Question to the Department for Digital, Culture, Media & Sport:

To ask the Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, what progress he has made on the public consultation on the deregulation of commercial radio.

The commercial radio deregulation consultation closed on 8 May 2017 and the government response was published on 18 December 2017.

The next phase is for DCMS to begin the detailed work to develop the new legislative structure and to bring forward legislation prior to analogue licenses coming up for renewal in 2022. Legislation will be brought forward when Parliamentary time allows.

We took great care to consider how the proposals will affect the nations. For example, due to the feedback we received from stakeholders and respondents on the proposal to allow Ofcom to have the power to set different news (national and local) or other local requirements in the nations, we have decided to not proceed with this. We agree that having such a power may disadvantage local stations in the nations and that a better approach is for Ofcom to have regard to the needs of all UK audiences in setting the requirements on a UK basis. We do not expect the remaining proposals included in the consultation to negatively impact the nations.

The consultation concluded that the current localness requirements set out under s.314 of the Communications Act 2003 are now too onerous and are acting to constrain the commercial radio industry from being able to rationalise their production base. Removing this will allow services to compete more effectively against new online services. However, news and information must continue to be locally sourced.