The director of BBC Scotland has challenged a series of claims by SNP MSPs which denigrate its Scottish broadcasting output and funding.
Claims that staff have been cut by 60%, that Radio Scotland receives a tenth of the budget of Radio 4, that the programming budget has dropped by 20% and that its flagship Scottish politics TV show is not available on iPlayer are all untrue, according to Ken MacQuarrie.
He has written a letter to Holyrood's Education and Culture Committee challenging the claims of its convener and two SNP MSPs.
He has called for evidence to support claims by Peter Murray, a National Union of Journalists executive who took voluntary redundancy from the BBC around two years ago, who said "there has been a staff cut of 60% in radio news and current affairs". Mr Murray's claims were repeated by SNP MSP Stewart Maxwell, the committee's convener, during a meeting in January.
Mr MacQuarrie said: "The figures proffered by the convener were not ones which we recognise and we would reiterate our request to have sight of these in order to understand their genesis and construction."
He also challenged comments by Iain MacWhirter, who worked for the BBC in the 1980s and is now a newspaper columnist, who said BBC Scotland "gets only a tenth of the budget and programmes are made at a tenth of the cost".
Mr MacWhirter's claims were repeated by SNP MSP Joan McAlpine, who also claimed BBC Radio Scotland's news programmes "have half the staff" of Radio 4's news programmes despite being on air twice as long.
Mr MacQuarrie said: "The budget of BBC Radio 4 is approximately three times that of Radio Scotland, not 10 times, as suggested. The Radio 4 audience is approximately 16 times that of Radio Scotland. The statistics quoted by Ms McAlpine are not ones that we recognise."
He also responded to concerns by SNP MSP Clare Adamson, who questioned whether BBC Radio Scotland can continue to deliver quality programming following a budget cut from £29.5 million in 2007 to £23.2 million in 2012, and a drop in listeners of 11,000.
Mr MacQuarrie said the budget cut "does not represent the programme funding situation across these years", which included previous overheads such as staffing and building costs, insisting that "the actual reduction in programme budget on Radio Scotland between 2007 and 2010 is £1.7 million".
