My Lords, I am pleased that we are now at the section of the Bill dealing with radio and able to say that the state of radio in the UK is in good health. The medium continues to be attractive to new generations of listeners, while the proportion of adults who listen each week is virtually unchanged from a decade ago. I imagine quite a few people are tuning in right now to their radios across the UK.
However, UK radio also faces many more challenges than it did in the past, with competition from technology platforms and online streaming providers, and it is vital that stations large and small are able to adapt their services in response to listeners’ preferences, which is why the measures in the Bill regarding radio are so important.
I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Storey, for his Amendments 71 and 73, which would require Ofcom to determine the licensing process for new local and restricted services licences within six months of the Bill’s completed passage. We would, however, consider such a requirement on Ofcom to be unduly prescriptive. As the UK’s independent regulator, not only for radio but also for spectrum management and specific frequency allocations, we believe that Ofcom should continue to have wide discretion in how it carries out its functions in respect of its regulation of radio services. We are not persuaded that overlaying new and prescriptive requirements on its duties is necessary.
My noble friend Lady Berridge, speaking to Amendment 72, referred to the meeting we had yesterday with my honourable friend Julia Lopez, the Minister for Media, Tourism and the Creative Industries. I was very grateful to my noble friend and to the noble Viscount, Lord Colville of Culross, for giving up their time to join us to discuss it. Her amendment seeks to ensure that, in areas defined as rural or in those that present a topographical issue—hilly or mountainous terrain or other things that get in the way of radio broadcast and limit the availability of digital services—Ofcom would be required to grant an FM licence to the organisation applying. That would mark a departure from the present licensing system, as we discussed yesterday, and create legal uncertainties about when this requirement applies and who would judge whether a particular area is unsuitable for a digital radio service.
Since 2003, Ofcom has had responsibility to secure the optimal use of the spectrum in determining where and how to license FM and other radio services. This amendment would conflict with that responsibility, especially in the case of areas where Ofcom judges that there may not be spectrum available to license further FM services.
Since 2010, Ofcom has successfully focused on developing community radio. A number of noble Lords rightly pointed out that this is greatly valued by people across the UK, with 320 services, the majority of which are on FM, across the country bringing an important degree of local choice and diversity. Ofcom
has also focused on developing digital radio. Ofcom is currently focusing on small-scale DAB, which is now in its sixth round of licence awards, with 59 areas currently licensed, giving cost-effective opportunities for small commercial and community stations to broadcast on DAB as well as online. A number of these new multiplexes are located in more rural areas of the country, bringing new stations on air in these locations.
My noble friend raised very eloquently some pertinent points about the lack of services in more rural areas, such as the Vale of Catmose in her territorial designation. Ofcom has offered FM community radio licences in the most recent licensing round between 2017 and 2020 to people interested in developing community services. Although the most recent licensing round was a successful exercise, with more than 70 new community radio stations launching, rural areas with smaller populations may have specific challenges in being able to bring together viable proposals for community radio services, as my noble friend outlined in her speech.
With Ofcom’s licensing of small-scale DAB coming to a natural break point, I can tell my noble friend that we plan to work with Ofcom to look at the case for supporting new radio services in rural and remote areas and to assess possible options for helping to support these services get on air. To that end, my honourable friend Julia Lopez is very happy to write to Ofcom, asking it to provide advice on this, and to publish a copy of her letter. That can be done swiftly and I hope that, with that commitment to ask Ofcom to look at the case for supporting new stations in rural and remote areas, my noble friend will be content not to press her amendment and perhaps to continue to discuss this with us.
I turn to Amendment 74 tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Storey. Like many who spoke, I recognise the important contribution that commercial radio stations play in delivering local news and other local information. The noble Lord’s amendment, which seeks to put in legislation the current requirements on local production and news drawn from the current Ofcom guidance, would be a significant change to the radio deregulation measures. It would reinstate the requirements for maintaining local production, resulting in higher costs for commercial radio broadcasters. By putting the current Ofcom localness guidance on a statutory basis, it would also limit Ofcom’s flexibility to develop new guidance that will set the expectations to enable Ofcom to hold stations to account for their compliance with the new locally gathered news and to adapt the guidance in future. Fixing these requirements in this way would result in additional long-term costs, which may have an impact on the financial viability of the sector and its ability to invest in content. It is worth noting that there are no similar provisions for the BBC under its royal charter or agreement.
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The changes proposed in the Bill include important new protections for local news and information as well as new requirements, which Ofcom will be able to enforce, for a portion of local news coverage to be gathered locally—that is, by a professional journalist based in the relevant multiplex area. The Bill includes a power to extend these protections to digital radio for
the first time, recognising that a further shift to digital broadcasting could reduce the availability of local news on local commercial radio using DAB.
The noble Lord mentioned the importance of locally based community radio services, the growth of community radio and the ongoing extension of small-scale DAB and new DAB-only stations. This means that there is now more choice for listeners and a wide range of community and small commercial stations in local areas across the country providing these services. We think that the overall approach—which protects and strengthens requirements to deliver local news and information—combined with powers to protect this provision for digital radio, is right for commercial radio and helps to ensure that it continues to deliver public value for listeners. For these reasons, I am not able to accept the noble Lord’s Amendment 74, although we have considered it carefully, as he hoped we would.
Amendments 75 and 76 tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Foster of Bath, are on due impartiality. We are proud of the UK’s world-renowned news and current affairs broadcasting sector, where British-made programmes are enjoyed by audiences both at home and across the globe. The regulatory framework that underpins this landscape, put in place by Parliament, is looked to internationally as the gold standard for the proportionate, fair and independent regulation of content. As noble Lords are aware, Ofcom is required by that framework to draw up and enforce a Broadcasting Code for television and radio to ensure that audiences are adequately protected from harm and that they can encounter a diverse array of voices and perspectives.
The Broadcasting Code sets out rules to ensure these protections for audiences, including rules specifically to protect children, to ensure that audiences are protected from harmful or offensive material, and to ensure that broadcast news, in whatever form, is reported with due accuracy and presented with due impartiality. Ofcom has a duty to keep the Broadcasting Code under continual review. This obligation is in place to ensure that the code remains up to date and continues to reflect the current viewing and broadcasting landscape. In this way, the regulatory framework is designed so that Ofcom can ensure that its regulation of content can adapt to the shifts in technology and audience expectations that we see in broadcasting.
To this end, Ofcom recently published audience research on the specific concerns of the noble Lord, Lord Foster, regarding politicians as presenters, and updated its guidance. Research uncovered a range of opinions on the advantages and disadvantages of having politicians as presenters. Overall, audience feedback supported existing due impartiality rules under the Broadcasting Code, which apply only to news. Viewers and listeners strongly value due impartiality as an important requirement, especially for news programmes, but they also value broadcasters’ freedom of expression and think that using politicians as presenters in non-news programmes can help to hold other politicians to account. I had the great pleasure of appearing on my noble friend Lord Vaizey of Didcot’s Times Radio show, and I am happy to report that he gave me no easier a ride on that show than he does in your Lordships’ House.
There is clearly a balance to strike here, and it is right that Ofcom, as the independent regulator, retains the flexibility to keep these matters under review and to take a decision based on the best and most up-to-date evidence, rather than being unduly restricted in legislation.