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Local and Regional News

I hope that the hon. Gentleman took the time this morning to read the report of today's speech by Mark Thompson, who heads the BBC. It gives full details of the major changes and cost savings that the BBC will make. Those savings will help to support other commercial public sector broadcasters, which I welcome, but I hope that the Minister will also be prepared to help ITV by, for instance, relaxing the rules governing its contract rights renewal. The Secretary of State's unwillingness to consider the possibility of product placement, which could have brought additional money into broadcasting and, perhaps, removed some revenue from online services, was antediluvian. The Minister might also consider allowing more flexibility, not in the total amount of advertising time on our commercial channels but in the time slots in which advertisements are placed. I hope that the talks between Channel 4 and the BBC will continue, because, among other things, they may help to protect ITN. Attention has already been drawn to the problems of radio, but we should now concentrate on the issue of cross-media ownership. There is an urgent need for us to consider ways in which the rules can be adjusted if we are to protect commercial radio stations. I hope that that will involve the introduction of a new localism test for stations applying for licences. The current test to establish whether a radio station is truly local does not deliver what my constituents—and, I suspect, many others—want. We must also think about newspaper ownership, and try to find ways of supporting newspapers. Many newspaper owners were concerned about the proposals for BBC Local, which they rightly feared would damage local newspapers. Perhaps the proposal could be reformulated: the BBC could offer financial rewards to local newspaper and radio journalists in return for what they could provide. There are many good ideas to be explored, and I hope that the Minister will explore all of them.