating if it were scaled up to embrace the entire public broadcasting sector.

Whoever ends up making the programmes, viewers and listeners are increasingly likely to be receiving them on digital equipment, and the Committee's report exhorts the government to speed up the process of educating the public about the new technology, and planning for a switchover of TV and radio transmitters from analogue to digital.

OFCOM, said the Committee, should be responsible for an annual audit of progress towards analogue switchoff, and a leaflet on digital TV should be distributed to every household, followed by a public information campaign on free-to-air channels.

The Select Committee report will now be considered by Ministers at the DTI and DCMS, along with hundreds of submissions on the White Paper from organisations including BECTU.

A new Communications Bill is likely to feature in the legislative programme of the next government if Labour are re-elected, and the proposed changes could become law within the next year.

Carlton Television was today accused of 'sucking jobs out of the Midlands' as it axed staff at its Birmingham studios. The broadcasting company admitted it was eliminating six full-time posts in its presentation and scheduling operations in Birmingham and giving the work to London. But one disillusioned worker said the new cut was the latest in a series of blows since Carlton took over Central about five years ago.

'The feeling is that they are sucking as much from Birmingham as they are allowed to do and give lip service to their responsibilities for the region.' 'Scores of jobs have gone since Carlton took Central and they have now even taken away the branding. All they are leaving is a vestigial remnant of what it used to be.'

A Carlton spokesman said the jobs concerned the making of on-air announcements between programmes and adverts and broadcasting scheduling. He said consultations were now taking place with staff and added 'The present structure has a lot of duplication of roles, functions and responsibilities.'

In recent months, investors have been deserting Carlton Communications in droves. So far this year, the media group's shares have underperformed the FTSE 100 index by 25 per cent.

Compared with other media stocks in both the UK and continental Europe, its performance is even poorer - it is now among the most lowly-rated media stocks in Europe.

...On the face of it, the slide is easy to explain, so we are told ! Investors are frustrated with the fragmented ownership of ITV, in which Carlton holds three regional franchises.

Ballot rules agreed with BSkyB

A vote on union recognition at a BSkyB call centre is likely to start in January.

BECTU and BSkyB management have agreed to ground rules for the ballot, which identify the staff at the Livingston call centre who will vote, and lay out a procedure for union and employer to put their respective points of view to the workforce.

The secret ballot will be conducted among BSkyB staff working in Livingston's sales department, where BECTU has demonstrated sufficient membership to trigger a union recognition ballot.

Although BSkyB declined an invitation to recognise BECTU voluntarily, the union and management have mutually agreed to the ballot procedure without having to refer back to the government-appointed Central Arbitration Council (CAC), which oversees cases where employers contest claims for union recognition.

If no agreement had been reached on the range of staff to be balloted - the "bargaining unit" in industrial relations language - then the CAC would have adjudicated after hearing arguments from union and management.

Instead, BSkyB and BECTU have agreed that Livingston sales staff represent a bargaining unit, and, once the date for a secret ballot has been fixed, there will be a formula for union and management to have access to the staff involved in the vote.

Under the terms of the voluntary agreement struck between BECTU and BSkyB, both parties have promised to avoid negative campaigning against each other, and any hostile comments made during the earlier recognition campaign will be withdrawn.

BECTU is hoping that the secret ballot on union recognition will begin before the end of January 2003.

Scottish Media heads for strike

Union stewards at Scottish Media Group are due to announce dates for industrial action.

No progress has been made towards resolving a dispute over pay and redundancies since BECTU members at Scottish and Grampian TV voted for strike action.

In a postal ballot last month 83% of Glasgow-based SMG members voted for industrial action, which was also supported by 81% of BECTU members at Grampian.

Turnout in Glasgow was 69%, while a record 89% of Grampian members took part in the ballot.

The dispute began with SMG's decision to impose a 2% pay increase without agreement in January this year, a figure well below inflation.

Discussions with SMG failed to resolve the dispute, and feelings were inflamed by the subsequent announcement of redundancies at Grampian.