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Media Ownership (Radio and Cross-media) Order 2011

My Lords, I want to add the support of these Benches to the order. I do not have anything like the experience of my noble friend Lord Fowler in local newspapers or the noble Lord, Lord Gordon, in radio, but the importance of local media is obvious to all of us, whether it is radio, television or newspapers. Surprisingly, we are looking at this order rather late in the day. The other place looked at it in March and, in view of its importance, I do not understand why it has taken us quite so long to consider it. It is clear that this is extremely evidence-based. As the Minister mentioned, we had the CMS report in April 2010 and the Ofcom report in August 2010. Although the noble Lord, Lord Fowler, did not refer to it, the Communications Committee, of which I declare current membership but was not at that time a member, looked at this whole area and was rather more prescient, strangely enough, than the Newspaper Society. The Newspaper Society’s evidence was described as rather upbeat but the committee was rather more sceptical. It said that such figures which were produced by the Newspaper Society showing buoyant advertising revenue and so on can be deceptive. Of course, 2008-09, in terms of the dropping away of classified advertising revenue, readership and consumer habits in the recession, has been crucial and is why we are in the position that we are today. In a sense, Ofcom was told to go away and do its homework again by the Secretary of State. I shall come to what I think the reasons are for that. Ofcom acceded to the argument to deregulate further than it originally thought it would on the basis that it thought that local TV, which is very much the brainchild of the Secretary of State, would impact positively on diversity and plurality. I suppose the other argument it gave, quite apart from the competition points that the Minister mentioned, was that the BBC will always be there to provide plurality, and it is very much to be hoped that the BBC will be there. But there is no doubt of the scale of the crisis or of the necessity, exactly in the way that the noble Lord, Lord Gordon, mentioned, to have cross-media businesses that really get to grips with the need for these organisations not to concentrate just in one area of media. In debate, I remember a positive speech made by the noble Lord, Lord Fowler, on free sheets. Perhaps it may have been rather over-regulatory as regards local authorities. Nevertheless, I am sure that the greater regulation of those free sheets from local authorities will help local media organisations, which would be a positive effect. I move on briefly to the direction in which I think we are heading. The whole purpose of relaxing the cross-media rules is to allow investment in new forms of media, in particular in local television. I am rather more sceptical about this. I am probably somewhere along the lines set out in the Shott report, which was quite sceptical about the future. It said that advertising revenue would support the establishment of only something like 10 to 12 local television stations, but I see that Greg Dyke is rather more bullish about the possibility. In the end, however, this is probably not going to be digital terrestrial television, but local internet television, which is a lot more practical both in terms of the revenue it can raise and the delivery mechanisms. I hope very much that that is the direction in which many of the media groups, which will now be freed up to invest in other forms of media, will go. If the Minister has information on where we are headed in terms of local television and where the Secretary of State is planning to take us, I should like to hear it. Finally, the question in all our minds is the definition of the public interest in these circumstances. If we are relying on general competition rules to make sure that we have plurality of local media, what is the public interest? What considerations will the Secretary of State, who now of course has all the powers of competition intervention necessary, take into account when looking at what is regarded as ““sufficient plurality”” in these circumstances, which is the other phrase on which Ofcom placed considerable reliance in its August 2010 report?