The BBC has been cleared of falsely claiming undeserving programmes as "made in Scotland".

The BBC has been cleared of falsely claiming undeserving programmes as "made in Scotland".

Yesterday Vicki Nash, the director of Ofcom in Scotland, the industry regulators, said that she had no evidence that BBC Scotland had ever labelled a programme as being "Scottish" when in fact it was made elsewhere.

She said that an Ofcom investigation found 25 "misallocated" programmes in 2006 and 18 "misallocated" programmes in 2007 across the whole of the UK .

However, none of these cases involves the BBC claiming a non-Scottish programme was Scottish.

Instead, she said, the majority of the misallocations were made by ITV - 15, and 13 respectively, with other claims being made by Channel Four and Five.

Indeed, misallocation was hardly a problem at all north of the border. For Scotland, there were only two programmes misallocated in both years, and both by ITV1.

Ofcom did not name the programmes involved.

It stressed that as a regulator it has been able to use accurate, audited figures straight from the broadcasters.

The question of "pretend Scottish programmes" was raised earlier this year by the Scottish Broadcasting Commission, which said certain programmes were being billed as Scottish when in fact they had "very little financial or creative connection to Scotland".

The SBC has been set up by Alex Salmond, the First Minister, to help map the way forward for broadcasting in Scotland.

Blair Jenkins, the leader of the commission, did not name the programmes in question, but suspicion fell upon the BBC drama Waterloo Road, which is made in England although its executive producer, Anne Mensah, is based in Scotland.

However, Ms Nash said: "Waterloo Road has never been allocated to Scotland by the BBC, and indeed there has been no misallocated programmes at the BBC. The main problem has been at ITV.

"I would say the problem is not as acute as it was made out to be last year. In terms of Scotland, the BBC are cleared."

A spokesman for BBC Scotland said: "When the Scottish Broadcasting Commission published its interim findings in January, we strongly rejected any suggestion that we had falsified any figures supplied to the industry regulator, Ofcom.

"We made it clear that when we provide figures against Ofcom's criteria, we do so fairly and accurately. We have not yet seen this Ofcom report but we look forward to reading their conclusions on this matter."

Yesterday, the BBC announced that its Pacific Quay headquarters is to be the joint home of BBC Two's The Culture Show as it moves to a new prime-time slot.