Broadcasting (Radio Multiplex Services) Bill

Debate between Rebecca Pow and Seema Kennedy

2nd reading: House of Commons
Friday 13th January 2017 Commons Chamber

[Seema Kennedy]

My hon. Friend anticipates the next part of my speech. It is almost as though she had seen it in the Tea Room, which she did not. I am glad that the points I am making in this place about isolation and loneliness are getting through. That is exactly the point I will move on to next.

To conclude my remarks on the excellent work of Leyland Festival Radio, although it continues to broadcast breakfast programmes presented by Keith Bradshaw, it is very limited. The aim of the group is to be a community radio station for Leyland, Farington and Moss Side.

To move on to the point made by my hon. Friend the Member for Aldridge-Brownhills (Wendy Morton), I believe that hyper-local radio has a role in combating loneliness and isolation. Members will know, because I have raised it before, that the hon. Member for Leeds West (Rachel Reeves) and I are carrying on the work started by our late colleague, Jo Cox, and that the Jo Cox loneliness commission will be launched in Speaker’s House on Tuesday 31 January. I know that other hon. Members will join us.

My hon. Friend the Member for Bury North said that he always has his radio with him. We recognise that radio is a very intimate medium; it really can speak to us. I know that from friends and family members who have suffered from loneliness. Indeed, when I have been very lonely in my life, I have put the radio on. It makes us feel safer and as though we have somebody there.

[Rebecca Pow]

My hon. Friend is making some valid points about radio acting as a friend. I know that many elderly people turn to their radio when they wake up in the night, particularly the World Service. Many local radio stations have regular callers to their phone-ins, many of whom are lonely people who are gaining relationship building from the radio. Radio stations serve an excellent purpose in that regard.

[Seema Kennedy]

My hon. Friend, with her history in broadcasting, knows about this only too well. Local radio plays such an important role in the community. Hyper-local radio already performs that role, but the Bill will allow a flourishing of hyper-local radio.

Mediums of technology are useful in tackling loneliness and isolation only if they lead to face-to-face contact. As human beings, we need the contact of others just as much as we need food and water. That is the key point. We all talk about Facebook and Twitter, but radio, too, has to be able to connect people. When a radio station broadcasts to a few thousand people, those who are at risk of being lonely and isolated—the old, the infirm, people suffering from mental health problems and people who are disabled who cannot travel very far—will hear about community events and businesses close to them and go to them, which is the great advantage.

There is much to applaud in the Bill, but I have some questions to which I hope the Minister will respond. How do radio multiplex services work in practice? My hon. Friend the Member for Torbay mentioned attachment to high buildings, but many of us do not have them in our constituencies or anywhere around. Forgive me if I have missed something, but whenever anything new is put up, there are worries about what it looks like, so an example would be helpful.

The Bill has great potential to expand community radio, which plays such an important role in helping communities to build and foster good relationships. As I have mentioned, radio stations such as Leyland Festival Radio do sterling work in our communities. I hope the Bill gives it the opportunity to fulfil its dream of being a full-time radio station in South Ribble.

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[Rebecca Pow]

I welcome that intervention, because I am a complete Radio 4 addict. I listen to the World Service when I wake up in the middle of the night and I could not be without my radio because of “The Archers”. Sometimes I listen to the same episode three times: at lunchtime, the repeat in the evening and the long episode on Sunday. That is quite sad, but I am never quite sure what episodes I have missed! I am also a very big local radio fan. I do exactly as my hon. Friend does: as soon as I get back to my constituency in my car, I switch on the local radio so I can catch up instantly with the local news.

The way we listen to radio is changing. Television, which I spent many years working in, has already undergone a big transformation. Radio is now going through a similar change. Almost half of all radio listeners use a digital platform and approximately 60% of UK homes have at least one DAB radio. For Christmas a few years ago, my husband gave me a DAB radio for the bedroom. This year’s Christmas present from my husband was a DAB system for the kitchen to replace the old system—I am not sure whether the new system was for him or for me. It has taken me quite a long time to work it properly, not because it is not a good radio, but because I now have to put my glasses on to be able to see the touch-button thing—it is terribly sophisticated, and black and beautiful.

As we have heard today, DAB systems are becoming increasingly important as features in cars, which is where I listen to my local radio. For the uninitiated, I must clarify that when I talk about DABs I am not talking about fish. As a mum with three children, we eat a lot of dabs. They are terrific fish to feed children with and they are very, very cheap, but we are not talking about dabs today; we are definitely talking about radio. I will come on to explain why, as has been mentioned by many colleagues, small radio stations are so vital and why the Bill will really help them to have a better future, particularly the under-resourced and underfunded stations.

Local stations offer highly localised news that we do not receive from national stations, or from regional stations now that they are covering bigger and bigger areas. The Government have made the welcome announcement that Taunton will be granted garden town status. Local radio has provided a terrific place for the public to discuss what they think about that. What better place to carry out a poll on which day we should choose for Somerset Day? There was a lot of audience interaction across all the stations on that issue. They are also well placed to promote the local initiative Art Taunton, of which I am a patron, which encourages culture and art in Taunton. There are many great things about Taunton, but we need to up our offer of art and culture. Perhaps the Minister could pay a visit to talk about Art Taunton and maybe even do an interview on local radio.

Local radio is important for all those things, but it is very important, as my hon. Friend the Member for Morecambe and Lunesdale said, in times of crisis. The local and community radio stations were absolutely invaluable in 2013-14, when huge areas of Somerset were flooded. Local radio was the linchpin in transmitting the news, with people phoning in and volunteering to help. Local radio played a key role in co-ordinating where people should go and what they should do. Local radio is also very important in transferring information when it snows. All the local schools use local radio to tell people whether they will be open or closed, and everybody turns on their radio to find out. It is an invaluable service.

If we think of local radio, we cannot help but think of travel reports. Local radio is where all hon. Members get their travel information. It is where I find out what is happening on East Reach in Taunton during rush hour and whether to use the busiest road in Somerset, the A358, which goes right through my constituency. If one hears that that road is log-jammed, one avoids it, so it is a marvellous service. I hope we will soon never have to hear such messages on our local radios again, because this week the Secretary of State for Transport reiterated his commitment to upgrading the A358.

I would like to mention a couple of the excellent community radio stations in my constituency. Tone FM, based in Taunton, is very good for traffic news. It has an audience of 22,000 people, which is incredible for a town community station. It has great live broadcasts, despite operating on a shoestring. I used to do a regular gardening slot. We had a lot of fun, but I hope we also managed to impart a lot of knowledge. I would take something in and invite the audience to guess what we were talking about. One time I took in a giant elephant garlic, a terrific thing to see and to use in cooking. Similarly, much guesswork went on over my Jerusalem artichokes. I now regularly go in to provide updates on what is going on in Parliament. We have an awful lot of interaction and many people listen to the podcasts. It is a great way to disseminate information. I applaud all the people who work for Tone FM, in particular Darren Cullum who gives up hours of his time. The station could not run without them.

Another excellent community station is 10Radio, based in Wiveliscombe on the far western outreaches of my constituency.

[Seema Kennedy]

Does my hon. Friend agree that the Bill could enable these hyper-local radio stations to be a substitute for the Facebook community pages that have grown up in many of our villages and rural areas but are not very accessible for older people? They might be the perfect substitute for them or for declining local newspapers?

[Rebecca Pow]

That is a valid point. The Wiveliscombe station transmits to only 10 parishes, but it provides an invaluable service with local news and gossip. I much enjoyed going there just before Christmas to give an update on my year in Parliament: the station did a long interview with me, and then put it on as a podcast.

10Radio is run entirely by volunteers. I congratulate Derek Skeavington, the chair, Anton Matthews, who is the “techie brains”—the technical side of these services must be run by someone—and Barry Summers, who is the “glue” and has a great touch with all the people who come to be interviewed. However, I particularly want to mention Josef Tucker. Josef is a wheelchair user who speaks through a computer-controlled gadget controlled by his eye movements, and he presents a programme on 10Radio: “Joes-Show”. It is all about musicals, and it is absolutely brilliant. It is a fantastic platform on which Joe can engage with people and people can engage with Joe. That is one of the great things about community radio stations.

It was, in fact, on a very small local commercial radio station called Radio West that I started. Many people from pirate radio had gone to work there, such as Johnnie Walker, who is now on Radio 2. I had left university, and went to the station to gain work experience. I then went back and worked there for a whole year, pretty much unpaid: I had three other jobs on the go to fund myself. I devised a programme called “Country Connections”, which I broadcast live on Sunday mornings at 7 am. It ruined all my Saturday nights, because obviously I could not over-imbibe.

I had to drive home, and I had to drive all the way to Bristol early in the morning to broadcast the show to the whole city, although I was sure that no one was actually listening to it, because it was so early and because people in Bristol are a very urban audience. Nevertheless, that was a fantastic grounding. I learnt all my craft there—editing, producing and directing. I am certain that, without that experience, I would never have gone on eventually to produce “Farming Today” on Radio 4. Small local community stations are still offering young people that opportunity, and I urge them to take it because it is a fantastic grounding. The more we can do to help those services to operate, to remain in existence and, indeed, to expand, the better, and I think the Bill will ensure that that happens.

Tone FM and 10Radio are not on DAB platforms, both because the cost would be too high and because there is often not enough capacity available to such stations on DAB multiplexes. BBC Somerset, which is a bigger station, is on one of the larger multiplexes, and I must say that it does excellent work in helping many of the community stations. That is to be applauded. The smaller local stations are well aware that audiences are moving over to digital and have told me that they would welcome the opportunity to broadcast on a digital basis as long as that was practicable and affordable. 10Radio would benefit particularly, because the area is very hilly and it has difficulty with its FM signal.

I welcome the work being done by Ofcom, especially the 10 technical field trials that have been run over the last two years and which have examined the viability of small-scale DAB multiplexes. I believe that they have gone very well, having demonstrated that a software-based approach can be workable. The nearest trial to Taunton Deane was based in Bristol and carried out by The Breeze, which broadcasts from my constituency. Across the 10 trial areas, nearly 70 unique radio stations are now being carried, most of which are new DABs. I believe that a great deal of interesting, innovative work went on during the trials, and that lessons can be passed on and learned. Exciting opportunities have opened up. It has been proved that they could work, and I hope that the Bill will facilitate some of them.

I am delighted to support a Bill that will allow Ofcom flexibility in the servicing of small-scale radio stations with multiplex licences in a much simpler and more straightforward manner. That can only benefit small local radio stations and help them to do their great community work, and the community will also benefit hugely. Let me emphasise to the Minister that if the Bill is passed, the opportunities could be endless. Perhaps I could even start up Pow Radio from my garden shed. Who knows?

I welcome the Bill, and wish it the best of luck.