Local Media

Stephen McPartland Excerpts

Wednesday 14th March 2012 Westminster Hall

[Stephen McPartland (Stevenage) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Dr McCrea. I am grateful that the Minister is here to respond to the debate. He and I usually discuss high-technology issues, but today we will talk about low technology and local newspapers in print form. I am pleased to be able to talk about the importance of local media to small towns and cities.

Stevenage has a number of media outlets, including The Comet, the Stevenage Advertiser and Jack FM—a good local radio station on which I will be holding a phone-in surgery on Saturday, because it has a wide impact in the local community and reaches many people. The importance of local newspapers to small towns and cities lies in community cohesion. They are valuable assets to local communities. In my area, they report everything from Stevenage football club’s meteoric rise from non-league football two seasons ago to league one and its furthest ever placement last week against Tottenham in the fifth round of the FA cup at White Hart Lane, where it unfortunately lost, to stories about the Rainbows, the Guides, grass-roots football and other small local charitable organisations that have no opportunity to put forward their message elsewhere. I am pleased to be able to support local newspapers and media outlets.

I want to talk about some facts. We know that 33 million people in this country read a local newspaper every year. We also know that there are thousands of titles—well over 6,000—that 71% of adults read a local newspaper and that 14 million more people read a local newspaper than read a national newspaper. Local newspapers have a huge spread in local communities.

[Karen Lumley (Redditch) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Dr McCrea. I thank my hon. Friend on obtaining this important debate. Does he agree that papers such as the Redditch Advertiser and the Redditch Standard, which are local free sheets and the only newspapers that we have in Redditch, are vital to local people, especially the elderly who would otherwise be cut off from local news?

[Stephen McPartland]

My hon. Friend makes an important point about the valuable titles in Redditch. Local newspapers reach some of the most vulnerable people in our communities and push forward a positive message on everything: Government news, local authority news, planning permissions, charitable events and what is going on in the local community. The Prime Minister said that

“local papers are hugely important in helping to build a bigger, stronger society. There is a massive gap between the state on the one hand, and the individual on the other, and local papers help fill the space in between, galvanising readers into action.”

[Gareth Johnson (Dartford) (Con)]

Does my hon. Friend agree that local media are vital to small towns such as Dartford and Stevenage, because they are often too large to have parish magazines dedicated to their area, but too small to have, for example, regional television covering just their area?

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[Stephen McPartland]

My hon. Friend makes an important point about local newspapers in Dartford.

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On resuming—

[Stephen McPartland]

Before the Division, we were discussing what the Prime Minister said about local newspapers being a great vehicle for social change, and I want to refer to a couple of campaigns that I have run with local newspapers in my area. One campaign sought to bring the carnival back to Stevenage, and that had great success last year. We are currently running a campaign with a different newspaper to have a satellite radiotherapy unit based at the Lister hospital in Stevenage. Patients from Stevenage who undergo radiotherapy currently have to travel nearly 4,000 miles during the course of their treatment. We think that that is a little too far, and that treatment should be available somewhere closer.

[Oliver Heald (North East Hertfordshire) (Con)]

That issue also affects my constituents in the neighbouring constituency of North East Hertfordshire. Does my hon. Friend agree that the local media have been extremely helpful in supporting that campaign and fighting to help cancer sufferers, who currently have a difficult journey, to receive treatment?

[Stephen McPartland]

My hon. Friend makes a good point; he has been a great advocate and supporter of the campaign and has led the way in North East Hertfordshire. As he rightly says, without the support of local newspapers, the campaign would not have achieved such massive community penetration or have been mobilised into a big, cross-party issue locally. The campaign is going well.

We are also running a campaign to stop the expansion of Luton airport because, although Luton would get all the jobs, Stevenage and particularly North East Hertfordshire would get all the aircraft noise. If there are to be quieter aircraft, we are keen for them to turn up, and we would be interested in getting the truth about those figures. Local newspapers are a great vehicle for change and something that I support.

Local newspapers face great competition from new media, although many of them are embracing that competition and in many ways turning themselves into embryonic versions of the local multi-media companies that the Minister and I support so well. Local newspapers are trying hard to move forward by doing a lot of work on the internet, accessing a variety of other platforms and starting to move into radio and so on. However, they face a great deal of competition, and although they are tackling that head-on, there is concern over the behaviour of some local authorities.

I would be interested to hear the Minister’s views on whether local authorities should spend taxpayers’ money on advertising in local newspapers, as opposed to producing propaganda that a large number of local residents are not particularly interested in reading, so it quickly ends up in the bin. For example, the Stevenage Chronicle is not particularly well supported. The problem with such propaganda is that taxpayers have no interest in it, and given the choice they would scrap it right away rather than see other services reduced. The local media market is distorted because local newspapers come under severe financial pressure when local authorities—whether county or district authorities—produce their own material.

What are the Minister’s thoughts about the current Department for Transport consultation on removing the mandatory advertisement of things such as road closures and planning applications in local newspapers? It is very important that that is reviewed. I am interested in his views, simply because I think that such a move will undermine further the financial viability of local newspapers.

[Dr Thérèse Coffey (Suffolk Coastal) (Con)]

My hon. Friend raises an extremely important point. Just this morning, the editor of the Ipswich Star, Nigel Pickover—there is also the Felixstowe Star—raised that point with me. I am sure that my hon. Friend agrees with me that local papers are very important for democracy and holding representatives to account and for conducting campaigns, which he has mentioned. Taking away some of their regular revenue puts more papers at risk.

[Stephen McPartland]

My hon. Friend makes a very important point much more eloquently than I managed to. She got to the heart of the issue, which is that that revenue will be taken away from local newspapers and instead of our having the disinfectant of transparency and local communities being able to understand what is going on, much of that information will be hidden away on local authority websites and will not get the attention that it so richly deserves.

This is very important. It comes down to a simple point. I accept that we are not in the business of subsidising local newspapers and that taxpayers should not pay for advertising in that sense. However, we should not be in the business of encouraging local authorities to compete against newspapers by taking that advertising revenue away from those newspapers and putting things on their own websites, because as hon. Members know, very little of those savings will go to front-line services. Local authorities will probably spend the money on developing a newer and better local authority website or newer and better local authority propaganda. The local community does not want that. It wants access to transparent information. The key message is that if public funds are used, the money should be spent on advertising in local newspapers, not on simply producing propaganda.

I would be interested in the Minister’s views on the consultation that I referred to and the impact that the proposal would have.

[Simon Hart (Carmarthen West and South Pembrokeshire) (Con)]

Would it not be necessary to prove that the advertising that the taxpayer was paying for was actually being read by the taxpayer and was valued by the taxpayer?

[Stephen McPartland]

That is a very good point. Many people will wonder how many residents read the traffic planning information on road closures in the back of a local newspaper. That is a key issue and no doubt the reason why the consultation is taking place, but I am concerned about the consultation’s adverse effects. I believe that most laws are made with the best of intentions across all parties and all Governments, but there is always the law of unintended consequences. My concern today is that the unintended consequences will simply be that more and more local newspapers end up going out of business. That will continue the removal of a vital community resource from our local communities.

I have tried to show, in the few minutes of my speech, how effective those local newspapers have been as a vehicle for change. As I mentioned, the Prime Minster supports local newspapers. We have to put our money where our mouth is on some occasions and actually invest in local newspapers.

[Andrew Bingham (High Peak) (Con)]

My hon. Friend is making a superb point regarding local newspapers. In my constituency, we have the Buxton Advertiser and the Glossop Chronicle. People always read the notices in the back. There is also local radio. My local station, High Peak Radio, is widely listened to and, as my hon. Friend says, gets the message out better than many of the free sheets produced by local authorities.

[Stephen McPartland]

I agree that radio is a very effective medium. As I mentioned, I will be doing a radio phone-in surgery on Saturday morning with my local radio station, Jack FM, to get that great penetration into my local community.

[Andrew Bingham]

I thank my hon. Friend for giving way again; he is being very generous. Not long after I was elected to the House, my local radio station, High Peak Radio, came down and broadcast from the Lobby of the House for a morning. That went down extremely well and increased the perception and knowledge of Parliament throughout the constituency. I would recommend that to any colleague.

[Stephen McPartland]

I thank my hon. Friend for making an excellent point, which I will make to the producer of Jack FM on Saturday morning before we go on air.

The key points for me are clear. We do not want to distort the media market. The number of hon. Members who have intervened on me and are present for the debate shows the interest in it. My hon. Friend the Member for Carlisle (John Stevenson) is keen to speak, so I will finish my speech shortly. The reason why I wanted the debate was simply that we have to understand the law of unintended consequences. I am very concerned that local authorities are using taxpayer funds—

[Jason McCartney (Colne Valley) (Con)]

I am very lucky in my part of the world—Colne Valley. The Huddersfield Daily Examiner is a fantastic daily newspaper six days a week, running community and business awards, which are very well followed. I have to mention Barry Gibson’s coverage of the local development framework controversy on our patch. He was in the council chamber for 10 hours and was tweeting. The newspaper also led an important community campaign to get people signed up to the Anthony Nolan Trust bone marrow register after one of its journalists died of leukaemia. I agree with my hon. Friend about the importance of councils using their local newspapers for advertising. Does he agree that at a time when money is tight, that can also be very cost-effective?

[Stephen McPartland]

My hon. Friend makes an excellent point. I have experience of The Huddersfield Daily Examiner, as my wife went to university in Huddersfield and I have read the newspaper on one or two occasions. I do not know whether my hon. Friend has contributed many articles to it in the past, but it is an excellent newspaper. We come back to the point that local newspapers are fantastic vehicles for social change, and we need to be very careful about ensuring that they have the ability to campaign. On that point, I shall finish my speech, so that other hon. Members have a chance to speak.