Asked by: Drew Hendry (Scottish National Party - Inverness, Nairn, Badenoch and Strathspey)
Question to the Department for Digital, Culture, Media & Sport:
To ask the Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport, what assessment his Department has made of the adequacy of DAB radio reception in Scotland; and what steps his Department has taken to improve poor reception in areas receiving low-quality coverage.
Answered by Lord Vaizey of Didcot
The Government is working with the radio industry to improve digital radio coverage for listeners across the UK. DCMS, the BBC and commercial radio are jointly funding the long term expansion of the local DAB network with the building of 182 new digital transmitters across Scotland, Wales, England and Northern Ireland and technical/frequency changes at a further 49 existing local DAB sites by the end of September 2016. As a result of this new investment, according to the independent communications regulator Ofcom, it is expected that local DAB coverage in Scotland will increase from 65% to 86% of households.
Ofcom has published detailed maps outlining the improvements to local DAB coverage for the local digital radio multiplex areas in Scotland and these are available at:http://stakeholders.ofcom.org.uk/broadcasting/radio/coverage/dab-coverage-plans/
Separately the BBC is rolling out its national DAB network to a further 163 transmitter sites across the UK, scheduled for completion by the end of 2015. This programme will increase the coverage of its DAB network in Scotland from 91% to 95% of homes.
Asked by: Drew Hendry (Scottish National Party - Inverness, Nairn, Badenoch and Strathspey)
Question to the Department for Digital, Culture, Media & Sport:
To ask the Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport, when the Minister of State for Culture and the Digital Economy plans to respond to the letter to him of 29 June 2015 from the hon. Member for Inverness, Nairn, Badenoch and Strathspey.
Answered by Lord Vaizey of Didcot
The letter was not received and a duplicate has been requested.
Asked by: Drew Hendry (Scottish National Party - Inverness, Nairn, Badenoch and Strathspey)
Question to the Department for Digital, Culture, Media & Sport:
To ask the Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport, what research his Department has commissioned on the potential harm caused by fixed odds betting terminals in Scotland.
Answered by Tracey Crouch
The Government has not commissioned research specific to Scotland.
The Responsible Gambling Trust published the largest piece of research into gambling related harm on FOBTs in Great Britain last December. The Gambling Commission, as the statutory advisor to the Government published its advice on the conclusions of the research as well as next steps in March this year. This amounted to industry monitoring and evaluating its player protection efforts; to conduct further research into problem gambling and to persuade customers to move to an account based system so that more intelligent interventions can be made using statistical analysis of customer spend.
The previous Government introduced regulations that ended unsupervised stakes over £50 on B2 gaming machines. We want to wait for the evaluation of these regulations before we consider further legislative changes.