I will speak briefly to my two amendments, amendments 1 and 2, because I appreciate that time is marching on.
I have supported the Bill, promoted by my hon. Friend the Member for Torbay (Kevin Foster), throughout —I attended Second Reading and was on the Public Bill Committee. However, during the Bill Committee and on reflection afterwards, I felt that a couple of details that are not in the Bill were worthy of a little more probing.
Amendment 1 relates to public consultation. The Bill is important, stretching across many different facets, and will potentially reach many different communities. On Second Reading, the Government indicated that they would conduct a form of consultation and review with all the relevant stakeholders on the technical details of the Bill. However, given the Bill’s technical nature, I seek some reassurances from the Minister on that consultation, hence the proposed insertion of “after public consultation”. There are some very small community radio stations, often run by community volunteers, and I want to be certain that they will be part of the consultation process. It would be wrong if they were excluded in favour of the larger stations.
Turning to amendment 2, concerns were expressed about the Bill in Committee, particularly those that had been raised by the Community Media Association. I am concerned that the provision in proposed new section 258A(4)(c) of the Communications Act 2003 that an order under clause 1 may
“require small-scale radio multiplex services to be provided on a non-commercial basis”
is not a sufficient guarantee that such services will be operated primarily for public and community benefit.
We heard much on Second Reading about the benefits of community radio and how it can get into the hard-to-reach communities that Members of all parties are all too familiar with. I seek reassurance about that. Where a small-scale radio multiplex service is run on a commercial basis, there is a high risk that charges to small-scale and community radio content providers could remain excessive, and that opportunities for those radio operators to reduce costs through the sale of spare capacity could be lost, which would be a shame.
A commercially operated, small-scale radio multiplex operator might be inclined to populate available capacity with content from providers prepared to pay the highest rate, rather than content of the greatest public value. For example, content providers with low fixed costs, such as those providing semi-automated—predominantly music—services, might be better placed to afford the high costs of transmission than content providers that invest in original local content, including speech and local journalism. Such community stations go to the heart of our communities.
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My amendment 2 proposes that small-scale radio multiplex services be required to operate for public and community benefit, rather than for commercial reasons, in order to favour existing community radio providers or consortia of small-scale local and community media, so that they might come together and operate the multiplex. This would not preclude a small-scale local commercial radio service from playing a lead role in establishing a not-for-profit vehicle to hold the multiplex licence or from operating it on such a basis that local radio services, including small-scale commercial radio services, can be provided with free or low-cost carriage and surpluses generated invested in local content production.
This is such a forward-looking and important Bill. I just want to be sure that we reach out to those parts of the community that benefit from community radio.