Local and Regional News

Jason McCartney Excerpts

Thursday 30th March 2017 Westminster Hall

[Jason McCartney (Colne Valley) (Con)]

It is an absolute pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Nuttall, and a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Bishop Auckland (Helen Goodman). I had a fantastic season, while I was at BBC Radio Cleveland, reporting on the fortunes of Bishop Auckland football club. At the time, there was no ISDN line at the ground, so to report goal updates, I had to go into the clubhouse and on to a landline and wait for two minutes. Sometimes there would be a big cheer from outside while I was on air, and once the presenter back in the studio said to me, “Jason, has there been a goal?”, and I said, “No, Joe has just dropped the jackpot on the one-armed bandit.” That really is local news and local reporting at the heart of the local community—and I cannot remember whether Joe bought a round or not.

I thank the Backbench Business Committee for granting our request for a debate on the future of local and regional news providers. We are in a great time of change. There are great challenges ahead, but there are also great opportunities. Therefore, it is more important than ever that as many people as possible have access to quality, trusted news sources. That means a big role for local and regional news.

I must declare that, as I have just suggested, I am a former BBC local radio reporter. I went on to work for ITV television as a broadcast journalist. I am now chairman of the all-party parliamentary ITV group and—just for balance—I am one of the vice-chairmen of the all-party parliamentary BBC group. I am a former National Union of Journalists member. I was father of the chapel at ITV Yorkshire and I took my members out on strike, because job cuts were being forced by the poor business decisions of the then ITV boss, who was still raking in his £9 million bonus. I am now a Tory MP and that fat-cat boss is now a Labour peer—what a funny old world.

I am a keen consumer of local news. I wake up in the morning with Liz Green on BBC Radio Leeds. I get a paper edition in my constituency office of the Huddersfield Examiner and follow it online—I also follow the Yorkshire Post online. When I am with my girls in the car, we are listening to Capital radio. It is great that that independent radio station has a news team. They often ask me and fellow Yorkshire MPs to record clips and send them via our iPhones. That is a good use of innovative technology. We have two excellent regional TV news programmes: “Calendar”, which I used to work on, and “Look North”. Sometimes, if there is a big local news story, I make a point of trying to watch both—one at 6 pm and the other at 6.30 pm—to see the different ways in which they cover their news stories.

We have a very local free newspaper, the Holme Valley Review, which has been around for about two years. Again, I have to declare an interest: I have a monthly column in the Holme Valley Review. It has an excellent reporter, Olivia, who is always ringing me and other people, asking for local news stories.

I would like to focus on local newspapers for a moment. As I said, I am very lucky to have in my town the Huddersfield Examiner, with its dedicated band of locally based journalists. They produce six editions a week, Monday to Saturday, and they are very good at holding Kirklees Council to account—it is run by Labour, by the way—whether the councillors are parking illegally while they go on holiday for a few weeks or damaging town centre trade with their disastrous bus gates scheme.

However, it is with their campaigns, as the hon. Member for Bishop Auckland said, that local newspapers come to the forefront of their communities. My local paper has also been backing an NHS campaign, the Hands Off HRI campaign, which is trying to prevent the accident and emergency department at Huddersfield royal infirmary from being downgraded and moved to Halifax to fund the disastrous private finance initiative deal that was signed there. That campaign is led by local campaigner Karl Deitch and, with the support of the Examiner and the community, we are still hopeful of getting our clinical commissioning group to listen.

More positively, the Huddersfield Examiner puts on two fantastic awards ceremonies every year. The Huddersfield Examiner community awards celebrate the best in our community—campaigns, charities and volunteers—and in the autumn the Huddersfield Examiner business awards celebrate the best in local small and medium-sized enterprises and bigger businesses, connecting up the business community. That means that we have an unemployment rate that is below the national average, and textiles and engineering are doing well in our part of the world. I commend the excellent coverage by the Examiner of my beloved Huddersfield Town. As we chase promotion to the premiership, every bit of injury news is followed closely by Huddersfield Town fans.

One big challenge that local newspapers face is changing technology—the changes in the way people get their news. However, the Examiner is responding to that. It is now very much a digital newsroom, producing strong stories not only for the print edition but for the website, which it updates regularly with videos. That is surely the future—print supported and enhanced by digital output, not replaced by it. The Examiner is recruiting a video production editor, but of course its big challenge is providing engaging and challenging content for two very different audiences. With that in mind, the Examiner is also embracing social media.

The debate has been triggered by a worrying trend for local and regional newspapers. There was a net loss of nine regionals between November 2015 and March 2017. As Opposition Members have said, the number of UK local authority districts with no daily local newspaper coverage has risen to 273 out of 406. There is also the loss of plurality, which we are concerned about. The five largest publishers, including Trinity Mirror, which owns my local newspaper, now account for more than 77% of all UK newspapers. We need to halt the decline and to look at new models.

As a member of the Select Committee on Culture, Media and Sport, I have been questioning BBC bosses on their development of the plans for 150 local democracy reporters. I echo many of the excellent questions that the hon. Member for Bishop Auckland asked. Those reporters will be funded by the BBC and employed by qualifying local news organisations to cover councils and local public services, but will they enhance and be an addition, or will newspapers be tempted just to use them as a cut-price replacement for their existing services? The BBC has also announced the formation of the NewsBank, which will give online media organisations access to BBC video and audio. In total, that will be an investment from the licence fee of up to £8 million. I and others will be following those developments very closely.

For the vast majority of adults, their main source of news is still television, and we need a plurality of providers. I have talked about the BBC. I welcome ITV—as I said, I chair the all-party group—investing £100 million a year in national, international, regional and nations’ news. As I said, in Yorkshire we are lucky to have two quality regional TV news programmes: “Look North” on the BBC and “Calendar” on ITV Yorkshire, which I used to work on.

[Kelvin Hopkins (Luton North) (Lab)]

I am listening with interest to the hon. Gentleman and support what he is saying. Does he agree that local radio and local television are not the same, that they cannot provide the same detailed coverage as local newsprint, and that we need local newspapers as well as local television and radio?

[Jason McCartney]

The hon. Gentleman makes a good point. I am saying that we need all the different news sources. We have talked about Sky and about the strength of the BBC in the regions, but we need plurality. We need different local newspapers—we need dailies and weeklies. We need them online, but we also still need the print editions. Obviously, many hon. Members are au fait with social media, but a lot of our constituents are not and they still need to know what is happening in their community—what is happening with charities, with their hospital and council, and with planning applications and so on.

Having worked in both the BBC environment and an ITV newsroom, I know that there was healthy competition between the two. There was an eagerness to be first with the story and to cover it best, which increased the quality of journalism and drove up audiences. We need that kind of healthy competition.

I will bring my comments to an end to allow other Members to speak. I began by talking about challenges. One big challenge is accurate and trusted news sources. We are in an era of fake news and I am pleased to say that my Culture, Media and Sport Committee is starting an inquiry into it. By the way, I remind everyone that fake news is false news with false facts, and not just news that someone does not like—that gets bandied around a lot.

Finally, I echo the thoughts of the NUJ general secretary on the Localism Act 2011. Former council buildings in my patch are being taken over as community assets and I would certainly support ideas and developments on that model for taking over local newspapers. I am very open to innovative ideas for new local journalism models. I would look at levies on social media and online companies—the internet—tax breaks, investment funds and community trusts, because after all, for the sake of our democracy and our constituents, local news really does matter.

--- Later in debate ---

[Kevin Brennan]

I am sure the press barons of this country are mightily relieved to hear that.

My hon. Friend the Member for York Central (Rachael Maskell) spoke with a great deal of wisdom about the role local media can play in local emergencies. She described how in the floods, the local media were a very important public service and not just reporting organisations. She was also the first Member today to mention the importance of photographers. She emphasised the value of adopting a co-operative model for local media not just when they get into trouble, but before that so that it is not just a response to a crisis. I thought that was an interesting point.

The hon. Member for Ayr, Carrick and Cumnock (Corri Wilson) expressed concerns about the monopoly of media ownership, about which she made some good points. Speaking from the Scottish National party Front Bench, the hon. Member for Motherwell and Wishaw (Marion Fellows) spoke about the “Scottish Six”, BBC funding and the new channel that will be on the BBC in Scotland. I am on record being highly critical of the amount of money given to Wales in that same announcement. Scotland got £20 million and Wales should have got £12 million, but we only got £8 million. Additional investment is nevertheless important. She also mentioned Gaelic language provision. I am an avid watcher of BBC Alba when it covers the Guinness Pro12 rugby matches. Despite the commentary being in Gaelic, I think I can pick up enough of it to understand what is going on. She made a useful contribution to the debate.

I was quite surprised that we were not joined by the right hon. Member for Tatton (Mr Osborne) this afternoon.

[Jason McCartney]

He is too busy.

[Kevin Brennan]

Perhaps he is too busy, as the hon. Member for Colne Valley says—we know that he has many jobs that he has to perform. I understood that the right hon. Gentleman’s purpose in taking the editorship of the Evening Standard was to bring that experience from outside the Chamber into Parliament. I would have thought that this afternoon’s debate might have afforded an appropriate opportunity for him to allow us the benefit of his wisdom and knowledge on this subject.