Draft Local Digital Television Programme Services (Amendment) Order 2024

John Whittingdale Excerpts

Tuesday 17th December 2024 General Committees

[Sir John Whittingdale (Maldon) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Stringer.

I am, in general, a supporter of local TV. That used to be somewhat more controversial that it is today. Local TV was invented by my right hon. Friend the Member for Godalming and Ash (Jeremy Hunt) when he was the Secretary of State. His mantra at the time was, “Why should Birmingham, Alabama have a TV station and not Birmingham, England?” That point was widely recognised, but in the subsequent 10 years local TV has struggled.

Local TV has the advantage of EPG prominence— the No. 5 slot in most parts of the country—and has survived mainly by combining local television news and content with cheap programming, from which it derives advertising revenue. That is a difficult balance to strike, and some stations have been more successful than others. I have to say that London Live has perhaps not been as successful as some others; if hon. Members happen to watch it, they will see an awful lot of ’60s comedy shows, if that is their taste, and not a huge amount of local content.

As we come to the issue of the licence for the next 10 years, I ask the Minister to indicate to Ofcom the importance of local content. If local TV is to be of value, it needs to provide content that people want to see that is about their own community but is not available on regional TV stations. Coming from Essex, I can say that it is deeply frustrating that the local TV provided by ITV or BBC tells me what is happening in Cambridgeshire or Norwich, which is not of huge interest to my constituents. Local TV therefore has a real role to play.

One of the consequences of local TV stations’ difficulties is that there has been a huge amount of consolidation over the past 10 years. To my mind, however, the most important thing is not ownership, but content, so Ofcom, which has the job of laying down the licence conditions, needs to make it clear that that is the priority and focus, particularly in the area of news. As both my hon. Friend the Member for Meriden and Solihull East and the hon. Member for Guildford said, the task of drawing up a business plan to cover 10 years is challenging, so I hope that Ofcom will give guidance on how it expects television stations to set out business plans for a decade ahead.

That brings me to another important point, which the hon. Member for Guildford raised. The Minister and I recall—I am sure with great pleasure—our exchanges during the passage of the Media Act 2024 in the last Parliament. In relation to public service broadcasting, the prime purpose of the Act was to give prominence to public service broadcasting stations on digital platforms. They had the guarantee of the first few slots on the EPG, but as we moved to a world where people access television by various different means, there was real concern that they would no longer be guaranteed that prominence, which would result in a drop in viewers and so perhaps less advertising revenue for the commercial stations and less prominence for the BBC. The Government, with the support of the Opposition at the time, addressed that by giving prominence to the public service broadcasters.

The Minister may remember that, slightly unusually, having first been the Minister responsible for the Bill, I then moved an amendment to it on Report that would have given prominence to local TV stations. Part of the problem is that, as I understand it, the Act does not allow Ofcom to come back and designate other stations outside the main PSBs as requiring prominence. If the transition to a digital world continues at its current pace, more and more people will access TV through the internet and no longer through Freeview, and there is not the guarantee of prominence for local TV. Local TV made it very clear that it needed prominence.

Unfortunately, I was unable to persuade the Government to accept my amendment, and so it is not in the Media Act. I would be grateful if the Minister looked at that, because the answer at the time was, “Local TV does not have apps, so you cannot give it prominence.” It was a question of chicken and egg, because the providers of local TV said, “If you give us prominence, we will develop the app.” I believe that the app is under development. While I welcome the statutory instrument today to allow the extension of licences for a further 10 years, it needs to be combined with prominence. I hope that the Minister will address that.