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Local and Regional News

The hon. Member for Bath (Mr. Foster) said that freezing the BBC licence fee would not do any good, and that it would be a gesture. Perhaps Mark Thompson would like to make a gesture, too, with the £816,000 package he gets? A lot of people in my constituency have to scrape hard to pay the licence fee, which will be £142.50 when the increase comes through next month. Freezing the licence fee would send the right signal. Everybody else has to tighten their belts. Indeed, the local newspapers, that we all love, are doing so, because they have to. As the hon. Member for Great Grimsby (Mr. Mitchell) said, their advertising in areas such as employment, cars and property is shrinking. Therefore, they are making journalists redundant—some of whom have, no doubt, worked on the paper for a long time. There will also be fewer opportunities for young journalists leaving media courses, as they will find it more difficult to secure employment with such newspapers. We cherish these newspapers, and we must see what we can do to give them some support. In my patch, we have the Lancashire Evening Telegraph and the Lancashire Evening Post, and the weeklies, The Longridge News and the Clitheroe Advertiser and Times. They have internet sections as well, and they must do that for the future; they must see the internet not as a problem that will put them out of business, but as an opportunity that will give them great potential for the future, with advertising online as well as in the newspaper. Goodness knows what will happen in 40, 30 and 20 years' time. Will newspapers in the form that we know them today survive at all? Perhaps all the local news will be accessed via iPhones, BlackBerries or goodness knows what other devices that we can only imagine now. There are probably kids in silicon valley working on the next device that everybody will be buying in order to download newspapers. We must ask what can be done in the meantime to ensure the viability of local newspapers, so that they are still around to embrace the new technology. There is nothing worse than seeing a newspaper that was established 100 years ago or more going to the wall because of the current financial crisis. We must do everything possible to support local papers. We use local papers to get our messages across, because the news is local to people and they savour finding out what their politicians are doing. We get lots of opportunities to get stuff in the local papers, whereas it is far more difficult, although not impossible, for us to get stuff in the national papers or on to the national TV or radio news. People want to know about what is happening locally—in their own communities—and thank goodness we are helped by journalists who are employed here in Parliament and are basically conduits for us to get our messages across. I should also mention the team of expert journalists who work for these papers in our own constituencies, because they know our patches as well as we do and, thus, when we talk to them they know what we are talking about. On regional TV news, I am delighted that the BBC was not allowed to do what it wanted to do—develop its local TV stations, featherbedded by its £3.5 billion of licence fee payers' money, which it gets whatever it does. The plans would have crippled a lot of our commercial newspapers and, indeed, ITV, which is against the wall at the moment, as I have seen in my region. Granada TV, my local station, does a great job with "Granada Reports" and "Party People", which is the local political programme, but even over the past 12 months the coverage of "Party People" has diminished—instead of being on every week while the House is sitting it is now on once a month. The tremendous current affairs programming that Granada used to do, which involved great expertise, has been diminished; Granada is having to pull its horns in simply because of the financial crisis. I hope that the Minister has some answer on giving support to local papers and regional news. I think that product placement would have been one of the answers; it would have given ITV an opportunity to get some extra cash, at least during this recession.