BBC Local Radio

I start by congratulating my hon. Friend the Member for Suffolk Coastal (Dr Coffey). Like her, I speak in support of highly valued local radio services. To my pleasant surprise, I find I must declare a family interest, though I would not have had to do so a week ago. My sister found out last Friday that she has been accepted into the BBC's talent pool and is therefore one more person with a profound interest in its future. It is not on my sister's behalf that I am speaking, but on that of my constituents, who value their local radio station, BBC Hereford and Worcester. Among its 110,000 listeners, it has 33,000 who listen to no other BBC station and 18,000 who listen to no other station at all. I speak on behalf of the tens of thousands of listeners who value, through the day, BBC Hereford and Worcester's updates on real local news, its local sports coverage and the invaluable public service that it provides in times of crisis. I hope that we speak in this debate on behalf of common sense when it comes to the BBC's handling of its financial challenges. Cutting local radio, which represents a fraction of the total radio budget and a still smaller fraction of the overall budget of the BBC, is not the obvious place to start. There is no doubt that the BBC, like other public bodies, must cut its cloth to fit the times, but it has a great deal of cloth from which to cut, including large headquarters buildings and several smart television studios around the country, and budgets for entertainment, publicity and promotion, the salaries that it pays to big name broadcasters and the budgets of expensive television productions. Perhaps some of the many hundreds of people who covered Glastonbury last year should be spared before the 30 who work hard in my local radio station. The ““delivering quality first”” proposals that prompted this debate have not yet been properly costed. They are only ideas at present. However, the director-general has suggested that £150 million could be saved by scrapping overnight television programming between 10.30 pm and 6 am, showing repeats instead. That is more than the total cost of BBC local radio throughout the UK, which costs £137 million. Apart from the fact that local radio is enjoyed by thousands every day, as other hon. Members have suggested, it comes into its own in times of crisis. In Worcestershire in the summer of 2007, we faced cataclysmic flooding, a one-in-100-years flood that caused weeks of disruption, and images of our county were shown on the national news for all the wrong reasons. In such circumstances, local radio comes into its own. People who were stranded were able to get help, drivers were able to avoid the closed roads, and SOS messages from farmers needing their cows to be milked and from the elderly in need of food were responded to, thanks to local radio. Many years ago, freak snowstorms in October cut off my family in our home in rural Worcestershire. For more than a week, the power was out and the heating was off, and the local radio on battery-powered radios was our lifeline to the outside world, bringing news and comfort. Much more recently, in last year's hard winter, when snow drifts struck and thousands were stranded, it was to local radio that many people turned. I remember sliding along in my car listening to an SOS from a local wedding because the DJ had failed to arrive. It was not a matter of life or death, but as I plan to get married this Saturday, I can say that it must have felt so. Only local radio could have delivered on such a mission—and it did. If the cuts were to go ahead, the BBC would suffer from the loss of local knowledge and contacts provided by the local radio network. Many journalists—and, it seems, many MPs—began their careers in local radio, but many of the most popular and well-loved characters on the airwaves have remained there for many years. The local knowledge of figures such as BBC Hereford and Worcester's Paul Damari, our weatherman, is legendary; it would be harder to retain that knowledge with a broadcasting schedule of only a few hours a day. My case is that local radio remains a vital public service. If there is any justification for public service broadcasting, then surely local broadcasting should be at the forefront. The BBC must do what it can to manage its way through these financial challenges, but the suggestion of abandoning local radio is fraught with risk. It is the wrong cut to the wrong target. As we prepare for the Easter recess, I am reminded of the parable of the speck and the beam in Luke's gospel, in which one man focuses on the speck in his brother's eye rather than removing the beam from his own. The BBC gives wall-to-wall coverage of Government cuts and their impact on local communities, but it must also consider its own decisions and do the right thing to protect genuine community services such as local radio.