S4M-08987 Fairness for Local Television in Scotland

The Deputy Presiding Officer (John Scott): The next item of business is a members’ business debate on motion S4M-08987, in the name of Joan McAlpine, on fairness for local television in Scotland.

Motion debated,

That the Parliament welcomes the establishment of new local television services for Scotland; recognises the role that they can play in delivering public service broadcasting commitments such as news and current affairs; understands that Glasgow and Edinburgh have won local licences and that Ayr, in the South Scotland region, is on the shortlist for the next round of licences as well as Dundee, Inverness, Falkirk and Aberdeen; considers that local television’s public service content justifies a prominent position in electronic programming guides of Freeview and other digital providers to maximise discoverability by viewers; notes with concern that Digital UK, the body responsible for allocating channel slots on these electronic programming guides, proposes to locate new local television channels at position 26 in Scotland compared with position 8 in other parts of the UK, and notes calls for all stakeholders and those with a regulatory responsibility for broadcasting, including Ofcom, which has a Scotland office, to work together to ensure that local television in Scotland is not disadvantaged.

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Stewart Stevenson (Banffshire and Buchan Coast) (SNP): I join others in congratulating Joan McAlpine on securing this important debate. I apologise for perhaps not hearing the whole debate, should I have to leave early for the Conveners Group meeting that starts shortly, although I will certainly look at it afterwards.

The Scottish Parliament information centre tells me that broadcast media—TV and radio—employ something like 3,500 people in Scotland, so it is a significant industry. More fundamentally, it is significant for the people who consume the industry’s products. One of the little things that gives us an insight into what the public wants is the circulation of the Press and Journal, which is roughly equivalent to that of The Herald and The Scotsman put together. Why is that so? It is because the P and J is essentially a paper that is rooted in local news, as it has outposts across the north and north-east of Scotland, with journalists embedded in communities and reporting on what is going on. Every day the P and J has a page and a half of news from my constituency.

There is an appetite for local news, which the new stations absolutely play into. The time for local television has come, as the cost of entry has shrunk to an entirely different level from that which it was at years ago. We must not allow the initiative to fail because of some essentially technical issues around the stations achieving the right prominence. If channel 7 is going to be available, it should—to be blunt—be allocated to those stations, because we have public service broadcasters in the east and in the west and will have later in other parts of Scotland. Ofcom should respond to its guidance and allocate the channel to those stations.

There has been a bit of a lack of imagination on the part of Ofcom in examining other ways of achieving such prominence for the channels. This week, for example, when I came back and switched my telly on in my wee house down here, a message said, “There are new channels available. You have to retune.” I pressed the retune button, and three minutes later the TV had retuned. That is fascinating.

However, I have examined the behaviour of Sony, Panasonic, Samsung, Humax and Pace boxes—just a sample, not a comprehensive survey—and they always wipe my favourites. The reality is that if we could get our favourites set up so that retuning did not interfere with them, it would be okay when such a message came up and we had put our local channels on the favourites. However, the reality is that every time we retune, it overwrites our choices. The software that does that in all those boxes is downloaded from the network, so Ofcom could set regulations for the software as well as for the data content of the EPG, and could require the providers of the software not to do that. It is, in any event, specific to the UK, so that would not be to touch on international matters.

With a bit of imagination, we could get things to a different place. Ofcom could even require that there be little icons on the screen, so instead of having a dozen stations on the first screen that we see there could be—let us use an arbitrary number—26 of them, so we could get the new stations on the screen. There has been a lack of imagination.

The world is changing and will continue to change. I have just realised that it is 20 years since I first published a website. There is a lot happening and there is a lot more to happen. Let us ensure that there is a fair wind for this excellent local news initiative—for which I am sure there will be great demand—and that our local stations are prominent, so that the public can easily access and enjoy them.

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