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

To ask the Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport, how many and what proportion of households in rural communities have full access to (a) television and (b) local radio services.

Freeview currently reaches nearly 99% of UK households. However, good terrestrial television signals may not be available to all households in rural areas due to a number of factors including local topography and spectrum availability. In these cases, Everyone TV – the organisation responsible for the day-to-day running of Freeview – advises that viewers consider other options to access free-to-air television such as the satellite service Freesat, which provides near total coverage in the UK.

Details of local radio coverage provided have been published by Ofcom in May 2022 and are available here.

More detailed data on the usage of free-to-air radio and TV is available from a variety of sources. For example, Ofcom produces its Media Nations report which reviews key trends in the media sector and sets out how audiences are served across the UK. The most recent report was published in August 2023 and can be found here. Ofcom also publishes the results of a number of annual surveys addressing these issues, as well as an interactive data set in the form of its annual Communications Market Report. Many of these publications include relevant analysis broken down by geographic area.