Local Newspapers

Nia Griffith Excerpts

Thursday 19th March 2015 Westminster Hall

[Nia Griffith (Llanelli) (Lab)]

I am grateful for the opportunity to speak, Sir Hugh. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Hayes and Harlington (John McDonnell) on his excellent and eloquent speech, which has covered many of the points that many of us will want to make today.

I am particularly blessed in south-west Wales because we have a number of newspapers. We have the Llanelli Star, in my own town of Llanelli, and its sister papers, the Carmarthen Journal and the South Wales Evening Post, which also cover my constituency. We also have the South Wales Guardian, which is another completely independent newspaper and it, too, covers my constituency. We also have the Carmarthenshire Herald, which has just started up and which offers yet another perspective.

Nationally in Wales, we have the Western Mail and I will begin my comments today by talking about the whole issue of devolution and local newspapers, because it is quite apparent to me that the more that devolution progresses and the more that policy differs between England and Wales, the more difficult it is for people in Wales to get information about the policy in Wales, so that they can hold to account the Ministers in the Welsh Government in the same way that other Members today have talked about local government being held to account by local newspapers. That role of newspapers is extremely important.

For example, if someone reads any of the UK national newspapers, they will see extremely little reference to the policy differences that exist in Wales. To take one fairly “hot” subject for debate, there is the issue of student fees. When the Conservative and Lib Dem coalition chose to charge university students who are domiciled in England fees of £9,000 a year, the Welsh Labour Government decided to peg fees at £3,500 per year for those university students who are domiciled in Wales, regardless of which university they go to. Consequently, the issues of funding of universities are very different in Wales, and they need to be discussed in a different context and in a different way from the way in which they are discussed in England. There is a debate as to whether the level of fees is affordable, about the effect on the institutions themselves and, obviously, about the effect on the students of any change in that situation. That is typical of the type of issue that we will just see disappear altogether, and there will not be quality debate on such issues, if we do not have a plethora of local newspapers that are able to promote that debate.

Likewise, as other Members have already referred to, there is the local council. As we see a greater extent of devolution in different ways in different parts of the UK, it is ever more important that people who hold the purse-strings and who make policy decisions are held to account locally. Sometimes that can be very uncomfortable, but it is extremely necessary.

That process may not necessarily be simply about the local council. We have bodies and individuals such as local health boards, the police commissioners and the fire authorities. All of those are partly covered by some elective democratic control, but very often they are perceived by the local population as not necessarily responding to local need. Again, it is often local newspapers that can uncover, perhaps through freedom of information requests, some uncomfortable information about the way that those bodies or individuals spend money, or it may be that local newspapers will champion campaigns, as we have seen locally in my area with support being expressed for keeping services in our local hospital. All those democratic and semi-democratic institutions need to be held to account, and the loss of local newspapers, or the loss of the quality from local newspapers if they simply regurgitate pre-prepared articles from miles away, will of course have a very detrimental effect on that democratic process.

I support the idea of a short, sharp inquiry into what can be done, because I do not think that we have all the solutions ready straight away. We need to have that inquiry, but I do not want it to be a way of kicking things into the long grass.

Obviously, we have seen a dramatic decline in the number of journalists and quality journalists who are able to work in full-time employment on these papers, and it is absolutely no good thinking that the resulting gap will be filled by lots of people with the time and inclination to write that sort of stuff. There are just not that many people out there who want to do that, and the danger is that they can simply be used by those organisations that have the necessary capacity and that do not really reflect the interests of local people.

This is an urgent issue, which we need further investigation into to see whether financial help can be given, or whether a break can be allowed to enable community groups to take over newspapers. However, it would be a terrible shame if we saw our papers disappear.

It is all very well to talk about things going online, but if we consider some of our constituents, we would all recognise that there are older people who go online but they do so for a specific purpose—perhaps to e-mail their friends, children or grandchildren who live far away—and they are not “grazers”, as perhaps some of the younger generation are, who “graze” continually. Indeed, many of us here do that, as we are continually on e-mail or websites. However, many older people do not find that a natural way to access their news; they much prefer to have it in a written format, which they can pick up and buy.

Hon. Members mentioned archivists. I am worried—I think many of us have noticed it—that with the change to digital cameras a whole chunk of our lives, or our children’s lives, is no longer recorded because we lost our first digital cameras or lost or moved on from the computer we downloaded the images on to. There is a danger that, with the move to the web, we do not have the same quality of archive material that we find in a printed archive.

We elected Members are sometimes uncomfortable with newspapers, because they pinpoint things that they disagree with us about or hold us to account, but that is part of the democratic process and I welcome that dialogue. The more we devolve power to the Welsh Assembly and the more that we ask local councils to take on, the more vital it is that we have quality local journalism, not simply something regurgitated and sent down the M4. For example, there was an article in my local paper not so long ago about driving down the M4 and seeing Castell Coch on the right hand side, but when driving from my constituency Castell Coch is on the left hand side. That article had clearly been written on the other side of the Severn bridge and was in no way reflective of local journalism.

We really need people who have the proper training—proper, qualified journalists—who are able to delve and look, find and sort things out, and really put people on the spot, asking them pertinent questions to make sure that local people have the opportunity to see that in print, so that it informs their decision making.

--- Later in debate ---

[Nia Griffith]

Does my hon. Friend share my alarm at being told, on a previous occasion when we discussed this very topic, that journalists were afraid to mention it in their local paper? They had been intimidated. Does he agree that that is utterly disgraceful?

[Paul Flynn]

I agree very much. I will tell a story about my local paper, I will play the game as well and say what I think about them. When I was first elected to this place, it was in spite of the local paper. The then editor made it clear to me many times. This was in 1987. It did an editorial on each constituency and recommended that its readers vote Labour in four constituencies, but when it came to my constituency, which was the only one that could possibly change hands, it invited and urged its readers to vote Conservative. The editor told me that that was because of a conversation that took place. Of course, local newspapers are subject to the same pressures as others.

I do prize my local paper for what it did last Friday, when it printed a tribute to a local politician who just died at the age of 92. He was a wonderful man, radicalised by the second world war to be a pacifist and peacemonger for the rest of his life. He was a great visionary and an accomplished poet who, as a councillor, valued the permanent treasure of the city, Tredegar house, which he ensured was preserved in its best form as well as the Transporter bridge, a wonderful piece of engineering that people wanted to destroy. He leaves a legacy to the city that is precious but forgotten. However, one of the journalists at the local paper, the South Wales Argus, did a tender, perceptive tribute—it was not just an obituary—that saw the fine qualities of Glyn Cleaves.

I am also grateful to the Leicester Mercury. I wrote a biography of one of our former colleagues, David Taylor. Of course, there is no interest in that nationally—there will not be anything in The Guardian about that—but he was a model, devoted MP. The Leicester Mercury was kind in giving that great coverage, which his family and admirers greatly enjoyed.

Local newspapers cover an area covered by no one else and I agree with everything that has been said about them. The Argus has had a long tradition. We went through a bad patch a while ago when printing, which had been done in Newport for more than 150 years, suddenly disappeared. We have compensation for that now in that one of the hubs referred to is in Newport. I understand the criticism of doing sub-editing from a distance, because that has problems, but 40 badly needed jobs have been created in Newport mainly because of that hub. There is a certain amount of rough justice involved in that.

The paper is more optimistic than has been heard in many of the comments made today. It claims, quite accurately, that more people are reading it than for many years because of the numbers coming online. Certainly there has been a serious loss in paper sales, but the online presence is powerful. That must be accepted.

It is clear that advertising has been eaten away from local newspapers. So much basic advertising for property, jobs and public notices has gone and, sadly, it will not come back to them. We have a crisis but, as everyone has said, local newspapers perform an irreplaceable service for democracy. We have a gap between national publicity for the great events that go on and the publicity given to what is done in local government and by the various other people who are responsible for their local communities.

We must say to this Government and the next Government that something must be done. We cannot talk about subsidies for local newspapers. We do not want them to be dependent on money from elsewhere, because that might affect their independence, as we have seen with other organs in the past.

In Wales we have a particular problem, because national newspapers are dominated by the political agenda. For four days running, the Daily Mail had page 1 leads about the state of the health service in Wales. In no way were those front-page leads attributable to news values; they were purely political propaganda that did a great deal of damage by undermining the faith and trust that people have in the health service and their doctors, which is a crucial part of recovery and therapy. That campaign was completely irresponsible, but, sadly, the Daily Mail may be far more influential than all the local newspapers put together.

Local newspapers would not dare to give such a distorted view of the health service. Of course, health services throughout the United Kingdom have problems, but we know that the Nuffield Foundation, which looked into that, said that there are strengths and weaknesses everywhere. We know that the strengths of the health service in Wales include the fact that a cancer patient in Wales is likely to live longer than one in England. Also, there has been less use of the private finance initiative in Wales, thanks to the wisdom of the Welsh Assembly, and there will be fewer problems in future. However, the way in which the health service has been used by the national press—by these greatly influential bodies—has been a disgrace. Local papers certainly would not get away with that; they would be brought to book.

Local newspapers have to continue to provide the quality service that we have had for years. It is up to them to find a mechanism to do so, which may be a subscription system—people who value their paper might have to pay directly for it. However, the Government have a responsibility to come up with a formula through which local papers can survive, thrive and do the valuable the job that only they can do, but do it in a manner that keeps their independence and integrity.