Highlands and Islands Enterprise (HIE) announced this week it has decided to discontinue the practice of holding part of its board meetings in public.

Speaking after the board's decision this week, Chair William Roe said: "Six months ago we introduced two new opportunities for the public to get a clearer idea of how decisions are reached - by holding part of our board meetings in public and by increasing the amount of information we provide on our website.

"When we gauged how effective each one has proved, it became obvious that the additional time and cost required to arrange public meetings compared to the level of public engagement it generates has not proved particularly successful. Numbers of the public attending meetings have ranged from two to four.

"However during the same time 248 downloads have been made of the 47 audio recordings of meetings and there have been 2,470 downloads of the 43 board minutes, papers and presentations published on our site.

"Based on these figures we have decided to concentrate our efforts on developing information delivery via our website or by other means of physical public engagement."

Mr Roe said that the practice of inviting local and national journalists to discuss any issue after board meetings with himself and chief executive Sandy Cumming, would continue.