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Local Media

My hon. Friend makes a very important point much more eloquently than I managed to. She got to the heart of the issue, which is that that revenue will be taken away from local newspapers and instead of our having the disinfectant of transparency and local communities being able to understand what is going on, much of that information will be hidden away on local authority websites and will not get the attention that it so richly deserves. This is very important. It comes down to a simple point. I accept that we are not in the business of subsidising local newspapers and that taxpayers should not pay for advertising in that sense. However, we should not be in the business of encouraging local authorities to compete against newspapers by taking that advertising revenue away from those newspapers and putting things on their own websites, because as hon. Members know, very little of those savings will go to front-line services. Local authorities will probably spend the money on developing a newer and better local authority website or newer and better local authority propaganda. The local community does not want that. It wants access to transparent information. The key message is that if public funds are used, the money should be spent on advertising in local newspapers, not on simply producing propaganda. I would be interested in the Minister's views on the consultation that I referred to and the impact that the proposal would have.