Letter: Essential expense

Your story on BBC Scotland expenses ("BBC Scotland employees claim over £5m", 7 March) claims BBC Scotland staff have personally collected that amount and £6m the year before, on top of their salaries. That is completely untrue.

The expense spend was almost entirely production-related and the vast bulk of it was on day-to-day programme production costs, such as travel for participants and contributors to programmes, not on staff.

This point was made in our response to a Freedom of Information request which was the source of this story, but it was not reflected in your report.

Programme expenses are an essential part of the process of operating a 160m business and we operate a strict policy to ensure best value deals are secured when procuring essential services.

Like all public bodies, we are trying hard to reduce costs where we can and with budgets diminishing over the next few years it's important that we do so rigorously, while maintaining quality across all of our output.

Ian Small

BBC Scotland

Pacific Quay

Glasgow