BBC Local Radio

I start with a tribute to the BBC, and a thank you. Apart from two years spent floating up and down on the waves as a pirate disc jockey, I learned my broadcasting with Radio London, which gave me the greatest opportunity I have ever had. It took me on as a young, inexperienced, microphone-trained-but-nothing-else broadcaster, and turned me into a radio journalist. I was given the chance to cut my teeth, to make mistakes, to broadcast hour after hour, and to learn the hard way what broadcasting is about. That is where I want to start. First and foremost, BBC local radio is now effectively the only speech-based local radio service in the country, and it provides a superb training ground for young broadcasters. If that service is taken away, I do not know how people will learn real broadcasting and radio journalism skills without that platform. Local radio is vital to the future of broadcasting, and it should not be underestimated in the way that the craven, metrocentric, television-based management of the BBC currently tries to treat it. I am sorry; I should have congratulated my hon. Friend the Member for Suffolk Coastal (Dr Coffey) on securing the debate before I went into rant mode. The hon. Member for Penistone and Stocksbridge (Angela Smith) expressed the second point that I wanted to make very well. When it comes to local issues and emergencies, to crisis time or to relatively regular and simple things such as schools closing due to snow, people turn to their local BBC radio station for information. For news about floods and other disasters, people turn to BBC local radio because that is the only real source of local information. I recall the 1987 hurricane when everything went down but people still had battery-powered radios. The whole of Kent was incredibly badly affected by that hurricane, and people tuned into Radio Kent. After a night of violent storm that ripped our county apart, I recall broadcasting at 6 o'clock in the morning through a radio telephone—as it was at the time—to Radio Kent to offer help and blankets to elderly people in my constituency, and to ask people to contact us if they knew of any elderly people who needed heat and light. Members of Parliament from all parties could not have mounted that operation had it not been for that genuinely local outlet. Local radio is a vital service in every county. It is easy in metro-centres—in Birmingham, Manchester, Liverpool and particularly London—to say, ““There is a plethora of stations that offer a wide menu of broadcasting alternatives, so we do not need this service.”” I do not believe that is true, however, because BBC Radio London, for example, still plays a vital part in the everyday life of ordinary Londoners.