My Lords, as I listened to the noble Lord, Lord Tope, moving his amendment—which, given an opportunity, we would support, faute de mieux—I was reminded of the remarkable film of the man who walked on a high wire between the Twin Towers in New York. It was an extraordinary experience. With this amendment, the noble Lord is navigating the gap between the Bill and the coalition agreement. I do not recommend that he emulates the high-wire artist, because he is very likely to fall precipitately to the ground, judging by what he has advanced tonight.
To begin with, the noble Lord assumes—he may be right—that the Government’s proposals are directed at unfair competition. That is the term used in the coalition agreement. It may be the case, but what constitutes unfair competition is far from clear. What the evidence is for unfair competition existing is even less clear. I will quote, as I did in Committee, from material supplied by the National Union of Journalists. One might have thought that it would be fairly sympathetic to the Government’s point of view, since journalists’ jobs are presumably more at risk if there is unfair competition in the newspaper industry than are the jobs of a handful of local government press officers. The NUJ pointed out:
“The last select committee charged with investigating the matter, observed that there was no evidence of a link between high-frequency local authority publications and the decline of ad revenue, circulation etc of the local press in the local authority catchment area”.
It also pointed out that the Audit Commission—perhaps this is one of the reasons that it is being abolished—in 2010,
“effectively debunked the assertion of newspaper proprietors that local authority publications represented unfair competition and were commercially damaging to other local newspapers”.
The Audit Commission found that the money spent by councils was not unreasonable, that few council publications were published sufficiently frequently to be a viable media for most local advertising, and—a matter to which no doubt we will return—that the current accountability framework would ensure that any misuse of public money could be dealt with.
Those are fairly strong views by an interested party that, one might have assumed, would be sympathetic to the Government’s position but is not. Its evidence is substantial in that respect. It also points out that the press began reducing its workforce many years ago, and that already something like 61% of local newspapers in the area it contacted had closed or struggled. One reason was the decline in advertising revenue, but it was not to be attributed to local authorities including advertising in their publications, because, as the Audit Commission pointed out, in almost all cases the publications were too infrequent to have that impact. Some 55% of newspapers cited competition from the new media.
It does not stop there. There are free newspapers in circulation. The Evening Standard is a free newspaper. I am not sure about the new paper launched by the Independent. It may be free, or cost a nominal amount. Some of the newspaper groups themselves publish freesheets. Metro is published by a newspaper group and carries advertising. Therefore, the notion that somehow local authorities are responsible for the difficulties is ludicrous.
Even if local authority publications constituted competition, to what extent would it be unfair? Is it unfair because the publication is free, or in some other way? Are advertisers not able to make a commercial judgment about what would suit them better? I should have thought that that was central to government policy. The proposal to dismiss the Government’s suggestions here would not constitute a breach of the coalition agreement because there is no evidence that the unfair competition part is at all relevant to what the Government are trying to do.
There is another issue. The Government’s proposals would apply to the code, but the code can change. We do not know what restrictions the next code will bring in. Most of the code, as it stands, is fairly reasonable and acceptable. I dispute the necessity to limit titles to four publications a year, but most of the rest is fairly balanced. What is to stop the Government tightening the code and deciding on a range of things beyond those that they now say should not be published—or, conversely, should be published—in local newspapers? This would give a blank cheque to a Secretary of State to tie the hands of democratically
elected local authorities in terms of how they communicate to their electorate, who, after all, should have the final say in what is done locally.
Of all Secretaries of State, the present one is the last person I would like to see entrusted with those powers. I would be quite happy, or relatively happy, for the noble Baroness to have that power but I would not be at all happy to have the present Secretary of State exercising it. Nothing in the Bill would prevent him tightening up the code and using this mechanism to ensure that it is enforced. My preference is for the whole clause to go. I am anticipating what may be said, perhaps rather more briefly, in a subsequent debate. The noble Lord’s amendment would moderate the damage but in my view he should have stuck to his guns and his party’s principles and recognised that he would not breach the coalition in so doing. Then we could have perhaps exercised a bit more leverage on his coalition partners, for the time being, and improved the Bill rather than allowing it to go forward to the statute book in its present form.
7.30 pm