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Local and Regional News

I want to use the debate to highlight my concern at the decision by the Guardian Media Group to announce 150 job losses at the Manchester Evening News and its 22 weekly newspapers, including the extremely successful Stockport Express, which serves my constituency. The weekly newspapers will continue to exist but their offices will be closed and the papers will all be written and designed at head office in Manchester by a remote pool of journalists. That development chimes with an unwelcome national trend towards centralisation of services and people. Sixty local newspapers out of 1,300 closed last year according to the Newspaper Society, and we do not want our weekly newspapers in the Manchester area to end up suffering the same fate. Local newspapers such as the Stockport Express, which has been going since 1889, play an essential role at the heart of their communities. That is because they are written by journalists who are constantly out and about and who know the local area and its people well. Local newspapers strengthen democracy and community life and hold local government and other organisations to account. They also provide a forum for individuals and organisations to speak to each other. Unlike many other newspapers locally and nationally, the Stockport Express is bucking the national trend and is gaining new readers all the time. It is the only paper in the north-west to have increased its sales. The latest ABC figures show that circulation has risen by 1 per cent. while every other title was down, in most cases by more than 5 per cent. In fact, the Stockport Express is the only one of 25 paid-for weekly papers in the whole UK to have seen an increase in sales, so it is very sad that instead of building on such a great success story, the Stockport Express is about to be weakened by having no editorial presence in the town. The rise in sales of the Stockport Express under the able editorship of Mandy Leigh has been accomplished as a result of the paper's reputation as a trusted, honest and open community newspaper. It is very grass roots: it understands the community and gives it what it wants, which will not happen if the editorial staff are all based in Manchester. The Stockport Express has six very popular district pages devoted to small areas of the town. Those are the pages that readers often turn to first, and people tell me that it feels as though they know exactly what is happening in their road. The paper also runs hard-hitting campaigns, such as the one to save Stockport's Plaza theatre. That campaign is going from strength to strength. The paper has exposed countless stories of wrongdoing, and its very good sports page is often devoted to coverage of Stockport County, the local football team. Readers have been following the team's financial ups and downs, as well as its success in the league, and each week there is another episode in what is an exciting saga. The paper provides a vital voice for the man or woman in the street. People feel that they can turn to it if they have an issue or a problem that they want to air. If they are unhappy with the care an elderly relative has received, for instance, they feel confident that their local paper will give them a fair hearing and will not willingly misrepresent them. Highlighting individual cases also brings to the attention of local and national policymakers wider cases of injustice, and that can help to bring about change. I remember how one such incident began with a story in the Stockport Express on neighbours' complaints about noise and antisocial behaviour arising from a small children's home. It transpired that there was no need for such homes to be legally registered but, after a successful campaign, legislation was introduced in 2000 to require small children's homes to register, which allowed better monitoring of such premises. I can think of many examples over the years that illustrate the important part that local newspapers play in the democratic process of bringing about change. The Stockport Express has also been a prolific winner of awards over the years. It was the last holder of the Guardian Media Group's award for best paid-for weekly, and is the current holder of the How-Do award for weekly newspaper of the year. Several of its journalists—including chief reporter Peter Devine—and photographers have won national awards. If the Guardian Media Group proposals go ahead and the Stockport Express is produced in Manchester, face-to-face contact with the town of Stockport will be lost and there will be no on-the-spot journalists. The upshot will be that the bond between paper and town will be loosened, which can only damage the paper's future prospects. When I gave my maiden speech in the House of Commons in May 1992 I praised our good local press, which then comprised of six papers. Since then, all of them have closed, apart from the Stockport Express and its sister paper the Stockport Times. It is ironic that The Guardian began in Manchester as a successful independent community newspaper, and yet the Guardian Media Group plans to take this drastic action. Local newspapers provide a documented record of our social history that cannot be replaced by social networking sites and the internet. They are a record for generations to come, and for a town to lose one would be to lose its collective memory. Therefore, I urge the Guardian Media Group to think again about its proposed cuts.