Local Newspapers

Chris Bryant Excerpts

Thursday 19th March 2015 Westminster Hall

[Sir Edward Garnier (Harborough) (Con)]

I will not take up my full allotted time, Sir Hugh.

I congratulate the hon. Member for Hayes and Harlington (John McDonnell) on initiating the debate. I thank my hon. Friend the Minister for Culture and the Digital Economy for taking a real interest in this aspect of his portfolio. Few Ministers have had the length of service in one job and have therefore come to know a great deal about their subject; I am grateful to him for that. I also thank the Chair of the Select Committee, my hon. Friend the Member for Maldon (Mr Whittingdale), who has brought great wisdom and knowledge to this subject, as we have witnessed today.

One of the dangers that I will relieve the hon. Member for Hayes and Harlington of having to face is my being here for the entire debate—as he anticipated, a number of us cannot stay for its full length—but there is still danger that we will appear to the outside world as a collection of retired colonels, regretting the past. If we give the impression that the newspaper world should never change and that it is immune from the ordinary laws of economics, we are doing it a disservice, just as we are doing ourselves a disservice.

I have an interest to declare in that, for the past 40 or so years, I have been a member of the Bar who specialises in newspaper cases—newspaper and media law. I have acted for and against many local newspapers and I have understood, both as a consumer of the product and as a person being paid by them, the value that they provide throughout the country to local communities. It does not matter whether one is in Scotland—the hon. Member for Na h-Eileanan an Iar (Mr MacNeil) mentioned his local paper in Stornoway—Northern Ireland or any part of England and Wales; there is no community that has not over the years benefited in some way from its local press.

Of course we regret the demise of the local press and the way in which it has changed. In my own county and constituency, the Harborough Mail, a weekly paper that has been going for more than 100 years, is now running from a hub—to use an expression used earlier—and is using shared content. It is no longer based in Market Harborough. It is part of the Johnston Press company, and our editor is now the editor of a number of local titles and he is based in Kettering, so we do not have that immediate local connection. Although Kettering is only 15 or so miles down the road, there is a psychological gap that has been created by the rationalisation—to use that awful expression—of the newspaper world.

My local daily paper, the Leicester Mercury, which was mentioned a moment ago, is in the same group as the Derby Telegraph. At one stage the whole production of the Mercury and all the journalists, as well as the outlying offices, were connected into the main office on St George street. When I first became the Member of Parliament for Harborough, the newsroom was noisy, bustling, full of paper and all that sort of stuff. Now, the newsroom is quiet, not only because everyone is typing on word processors and not the old Imperial typewriters, but because fewer people are in there, and as someone has mentioned, they are drawing on press releases, cutting and pasting.

I do not ascribe that problem only to the Leicester Mercury. When I worked in Fleet street newspapers—I am talking about the late 1970s—I remember listening to a City journalist on The Guardian complain that all he was doing was cutting and pasting or reproducing company press releases. He said, “That’s not journalism. That’s just copying.” If we do not get the training at local level for the journalists who translate to Fleet street and become the great national names of journalism, we will lose something, but I do not think that we will repair that loss by getting the state to subsidise the press, as I think the hon. Member for Great Grimsby (Austin Mitchell) might have been implying. The press should be utterly free of Government interference. Yes, the Government—Parliament—should regulate the world within which we all operate, but the day that we get the Government paying for the production of newspapers is a day that I think we would regret.

[Andrew Rosindell in the Chair]

I do not want to belabour the point, but we cannot constantly regret the past. We need to come up with innovative and practical solutions. In his brief remarks, my hon. Friend the Member for Maldon offered a few suggestions that he and his colleagues in the Committee of which he is Chair came up with. We need to ask the Government, whether this one or the next, to think carefully about what they can do without sitting on the press and the news media. What can they do to help them flourish?

One thing that I would urge the Government who are in charge of this review to look at is the way in which we regulate the acquisition and merger of local titles. That idea is not original to me; it has been suggested to me by the News Media Association and I am happy to repeat it. The association asks that we

“Reform and liberalise the local media merger and transfer regime so that more titles are not closed down because their sale to a willing buyer is blocked by the competition authorities.”

It tells me that

“In 2011, Northcliffe Media’s attempted sale of seven weekly newspapers to KM Group was aborted after the Office of Fair Trading referred the sale to the Competition Commission, leading to the closure of some of the newspapers.”

Ofcom has since endorsed the industry’s position, suggesting that the media merger regime needs to be modified and local media excluded from its plurality review, but there is no evidence that that new approach has been adopted. Through the Minister, I urge that the review consider that position.

Johnston Press is a large organisation. It owns the longest continuously published local newspaper, the Belfast News Letter, which has been published daily since the first half of the 18th century. I do not know who owns The Oban Times in Scotland, to which the hon. Member for Na h-Eileanan an Iar referred, but it is the most widely read newspaper throughout the English-speaking world.

[Chris Bryant (Rhondda) (Lab)]

The right hon. and learned Gentleman has referred to long ownership of titles. One of the things that have happened when large conglomerates, such as the ones mentioned in this debate, close titles is that they have refused to allow anybody else to use the titles. Might there not be an advantage to making it possible—after a moratorium of, say, two or three years—for others to take on such titles, so that they can maintain the tradition, albeit under a different model?

[Sir Edward Garnier]

That is a very sensible suggestion, which I hope the review can take into account. Of course, the owners of the intellectual property in a title may want to resurrect it in some other form, or to restart the newspaper when times get better. For example, the Evening Standard and the Evening News here in London are now merged into one paper, but who knows whether the current owner of the Evening Standard may not one day wish to revive the Evening News? I do not know where the ownership of that title has gone. However, the hon. Gentleman’s point is worthy of consideration.

I urge that we behave in a positive way and do not constantly doomsay and give the impression that the problem is completely insoluble. It is not, if there is the will and if there is intelligent and appropriate management of the finances of these companies—although some of the stories told by the hon. Members for Hayes and Harlington and for Great Grimsby about the movement of money within them were surprising, if not shocking. None the less, it seems to me that the newspaper industry has it within its resources to do a lot to help the local press. For example, why do not The Daily Mail or The Sun, both immensely successful newspapers in their own right, adopt a local paper outside the family tree of Northcliffe Media or News Corp, so that both can flourish in their different markets? No one would suggest that the Leicester Mercury is competing with The Sun or that the Harborough Mail is competing with The Times, but there are commonalities of interest that could be explored, to help little local newspapers.

My constituency has lost the Harborough Herald & Post. I have no idea who owns the title now, but there was a reasonably well read local newspaper that has gone and will probably never come back. I want the Harborough Mail and the Leicester Mercury still to be there in 50 years’ time. I am sure many other hon. Members would like a good local voice operating loudly and disinterestedly in each of our constituencies.

--- Later in debate ---

[Chris Bryant (Rhondda) (Lab)]

It is always a delight to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Rosindell. In fact, there is a never a delight greater than serving under your chairmanship—and if you believe that, you’ll believe anything.

I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Hayes and Harlington (John McDonnell) on securing the debate. I knew that he and other hon. Members were seeking it, and I am delighted that it has come to pass. Perhaps he thought that only a few of us would be here and that we would have to stretch our speeches out for hours to fill the allocated time—we know that the Minister finds that difficult to do—but what my hon. Friend had forgotten was that the debate has a subtitle, “How to get in your local newspaper”, and an awful lot of colleagues have come along to get in their local newspaper. We have heard an array of names of local newspapers and a great deal of name-checking, and we are all grateful for it.

It is a shame that the beknighted Gentleman, the hon. Member for Colchester (Sir Bob Russell), is unable to join us for the end of the debate. He has apologised, and obviously we understand that he has to fight off the Labour contender in his seat, so he cannot stay here for the rest of the debate.

I was delighted to hear from my hon. Friend the Member for Llanelli (Nia Griffith), who made extremely important points about what is happening in Wales, which I will refer to later.

It is always a delight to hear from the hon. Member for Maldon (Mr Whittingdale), the honourable toyboy of Mrs Thatcher—[Laughter.] Well, that is what the press described him as, so we can only presume that it was the truth. Maldon, of course, has a great tradition of journalist MPs. Tom Driberg had quite a reputation, which the hon. Gentleman has not quite managed to live up to—or live down to, or live across, but I have never crossed Westminster bridge with him, so I do not know.

I am envious of my hon. Friend the Member for Great Grimsby (Austin Mitchell), because I think the Rhondda, too, should be the Great Rhondda. His constituency should not be the only one called “Great”. In fact, my constituency used to be the Great Rhondda, in that it was Rhondda Fawr and there was a Rhondda Fach as well. Perhaps we will return to the Greater Rhondda at some point.

It was a delight to hear from the right hon. and learned Member for Harborough (Sir Edward Garnier). He also represents Oadby and Wigston, though he left those two bits out, and I see that he has departed this realm—or this room, anyway.

The hon. Member for Carmarthen East and Dinefwr (Jonathan Edwards) has obviously gone off to his constituency as well. He referred to Martin Shipton and David Williamson as great scions of Welsh journalism. I would only say that Martin Shipton laid a bet with my hon. Friend the Member for Cardiff West (Kevin Brennan), when I was selected as the Labour candidate in the Rhondda in 2000, that I would lose the seat because of my sexuality. My hon. Friend said that I would win by more than 10,000 votes, and he had better political antennae than Mr Shipton, for which I am grateful.

We also heard from the hon. Member for Morecambe and Lunesdale (David Morris), which is always a delight—oh, he’s gone as well.

My hon. Friend the Member for Walsall South (Valerie Vaz) told charmingly entertaining stories of the various different careers that she has had in the past, and it was a delight to hear from her.

The hon. Member for Cleethorpes (Martin Vickers) referred to selfies, and as one of the early proponents of the selfie, it is a delight to hear that everybody has now come round to my opinion on this matter. I merely point out that further to The Mail on Sunday and The Sun advertising my selfie in November 2003, I increased my majority at the next election, so it pays to advertise—although perhaps not in quite that fashion, would be my advice.

My hon. Friend the Member for Newport West (Paul Flynn) has been derided by the press in the past, in many different ways and in many different guises. He has the scars on his back and he is proud of them, as are many of us.

The truth is that, as many have adumbrated this afternoon, there are enormous problems in the local newspaper industry. As people have mentioned, first of all, there are the closures, with 150 titles gone since 2008. In November 2014, Trinity Mirror itself closed seven newspapers, losing 50 journalists. It does not feel as though the pace of those closures is slowing, and if anything, there is a danger that it will increase.

There has also been a dramatic fall in sales, not only in local newspapers, but in national newspapers: it has been 15% year on year for some time now. Last year, sales of the Bolton Journal fell by 39% in a single year, whereas for the Coventry Telegraph, they were down by 14.4%. In Wales, as we know even more keenly than I suspect many other places, sales of the Western Mail fell last year by 14%, and it is now down to just 19,654 copies. It does not feel like a national newspaper any longer, given that 3 million people live in Wales. The figure for the South Wales Echo is similar—20,634—and they are virtually identical newspapers now, with many articles repeated word for word from one to the other, or nicked from the Rhondda Leader.

As I have mentioned the Rhondda Leader—because I have to do my bit about getting into my local newspaper—it is a depressing fact that, when I was first elected, the number of copies sold every week was in the tens of thousands, and it is now 4,342. It is not a local newspaper any more, and frankly, that is partly because most of the news is not local news. It is published out of a hub. The paper is not published in the Rhondda and has not been for some time. It does not have its own distinct set of reporters and the inside pages often refer to all sorts of other places in south Wales that have nothing to do with the Rhondda. The fall even in the last few years, from nearly 10,000 copies in 2009 to 4,432 now, means that sales have halved in the period of this Parliament, and that represents a major problem.

There has been the collapse in journalism as well. In 1999, Media Wales had 700 journalists, but it now has 136. It simply cannot provide the same degree and level of expertise about a wide range of subjects—from agricultural through to politics, to broadcasting and so on—that the national newspaper of Wales really needs. Many local newspapers now have barely any truly local content, and certainly none with investigative reporting or fact-checking behind it, as many hon. Members mentioned.

Advertising revenue fell dramatically during the recession, but there have been further problems since then. The advertising revenue for local newspapers is still falling, in part because they used to rely on people selling or buying a car or their home, and many of these things are now done entirely on the internet. Some hon. Members have asked, “Would it not be a good idea if Government advertised more in these newspapers?” The legal requirements are clear, but I do not think that Government should advertise in newspapers solely to keep the newspapers alive. That would be inappropriate. Government have to decide what is the most cost-effective way of communicating with all the community.

I say gently to the newspaper proprietors that I think sometimes they have conspired in their own downfall with regard to local newspapers—I truly do. My hon. Friend the Member for Hayes and Harlington made extremely good points about boardroom pay and profits simply not matching, or being completely out of kilter with what was needed in the industry to invest for the future to make sure that there was an ongoing revenue stream. Therefore, to try to keep the figures up, companies ended up putting cover prices up. The Rhondda Leader now costs 90p—quite a significant sum if there is to be no local newspaper content. When The Northern Echo put up its price by 15p a little over a year ago, the number of people buying the newspaper fell dramatically. Fifteen pence may be nothing to Members of Parliament or to many people listening to this debate, but that just made it an unattractive option for many people in the north. Somehow or other, we have to deal with that vicious circle. Why does that matter? It matters for the simple reason that local newspapers are an essential part of local democracy and local culture—people understanding what is happening around them.

At the moment, there is a little story going on in my constituency. Maerdy surgery has decided to go part time on Thursdays and has threatened to close on Fridays. There is no means of knowing that from a local newspaper now. To all intents and purposes, it is barely reported at all. There is a grass fire going on in Porth this afternoon. I doubt whether that will get into a printed newspaper in any shape or form, and if the kids who probably started the fire got arrested, I doubt whether that would end up being in a newspaper, either.

This is a problem for us all, because local government is where most of the policies and most of the public services that we talk about are administered. If no one gets to find out what is happening in their local area, there is no true accountability. That is all the more difficult in Wales. Scotland has quite a substantial national set of newspapers. They compete with one another. There is competition for voice, political posture and quality. Very little of that happens in Wales, where virtually only one voice can be heard in any given area and many people simply do not understand the devolved settlement. Sorry, I mislead the House. It is not a settlement; it is the devolved process, which changes every year because some new Secretary of State for Wales comes in and decides, “Right, we’ve got to do another chunk of devolution that no one will end up understanding.”

My hon. Friend the Member for Great Grimsby referred to local newspapers as the breeding ground for this country’s great journalists. Nearly every journalist, whether on television, on radio or at a great national newspaper, started life on a local newspaper. But even in south Wales, which in Cardiff has one of the best schools of journalism in the land and in Europe—it is much respected around the world—those newspapers are finding it difficult to take people on. There will be a very significant problem in the long term for the whole newspaper industry if we do not manage to address that.

Of course we should not overstate the problem, because it is possible to find out what is happening with the Maerdy surgery on Facebook, and that is increasingly changing the pattern out there. Many local people will create a local Maerdy page, a Ferndale page, a Treorchy page, a Tonypandy page, a Llwynypia page and so on, and people go there and have great conversations about what is happening in local politics and so on. However, that excludes a significant proportion of the population, who do not have internet access or do not want it, and we need to be aware of that.

Of course we must have a plurality of voices. My particular anxiety in relation to Wales—this was mentioned by my hon. Friends the Members for Llanelli and for Newport West—is that the BBC could all too easily be the only news voice in Wales, providing news for S4C and deciding how much funding it gets, completely out-resourcing ITV and making it difficult for anyone to listen to anything other than one single voice. This has always been depressing to me. My hon. Friend the Member for Llanelli mentioned the problem of a newspaper referring to whether Castell Coch was on the right or left of the motorway and revealing that the person had obviously been going in the wrong direction. In fact, it would be quite nice if BBC journalists could occasionally get north of the M4 to see Castell Coch. The problems with the BBC in London never managing to get any further than Camden are replicated elsewhere in the country because they cannot get any further than Llanishen.

I should say, however, that it is not only local newspapers that sometimes get things wrong. I remember that on one occasion the Daily Mail wrote that I was an ex-gay vicar, and it took me 20 minutes to explain that I am not an ex-gay vicar; I am a gay ex-vicar. There is a very significant difference between those two propositions—I have put aside one thing, but not the other.

The problem for us, of course, is whether this is all just a load of howling at the wind. Are we, like King Lear, finding it easy to spot the problem but not so easy to find the solution? That is a real question for the Government, because in response to many of the suggestions that have been made, other hon. Members have said, “Well, that doesn’t really work.” For instance, it was suggested that a bit of the licence fee might be taken to pay for local newspapers. I do not think that that is a goer myself. I think that any suggestion that there should be some kind of state subsidy for local newspapers is a major problem, for the obvious reasons about freedom of the press and so on. That leaves us with some difficult issues to address.

We need to hold on to some clear principles. The first is that in any given part of the country, there cannot be just one voice dominating what people hear. That applies to the whole country as well. A single person should not have so much power over the media that they can dominate—I hope that we will be able to say something about that in the general election—but it is also true for regional news and local news. I think that an important point to pursue is the one that I made to the right hon. and learned Member for Harborough in relation to newspaper groups that close a title but then are so jealous of their intellectual property that they refuse to allow anyone else to take over the title. I am sure that if the Rhondda Leader were ever to close, people in the Rhondda would want to take it over as a community venture.

My hon. Friend the Member for Islington North (Jeremy Corbyn) is not here now, but he referred earlier to the Camden New Journal, which is a completely different model of doing a newspaper. It has managed to survive through remarkably difficult periods, and perhaps others could, too. I gently say to some of the newspaper organisations that if they are closing down a title, they could look at handing it on to others in a constructive way. There are other models, and we need to pursue them.

I support the idea from the National Union of Journalists that there should be a short sharp inquiry. The hon. Member for Maldon is stepping down as Chair of the Select Committee—well, he does not have any choice, but he is leaving. He is departing from that Committee. Who knows? He may have more greatness thrust upon him. The point is that the Select Committee did a very good report in 2010. I think that the Select Committee is the right body to do the next inquiry, because it can bring people in; it can force people to come, and it can do it swiftly and relatively cheaply. I would very much welcome that, but it is not for a shadow Minister or even a Minister, were I to become one, to tell a Select Committee what reports it should engage in.

Finally, I want to ask the Minister a few questions if that is all right.

[The Minister for Culture and the Digital Economy (Mr Edward Vaizey)]

If you must.

[Chris Bryant]

The Kraken rises! The Minister is shuffling his papers and getting ready for the questions.

We were all intrigued by the Government’s announcement yesterday, but I am slightly sceptical about it. What is proposed might be a good thing, but I am nervous about how it will work. I say that because I blew a fanfare, as did the Cory band in the Rhondda—incidentally, it is the greatest brass band that Britain has had—when the orchestra tax relief was announced in December; but then of course we all discovered that it does not apply to most orchestras and it does not apply to brass bands, because of how the Government have drafted the concept of an orchestra. Not even the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment is counted as an orchestra under the tax relief.

I just want to be precise and pin the Government down. Why consider only business rates? Why have the Government gone for that angle? I understand, of course, that some of these issues are devolved, but a tax relief would not normally be devolved and would be available in Wales and in Northern Ireland and, for that matter, in Scotland, depending on how it was crafted.

What counts as a local newspaper? That sounds like a stupid question, because we have all referred to so many local newspapers, but is something that carries only advertising and no locally created content a local newspaper? Does something that is produced by a local council count as a local newspaper? If the Government stick with the business rate model that they have gone with, what happens if all the content of a newspaper is produced in England but the newspaper is distributed in Wales, or vice versa? I presume that the Government do not intend to legislate on that before the general election—if that is to be the case, we might have to meet rather more frequently than usual next week—but I wonder when the Government intend to publish their consultation on the matter.

With those comments, and with enormous thanks to my hon. Friend the Member for Hayes and Harlington for securing the debate, I will close my remarks. I agree with the octogenarians who have spoken in the debate that there are far too few of them. I see that my hon. Friend the Member for Great Grimsby heard that.