Oral Answers to Questions

Ben Bradshaw Excerpts

Monday 21st June 2010 Commons Chamber

[Mr Hunt]

I also welcome my hon. Friend, and particularly as someone whose background includes working both as an ITV broadcaster and as a BBC journalist, because BBC journalists have often tended to be represented more on another side of the House. The answer to his question is that we have to ensure that BBC news provision has competition. That is essential, although it is not necessarily the case that that competition must come from ITV; it might come from more local news providers. That is why the plans that we are putting forward will be so significant.

[Mr Ben Bradshaw (Exeter) (Lab)]

I give a warm welcome to the Secretary of State and his colleagues in their new posts, but could he please explain to the House why he has allowed his Department to be downgraded, in that we have lost 15 minutes from our previously hour-long Question Time?

On regional news, is the reason why the hon. Member for Bath (Mr Foster), who is an excellent Member of this House, has been excluded from this Front-Bench team—indeed, why all Liberal Democrats have been excluded—that they agree with us on this question and not with the Secretary of State?

[Mr Hunt]

I thank the shadow Secretary of State for the courtesies that he extended to me when I was in his position and he was in mine. He will be amused to know that local newspapers from his area are still being delivered to my private office, because it takes some time to cancel the subscription. I would like now to give him a copy of the Western Morning News, in case he is missing it. Let me tell him that under this Government, my Department has not been downgraded; it has been upgraded, because we are now responsible for the Olympics, which we were not before.

[Mr Bradshaw]

The right hon. Gentleman might like to know that tickets to the Royal Opera House for him and his wife have been delivered to my home in London—tickets that I have been foolish enough to send back to the Department. However, given what he has just said about local and regional news, can he point to a single other European country—not America, where market conditions, including in the advertising markets, are completely different, as he knows—where his model flies?

[Mr Hunt]

I cannot, because no other country in the world is trying to allow the emergence of truly cross-platform multi-media local media operators in the way that we are envisaging. If we look at countries such as France and Germany, we see successful local TV stations in places such as Paris and Lyon. I would ask him why, when he was Secretary of State, he did nothing to progress proper local TV in this country, when it is something for which communities up and down the country are crying out.