This week the Government's Media Bill continued its progress through the House of Commons, and I tabled several amendments to try to improve it and to try to retain incentives for publishers and newspapers to aspire to meet certain standards of journalism.
The first of my amendments relates to Cornwall and public service broadcasting. There has been a lot of debate over the past year about the decision of the BBC to reduce BBC local radio content in order to fund an expansion of its local online offering. As smartphones displace conventional radio and TV, the argument goes that the BBC must respond to that trend and produce more local content for platforms other than conventional ones needing broadcast spectrum. I understand the argument, but I don't agree with it. In places like Cornwall, which have such a strong identity, local radio stations are incredibly important and give expression to that local identity and, where you have an older population, stations like Radio Cornwall retain a central importance that had been overlooked.
Furthermore, we have other local news providers like the West Briton with their Cornwall Live presence which provide local news in the written form online already. The BBC is therefore vacating an important space where it has an important public service broadcaster duty to play and simultaneously trampling into the business model of private local news providers. My amendment would mean that parts of the UK which have recognition as a National Minority under the Framework Convention should be given special recognition when it comes to public service broadcasting. It would place Cornwall in a special category alongside Scotland and Wales and I hope would prompt the BBC to revisit its current approach and reinstate the broadcasting offer for Cornwall.
My other amendments relate to the incentives that were created to encourage newspapers to offer genuine arbitration to families who have their privacy wrongly invaded by the press. A decade ago there was an outcry over the phone hacking scandal when it was revealed that some newspapers were routinely hacking into people's voice messages to get news. The Prime Minister established the Leveson Inquiry to make recommendations. The victims of phone hacking, some of whom were grieving the murder of their children, bravely came forward to give evidence about the way their lives were turned upside down during these painful and traumatic episodes. The Royal Charter established a sensible system of self-regulation and incentives for joining were proposed. Still, the Government never commenced the incentives to join and now it plans to delete them altogether.
I was involved in putting together the original plan, so I object to the way Parliament is just reneging on undertakings it gave the families at the time, which were accepted in good faith. I have therefore been pushing a couple of approaches to take the rough edges on what the Government currently proposes so that good investigative journalism can be protected. At the time of writing, I don't even know whether the Labour Party is willing to do the right thing and back me but it's important to make the case on important issues like this even when they are not at the top of people's minds and to show consistency, even if you are in a minority within Parliament.
