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§ Mr. Geoffrey Clifton-Brown (Cirencester and Tewkesbury)I am grateful for the opportunity to raise the subject of BBC Radio Gloucestershire and the problems with the reception of its signal in my constituency. I welcome the Minister's presence, not least because he has always been so courteous in helping me with my constituents' other problems. He will be aware of our continuing correspondence on the subject, and of the questions that I have asked in the House ever since I have been a Member.
The time is now right to move forward, not least because a clear and simple solution has been identified. Since my election in 1992, there has been a blackout of Radio Gloucestershire in much of the Cotswolds. The situation in December 1995 is unchanged from that of December 1991, when the main medium wave AM transmitter was switched off. I ask the House and my hon. Friend the Minister for their forbearance, because this is a very technical subject. I will do my best to take it slowly.
The result of switching off the transmitter is clear. Figures from Radio Joint Audience Research Ltd. show that it is technically possible for 338,000 adults to receive broadcasts out of a total population in Gloucestershire of 471,000. That means that around 150,000 people—133,000 adults plus a quarter of under-16s—in Gloucestershire are currently unable to receive Radio Gloucestershire. That is a large section of the population, many of whom are my constituents.
The current reception problems are not confined to the geographical extremes of the county, but are confined to outlying rural areas beyond the principal towns and cities. The major gaps are estimated currently as follows: 20,000 people in the south-west of the county; 20,000 in the Forest of Dean; and 20,000 in the north Cotswolds. The rest are dispersed evenly throughout the county.
As the Minister knows, Radio Gloucestershire is a speech-based local news and information station, upholding the finest traditions of public broadcasting. Indeed, in 1994, it won the prized Sony award for local radio station of the year. Among its successes was the coverage of the dreadful Cromwell street story, when its journalists had their reports networked to the rest of the BBC. Before it lost its AM frequency, Radio Gloucestershire had built up an average weekly following in 1991 of a staggering 27 per cent. of the adult population, from a standing start in 1988.
My constituents hold their public service station in high esteem. At this time of year, many of my elderly and other constituents need winter weather and traffic information. Unlike London, power failures in parts of rural Gloucestershire are still far too common. When the power goes off, rural communities turn to their local radio station for information. The local radio station also provides much valuable sports and other news coverage.
When simultaneous broadcasting ended, the commercial stations were allowed to develop separate radio programming on medium wave and FM. To the west of my constituency, the independent Severn Sound is a good example of that. It retains licences for light music on both AM and FM. In contrast, the BBC was forced, as part of a national policy dictated by the Home Office, 948 to relinquish its AM frequencies; thus began part of the problem. Before 1992, the responsibility was not that of my hon. Friend the Minister and the Department of National Heritage but that of the Home Office. I absolve my hon. Friend the Minister from all responsibility for the matter.
Radio Gloucestershire's AM frequency was passed to Boss 603 Radio, a light music commercial station based in Cheltenham. Although that station can be hard by some of my constituents, it does not serve the wider needs of the Cotswolds. Its programming and advertisers aim at a target audience in the immediate Cheltenham area only. It strikes me and many of my frustrated constituents that it might be better off with an FM stereo frequency. That is a view shared by many independent radio stations and their advertisers, simply because they can get a better quality of broadcasting in their immediate local areas.
My plea to the Minister is to review the decisions taken in the wake of the Broadcasting Act 1990. It made good sense then but it is less relevant today, because we are a long way from the broadcasting situation that prevailed in the 1980s. At that time, no one could deny that the BBC held the lion's share of the AM and FM frequencies. A decade later, the commercial sector, under the Radio Authority, has a commanding lead. The situation needs to be reviewed and reversed.
The commercial sector has an interest in change, because many commercial stations, as I have demonstrated, are stuck with AM licences but might, for reasons of quality, wish to upgrade to FM. I recently discovered that, when a commercial radio licence holder maintains both FM and AM stations, such as Severn Sound in Gloucestershire or Capital Radio in London, cross-media ownership rules prevent them from converting from AM to FM. They are therefore caught in a bind that prevents public service stations, such as Radio Gloucestershire, from gaining space on the AM frequency. That needs to be reconsidered.
When Radio Gloucestershire was established in 1988, it was satisfied with its AM transmission, because that, unlike FM, can deal with difficult topographical and geographical situations. It meant that the AM frequency could be received throughout the whole county satisfactorily, whereas the present FM frequencies, which are interrupted by hills, gave rise to the current situation.
A year after the station was up and running, the Home Office held a meeting with the BBC in 1989. I am told by Radio Gloucestershire that the bottom line was that the Home Office required it to surrender its unused FM local frequencies, which it had been holding for future expansion of FM coverage in difficult rural areas. Home Office officials told the BBC that Radio Gloucestershire would keep its AM frequency, which had served the county so well, in return for surrendering its potential FM frequencies, a deal which made a great deal of sense to all parties involved at the time.
However, in July 1991, after the Broadcasting Act came into force, Home Office officials apparently changed their minds and revoked the AM agreement, as it did not accord with the new Act, and Radio Gloucestershire had to surrender its AM frequency. Despite a hard-fought battle by the BBC for extra FM frequencies, the best deal that the Home Office could subsequently offer was one FM filler transmitter in Cirencester in 1991. The situation has remained unchanged for the four years since. 949 My constituents do not like it. Insult is added to injury by the fact that, in parts of the Cotswolds, we can hear the broadcasts of every other surrounding station: GWR, Three Counties, Radio Hereford and Worcester, Thames Valley Radio, Radio Coventry-West Midlands and even Radio Shropshire. However, my constituents cannot receive their own Radio Gloucestershire. The market towns of Moreton, Stow, Chipping Camden and Bourton are left high and dry from their own Radio Gloucestershire signal, because the FM signal is interrupted by the ridges and hills in my constituency.
For the past five years, the Department of National Heritage and its predecessor, the Home Office, have been resolute in their belief that this is a matter for the BBC to resolve using FM fillers, despite the fact that it has been granted only one licence to do so, but that solution's problems are enormous and inordinately expensive, and anyway, universal coverage would not be sensibly achieved.
I come to the solution, which my hon. Friend the Minister may wish to hear. On 30 November, the BBC chairman no less, Mr. Marmaduke Hussey, wrote to me and informed me that it would cost at least £500,000 to provide the five or so filler transmitters to give even a reasonable coverage to the whole of Gloucestershire. That would bring relief to the Forest of Dean and the main Cotswold towns, but not to those many constituents in highly rural regions. To attempt to give the whole county FM coverage would require at least a dozen transmitters and would be a scandalous waste of licence fee money: estimates place that exercise's cost at more than £1 million.
The BBC chairman has, however, presented me with an answer, with which I concur wholeheartedly. His recent letter says:
It has recently become evident that the pressure on medium wave frequencies for commercial radio is not as great as had been anticipated. Therefore, we have taken the decision to look into the possibility of using medium wave again. We have had informal discussions with the Department of National Heritage and they have indicated that this would be an acceptable solution.My plea to my hon. Friend the Minister is that we should adopt that solution so that my constituents' suffering can be ended once and for all. Mr. Hussey's letter also states:
we intend to fund the additional transmitter out of next year's capital budget",so the two things are in place: the technical solution has been identified and the funding is there. A single medium wave transmitter would be far better value than pursuing the FM option, and would provide something approaching universal coverage for the whole of Gloucestershire.Before the BBC can proceed, however, the Department of National Heritage must allocate a frequency, and technical approval is required from the Department of Trade and Industry Radiocommunications Agency. I urge my hon. Friend to back the solution that I have outlined. I will send him a copy of the chairman's letter that sets out the BBC's plans. I hope that he can arrange an early meeting with officials to formalise those plans.
I am concerned because the precedent for this application is one made in 1994 for an FM filler at Coleford in the Forest of Dean. Apparently, it took many months for my hon. Friend's Department to respond, by which time the BBC had decided that it could not afford the FM option anyway. I do not want a repeat of that. Now we have identified the solution and the BBC is able 950 to fund it, it would be a tragedy if, because the various Departments involved took such a long time to consider the matter, the BBC said that it could not afford to fund a new AM transmitter.
The commercial sector is much more interested in the new FM frequencies, and the Radio Authority has just obtained a space between 105 and 108 MHz, covering about one fifth of that expanded waveband. Since the time of the Broadcasting Act 1990, the FM space available for domestic broadcasts has doubled because the emergency services and utilities have transferred to other frequencies. Plenty of space is therefore available for all the commercial stations to broadcast on FM, and, in any case, they want to cover only a relatively small local region.
It is interesting that the Radio Authority intended to advertise a new commercial FM licence for the Cotswolds and had accelerated its plans precisely because of all my complaints about the BBC position—it told me that in a letter. A Radio Authority official has told me, however, that the Cotswolds licence will now be for the medium wave because of all the problems that I have outlined with the FM frequency. It was originally proposed to allocate more space to commercial stations on FM. It is now being proposed to allocate it on AM because of the problems, yet we cannot obtain AM space for BBC Radio Gloucestershire, an established and well-liked station.
With that evidence in mind, I strongly urge that we ensure that the BBC has a fair share of resources to continue in the local radio business, because it seems that the Radio Authority is awash with frequency options on both FM and AM.
I have shown that Radio Gloucestershire's problems derive from the Home Office's policy decisions at the time of the Broadcasting Act 1990. With a new chapter in broadcasting on the horizon, I hope that we can first sort out the previous legislation's unresolved problems. It is instructive to look back to the 1987 Green Paper on radio. This is the overall guiding theme that we should all remember in relation to broadcasting.
The Green Paper states:
there remains a place for local BBC stations operating under public service obligations … there are particular reception difficulties in some less populated areas, and there may therefore be a good case for envisaging the continuation of simulcasting"—that is, simultaneous broadcasting on FM and AM. In the case of Radio Gloucestershire, it broadcasts simultaneously only in the towns of Gloucester, Stroud and Cheltenham. It is therefore time to restore the station's full coverage by allocating a replacement medium wave alongside its current allocation. I hope that my constituents will not have to wait another four years since the present problems began.I urge my hon. Friend seriously to consider what I have had said today. The solution is there, the funding is there. All it needs is a little push from him and I am sure we will achieve everything for my constituents' benefit.
§ The Minister of State, Department of National Heritage (Mr. lain Sproat)I truly congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Cirencester and Tewkesbury (Mr. Clifton-Brown) on the vigour and persistence with which he has followed this important cause. We have had many meetings, debates and questions and much 951 correspondence, and I hope that his constituents are as grateful to him for his hard work on this matter as they should be.
I thank my hon. Friend for this opportunity to reaffirm that the Government recognise the value of the BBC's local radio services. As he knows, last year, we published a White Paper about the BBC's future. It said that it was especially important that the BBC should continue to provide news and current affairs programmes on its local radio services. It did not, however, commit the BBC to a specific number of local stations.
On 27 November this year, we published drafts of the BBC's new charter and agreement. Those documents give effect to the Government's policies in the White Paper and provide the necessary formal framework for the BBC's future role, including local radio services provision.
I know that, since he came to the House, my hon. Friend has been pursuing this matter for many months, indeed years, and I have congratulated him sincerely on that. I sympathise with those of his constituents who are unable to receive the BBC's local radio service. Some of them will have had the benefit of receiving Radio Gloucestershire's programmes when they were broadcast on medium wave—AM—between 1988 and 1992. Others in Gloucestershire may not yet have been able to hear the service due to their living beyond the range of the station's transmitters.
My hon. Friend knows that considerable practical difficulties exist in providing good broadcast reception in the Cotswolds. That is not a unique position: many regions have problems relating to their reception of broadcasting services. I know that he is aware of the fundamental characteristics of broadcasting transmission, but, perhaps for the benefit of others, it may be valuable if, for the record, I set out some of essential features to put this matter in context.
Radio reception on the FM waveband, as for television reception on the ultra high frequency, relies primarily on a clear line of sight between the transmitter and the receiving aerial. Reception is impaired and can be blocked by obstacles interrupting the signal path. In built-up regions, such obstacles are usually man-made, such as tall buildings or large reflective structures. In rural regions, it is more common for the obstacles to be naturally occurring features such as hills and trees. Despite those complications, broadcasters have achieved more than 99 per cent. coverage for their television and radio services in the United Kingdom, from several thousand transmitters.
It should be remembered that each service requires a different frequency, and that each frequency has to be separate from those in use at each neighbouring transmitter to avoid interference. Unfortunately, it is generally the most beautiful areas of the country with forests and hills for which transmitters are needed, and I am sure that my hon. Friend agrees that Gloucestershire fits that description.
Broadcasters reach 99.4 per cent. of the population with television signals. That is a considerable engineering achievement, but it means that perhaps some 300,000 people are without a television service. The situation is similar for radio. The BBC currently estimates that its coverage of its national FM networks is 99 per cent. That 952 means that there would still be many transmitters to build at considerable expense if full coverage were ever to be achieved.
There is no obligation on the BBC to provide everyone with satisfactory access to all its services. The Annan committee recognised in 1977 that such an obligation would be wholly impracticable, in view of the small and scattered nature of many communities and because of the difficulty of matching transmitter coverage to the local geography.
I return to the specific problems in Gloucestershire that were raised by my hon. Friend. It may be helpful briefly to set out some of the background to the difficulty, and to explain how we have arrived at the current position.
BBC Radio Gloucestershire started broadcasting in October 1988, when most radio stations were providing a simulcast service on both the FM and AM wavebands. It had recently been established that this was a wasteful use of the frequency spectrum, and that simulcasting should be reduced to a minimum. Nevertheless, permission was given to the BBC to introduce its new Radio Gloucestershire service on both wavebands for a limited period. That was an exceptional and temporary measure, to help the new service to establish itself.
At the end of the agreed period, the BBC was to close its AM service, and Radio Gloucestershire was to broadcast on FM only. The BBC subsequently suggested that there would be little to gain by turning off the AM service before the frequency was needed for an alternative purpose. We agreed to that proposition, and extended the temporary transmission period until such time as the Radio Authority might need the FM frequency for developing independent radio.
On 31 January 1992, following a request from the Radio Authority, the AM transmitter was turned off and the frequency was reassigned to the authority for an independent radio service. The frequency is now used by the independent local radio service based in Cheltenham called Boss 603 Radio.
I should add, while mentioning independent local radio, that the Radio Authority has announced plans to advertise a licence for a service catering for listeners in the north-east of the county. That should feature among the licences that it aims to advertise from the middle of 1996 onwards. We welcome this extension of programme choice for listeners in parts of Gloucestershire.
However, we also recognise that some developments of this nature have adverse effects on listeners in other areas. The consequence of the BBC losing an AM frequency is that those listeners lose a service altogether, because FM and AM coverage of an area is rarely identical. Several areas, including Gloucestershire, have experienced a similar outcome.
A number of communities which had relied on signals from the AM transmitter could not receive the FM signals. The BBC generally hoped that, where possible, it might be able to build new FM transmitters to restore the service to such areas. However, its ability to do that depends on a number of factors, including the availability of frequencies and suitable transmitter sites. The BBC also has to take account of a variety of other pressing demands on its resources when determining its engineering priorities.
In Gloucestershire, the BBC has identified nine areas for which new transmitters are needed. It estimates that the total cost of providing FM facilities for each of those 953 communities would exceed £1 million. My hon. Friend the Member for Cirencester and Tewkesbury drew that information from the letter that he received from the chairman of the BBC. It is by no means clear at this stage that suitable sites and frequencies will be available, and, as transmitter installation is not a simple task, the operation would take some time to complete, even if the resources were available.
I do not want to sound too dispiriting to my hon. Friend. As he knows, the BBC has not given up on Gloucestershire. It has been looking for alternative ways to resolve the problem, and one possibility might be to provide an AM service for the area. Understandably, my hon. Friend may feel—although, charitably, he did not put it in such serrated language—that this could take us back to first base.
I appreciate that the affected communities might believe that such a solution, if it proved workable, would show that they have been inconvenienced unnecessarily. However, it must be remembered that the Radio Authority had few spare frequencies at its disposal when it opened for business in 1991. Simulcasting the same programme service over an area on two wavebands remains a wasteful activity, which we discourage, and it was appropriate to give the new service, which had, of necessity, to operate on the poor AM waveband, the best frequency that was available.
From the beginning of this year, the Radio Authority has had access to new FM frequencies in the 105 to 108 Mhz sub-band. Accordingly, its need for AM frequencies has diminished, and it is appropriate for the BBC again to take its potential use into consideration. It is too early to know whether the BBC will find that a viable way to sort out the problem for my hon. Friend's constituents, but I assure him that the BBC is working on it, and that the Department of National Heritage will look at any proposal as sympathetically as possible for my hon. Friend.
§ Mr. Clifton-BrownAs the Minister and I have said, the FM solution would cost about £1 million, but would still not give adequate overall coverage, whereas the AM solution, providing one transmitter, would cost £10,000 to £20,000, and would provide reasonable overall coverage for Gloucestershire. I hope that my hon. Friend will opt for the second of his two solutions, and push hard for the BBC to be allowed an AM frequency.
§ Mr. SproatThat certainly adds an element of realism to the sympathy that I have already promised my hon. Friend, and we shall take that important fact fully into account.
I know how greatly listeners appreciate the BBC's local radio services and I hope that listeners throughout my hon. Friend's constituency will similarly be able to take advantage of BBC Radio Gloucestershire's service.
§ Sitting suspended.