Tony Hall, Director-General of the BBC

YESTERDAY the BBC announced its biggest investment in programme-making in Scotland for more than 20 years. It means more money for programmes from Scotland, about Scotland and, for the first time, it means Scotland’s own, dedicated BBC TV channel.

Making sure the BBC in Scotland reflects and serves you better is not just our goal; it is also our public mission. We know we need to do much more to represent the people of Scotland and the full diversity of its voices and talent.

That’s why we have listened to your needs and concerns and we believe we have responded in a way that will allow us to deliver more of the things you love and much more that is relevant to you, on a scale never seen before.

People in Scotland love great television. You watch more of it, on average, that the rest of the UK – around three hours more each week. While not everyone likes everything the BBC does, we know that 94 per cent of the Scottish people consume the BBC week-in, week-out.

And you’re not shy at telling us what you think about our content. Most of the time you tell us you like our programmes – particularly our comedy, our factual documentaries and our high-quality drama such as Shetland.

But you also say you’d like more of these quality programmes, particularly more that you feel are rooted in Scotland and in Scottish life and culture.

Last year we announced some initial moves to help make our content more relevant across every part of the UK.

As part of that plan, we’ve since established commissioning roles in comedy, science and children’s programming based in Scotland.

That means more people in Scotland making the decisions about what’s on TV, both for audiences here and throughout the UK.

We’re also in the process of appointing a commissioning role for drama, and have established the BBC Writer’s Room in Scotland to help aspiring writers bring their ideas to the screen.

Those initial moves will help us capitalise on the creative talent that’s already abundant in Scotland and draw much more deeply on an extraordinarily rich talent pool.

You have also told us that you want impartial, fair and accurate news and current affairs, both from the news team in Scotland and also from colleagues elsewhere in the UK and across the globe.

A few may disagree but we genuinely believe our news teams go out of their way to provide viewers and listeners with impartial and accurate reporting and analysis of an increasingly complex world.

But we’re also aware that we need to make our news coverage as relevant to audiences here in Scotland as we can.

That is why our major new investment in the BBC in Scotland is focused above all on providing quality and choice.

We will spend more of the money raised in Scotland on programmes rooted in Scotland, while also still offering the choice of all the fantastic BBC content that is made elsewhere in the UK, but which is massively popular with audiences here.

The initial budget for our new channel – BBC Scotland – will be more than £30 million and there will be a new, hour-long news programme, edited and presented in Glasgow at its heart.

The channel will cater predominantly for audiences here but will also be available online and in HD via iPlayer across the UK. We are also investing an additional £1.2 million into BBC Alba, which will have a full weekend news service

At the same time, an extra £20 million each year will be spent on programmes made in Scotland for audiences all around the UK and across the world.

As you can imagine, this will require a significant number of additional staff, especially in our newsroom where we are expecting to create around 80 jobs.

It will also provide plenty of exciting new opportunities for the many independent companies that we work with.

That is all great for our creative industries but, more importantly, it’s great for our audiences.

We hope they will be as enthusiastic as we are about bringing new and ambitious Scottish content to our screens to help us inform, educate and entertain.

We will be launching the new channel in autumn 2018.

Our goal is to send out a powerful signal to the UK and the world about Scottish creativity and the role of Scottish talent and Scottish voices at the heart of an increasingly diverse UK.

Tony Hall is the Director-General of the BBC