Tory’s promise to ’sweep away’ local media ownership rules

Tory Shadow Culture Secretary Jeremy Hunt has told the Oxford Media Convention that a new conservative government will sort out the creative industries.

How will they do this? Competition, Competition, Competition.

They will revive the local media sector by ’sweeping away the cross-media ownership rules at local level’ , and seek to encourage local TV affiliates to emerge. Connected with this he made clear that his party did not support the news consortia scheme that the government were pursuing as a means to prop up regional news. He said that anyone looking to sign one of these contracts “should understand that we’ll do all we can to legally unpick them … And if they haven’t been signed, we wont be doing so.”

He called for more competition in next generation network too, and called for access to BT’s ducts to be done in order the stimulate investment in fibre. This he said, along with dealing with things such as business rate anomalies would do more than the proposed ‘telephone tax’ to create a digital Britain. He noted that the Government themselves warn that there is a danger that “intervening too early would distort the market, or chill planned investment” Why then, he asks, are they pressing ahead with this tax: “The telephone tax is ill-conceived, deeply unfair, and simply won’t do what the Government hopes it will.”

He also said his party were against directing the BBC and Channel 4 to invest in online content saying this would effectively kill off any one from the private sector investing in similar content.

What Hunt wanted to see less of was, Regulation, Regulation, Regulation.

“I have nothing against Ofcom, which has some extremely bright people working for it. But everything against the way the balance of power has shifted its way because we have a Government afraid to take responsibility for broadcasting policy” he said before going on to ask why Ofcom had to, for example, produce annual PSB reports; why the government was now asking them to creative even more reports; and why they were set on increasing Ofcom’s duties, rather than looking at areas of regulation they could step back from.

Commenting on Jeremy Hunt’s speech Liberal Democrat Shadow Culture, Media and Sport Secretary, Don Foster said:“The Tories’ blind faith in the markets misses the point on media. It isn’t good enough to simply deregulate and hope the market will make everything better. If independent local and regional news providers are to survive they will require active support from Government.”