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Local Media

I did not come to this debate as well prepared as the hon. Member for Bath, who clearly anticipated the Opposition's question regarding which policies made it in and which were out. The only issue that we disagreed over was IFNCs, and we had a specific alternative policy to put in place. On most other things—I am sure that at any point now the hon. Member for Bath will intervene and help me out—we were in agreement. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Hove (Mike Weatherley) on his maiden Westminster Hall speech. He and I share a similar ambition; I have renamed my constituency "Wantage and Didcot", although technically it remains Wantage in the Official Report. Even the BBC, when I occasionally appear on it, refers to me as "the Member for Didcot". My advice to my hon. Friend is to call himself "the Member for Hove and Portslade", and in every arena other than this, he will be known as that. As I discovered at the last election, he will rack up the votes in Portslade as a result. He has had a very successful career in the media and will bring important expertise to bear on the subject. No doubt he will continue to press me for a definition of super-fast broadband to demonstrate his strong independence while he remains temporarily on the Back Benches. I welcome the shadow spokesman, the right hon. Member for Exeter, to his place. I occasionally faced him across the Dispatch Box, and he brought a great deal of passion and expertise to his role as Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport. Again, without wishing to confirm the prejudices of the public, I have long been an admirer of him and his work. I now have to address some of the specific questions that he was able to put to me as a result of the expertise that he gained as Secretary of State. He challenged me to cite examples of successful local television in Europe. Obviously, there are strong examples in America, but there are also very important successful commercial examples in Spain, and possibly even Sweden. He also challenged me to name any serious commentators who supported our proposals. Roy Greenslade, the éminence grise, who is probably at the pinnacle of media commentators, was full of praise for the Secretary of State's proposals on local television. No one is pretending that a solution is ready to be taken off the shelf; we are working hard on the matter. What Roy Greenslade praised, and what the right hon. Member for Exeter might bring himself to praise in a quiet and private moment, is the ambitious nature of our plans for local television.