My hon. Friend is right to point out that geography and topography have a large impact on what radio and TV signals people can receive. The Bill is targeted at radio infrastructure and could provide options, which I will touch on later, to provide a service where digital radio currently does not exist or where choice is limited owing to an area’s topography. The current licensing system has not kept pace with the development of technology, so a different option is needed for smaller-scale radio stations. The situation with analogue was similar. Only a small number of analogue stations were broadcasting when the technology was extremely expensive. As the costs fell, increasing numbers of stations were created, including community stations. Now that digital technology is becoming cheaper, we need to look at creating a legislative process and a licensing system to allow community stations a chance to move to digital.
As I have touched on already, one issue with community stations and the current multiplex system is that many of the areas they cover are just too large, meaning that stations might be providing content that is irrelevant to many. For example, if a community station wanted to cover Torbay, which is perfectly reasonable under an FM licence, it would have to broadcast over a much wider area, leading to problems with sponsorship and rendering local discussions and contributions from local groups meaningless to much of the theoretical audience.
That is why the Bill seeks to create smaller multiplexes that can cover defined areas in the same way as a community FM licence.
The fact that there are such wide areas to be covered means that there is a large jump in the cost of access that is not necessary if someone is looking to use analogue and get a community licence. For a station that might be broadcasting from someone’s bedroom or over the internet from a small studio, the jump to digital radio can involve a fee of £100,000, meaning that it would have to generate revenue of some £1 million a year to provide a DAB service through the local multiplex. Would that be tolerated in any other industry? There is in effect a shelf that stifles the natural growth of a business from a bedroom or of the amateur operation moving to internet broadcasting, then through to a small-scale broadcasting operation and then to who knows where. Large companies have literally been developed in people’s bedrooms. Microsoft, for example, started out as a group of students drinking Coca-Cola to keep them awake all night while they created code and is now one of the biggest companies in the world.