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Digital Economy Bill [HL]

My Lords, I am the chairman of the Select Committee on Communications which made the proposal that the Government are acting upon, so I do not intend to jump overboard at this point. I believe it is a sensible proposal, and I will continue to support it. I understand what my noble friend said. He made the argument extraordinarily well. I shall make two points. The argument about public subsidy needs to be treated with a certain amount of caution because regional television has been supported by the implied subsidy from analogue broadcast. That is the whole point. Analogue has given an advantage to companies such as ITV, which is creating the new situation and the new position. Explicit subsidy and support may be a new concept, but implied and real subsidy and support is not. What worries me more than anything else is the idea that at a regional level BBC television will have a monopoly. I do not want that. It would be a retrograde step. I sometimes say it takes us back to the 1950s, but it is worse than that because in the 1950s, at least we had strong regional newspapers. You do not have to be a great media expert to understand that regional newspapers are not what they were. I was chairman of a regional newspaper group about 10 years ago, and it has changed radically even in that small time. We will not go back to the old days. These points need to be considered, not least, I humbly suggest, by my own party because we do not want to have a position where at regional level the BBC determines the political and news output for television. That would put a vast amount of power in the hands of news editors and correspondents. I regret that that is not entirely helpful to my noble friends, whom I support and like in every conceivable way, but I hope that they understand that I am not going to resile from the recommendations and proposals that I made only a short time ago.