Local and Regional News

Kelvin Hopkins Excerpts

Thursday 30th March 2017 Westminster Hall

[Jason McCartney (Colne Valley) (Con)]

It is an absolute pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Nuttall, and a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Bishop Auckland (Helen Goodman). I had a fantastic season, while I was at BBC Radio Cleveland, reporting on the fortunes of Bishop Auckland football club. At the time, there was no ISDN line at the ground, so to report goal updates, I had to go into the clubhouse and on to a landline and wait for two minutes. Sometimes there would be a big cheer from outside while I was on air, and once the presenter back in the studio said to me, “Jason, has there been a goal?”, and I said, “No, Joe has just dropped the jackpot on the one-armed bandit.” That really is local news and local reporting at the heart of the local community—and I cannot remember whether Joe bought a round or not.

I thank the Backbench Business Committee for granting our request for a debate on the future of local and regional news providers. We are in a great time of change. There are great challenges ahead, but there are also great opportunities. Therefore, it is more important than ever that as many people as possible have access to quality, trusted news sources. That means a big role for local and regional news.

I must declare that, as I have just suggested, I am a former BBC local radio reporter. I went on to work for ITV television as a broadcast journalist. I am now chairman of the all-party parliamentary ITV group and—just for balance—I am one of the vice-chairmen of the all-party parliamentary BBC group. I am a former National Union of Journalists member. I was father of the chapel at ITV Yorkshire and I took my members out on strike, because job cuts were being forced by the poor business decisions of the then ITV boss, who was still raking in his £9 million bonus. I am now a Tory MP and that fat-cat boss is now a Labour peer—what a funny old world.

I am a keen consumer of local news. I wake up in the morning with Liz Green on BBC Radio Leeds. I get a paper edition in my constituency office of the Huddersfield Examiner and follow it online—I also follow the Yorkshire Post online. When I am with my girls in the car, we are listening to Capital radio. It is great that that independent radio station has a news team. They often ask me and fellow Yorkshire MPs to record clips and send them via our iPhones. That is a good use of innovative technology. We have two excellent regional TV news programmes: “Calendar”, which I used to work on, and “Look North”. Sometimes, if there is a big local news story, I make a point of trying to watch both—one at 6 pm and the other at 6.30 pm—to see the different ways in which they cover their news stories.

We have a very local free newspaper, the Holme Valley Review, which has been around for about two years. Again, I have to declare an interest: I have a monthly column in the Holme Valley Review. It has an excellent reporter, Olivia, who is always ringing me and other people, asking for local news stories.

I would like to focus on local newspapers for a moment. As I said, I am very lucky to have in my town the Huddersfield Examiner, with its dedicated band of locally based journalists. They produce six editions a week, Monday to Saturday, and they are very good at holding Kirklees Council to account—it is run by Labour, by the way—whether the councillors are parking illegally while they go on holiday for a few weeks or damaging town centre trade with their disastrous bus gates scheme.

However, it is with their campaigns, as the hon. Member for Bishop Auckland said, that local newspapers come to the forefront of their communities. My local paper has also been backing an NHS campaign, the Hands Off HRI campaign, which is trying to prevent the accident and emergency department at Huddersfield royal infirmary from being downgraded and moved to Halifax to fund the disastrous private finance initiative deal that was signed there. That campaign is led by local campaigner Karl Deitch and, with the support of the Examiner and the community, we are still hopeful of getting our clinical commissioning group to listen.

More positively, the Huddersfield Examiner puts on two fantastic awards ceremonies every year. The Huddersfield Examiner community awards celebrate the best in our community—campaigns, charities and volunteers—and in the autumn the Huddersfield Examiner business awards celebrate the best in local small and medium-sized enterprises and bigger businesses, connecting up the business community. That means that we have an unemployment rate that is below the national average, and textiles and engineering are doing well in our part of the world. I commend the excellent coverage by the Examiner of my beloved Huddersfield Town. As we chase promotion to the premiership, every bit of injury news is followed closely by Huddersfield Town fans.

One big challenge that local newspapers face is changing technology—the changes in the way people get their news. However, the Examiner is responding to that. It is now very much a digital newsroom, producing strong stories not only for the print edition but for the website, which it updates regularly with videos. That is surely the future—print supported and enhanced by digital output, not replaced by it. The Examiner is recruiting a video production editor, but of course its big challenge is providing engaging and challenging content for two very different audiences. With that in mind, the Examiner is also embracing social media.

The debate has been triggered by a worrying trend for local and regional newspapers. There was a net loss of nine regionals between November 2015 and March 2017. As Opposition Members have said, the number of UK local authority districts with no daily local newspaper coverage has risen to 273 out of 406. There is also the loss of plurality, which we are concerned about. The five largest publishers, including Trinity Mirror, which owns my local newspaper, now account for more than 77% of all UK newspapers. We need to halt the decline and to look at new models.

As a member of the Select Committee on Culture, Media and Sport, I have been questioning BBC bosses on their development of the plans for 150 local democracy reporters. I echo many of the excellent questions that the hon. Member for Bishop Auckland asked. Those reporters will be funded by the BBC and employed by qualifying local news organisations to cover councils and local public services, but will they enhance and be an addition, or will newspapers be tempted just to use them as a cut-price replacement for their existing services? The BBC has also announced the formation of the NewsBank, which will give online media organisations access to BBC video and audio. In total, that will be an investment from the licence fee of up to £8 million. I and others will be following those developments very closely.

For the vast majority of adults, their main source of news is still television, and we need a plurality of providers. I have talked about the BBC. I welcome ITV—as I said, I chair the all-party group—investing £100 million a year in national, international, regional and nations’ news. As I said, in Yorkshire we are lucky to have two quality regional TV news programmes: “Look North” on the BBC and “Calendar” on ITV Yorkshire, which I used to work on.

[Kelvin Hopkins (Luton North) (Lab)]

I am listening with interest to the hon. Gentleman and support what he is saying. Does he agree that local radio and local television are not the same, that they cannot provide the same detailed coverage as local newsprint, and that we need local newspapers as well as local television and radio?

[Jason McCartney]

The hon. Gentleman makes a good point. I am saying that we need all the different news sources. We have talked about Sky and about the strength of the BBC in the regions, but we need plurality. We need different local newspapers—we need dailies and weeklies. We need them online, but we also still need the print editions. Obviously, many hon. Members are au fait with social media, but a lot of our constituents are not and they still need to know what is happening in their community—what is happening with charities, with their hospital and council, and with planning applications and so on.

Having worked in both the BBC environment and an ITV newsroom, I know that there was healthy competition between the two. There was an eagerness to be first with the story and to cover it best, which increased the quality of journalism and drove up audiences. We need that kind of healthy competition.

I will bring my comments to an end to allow other Members to speak. I began by talking about challenges. One big challenge is accurate and trusted news sources. We are in an era of fake news and I am pleased to say that my Culture, Media and Sport Committee is starting an inquiry into it. By the way, I remind everyone that fake news is false news with false facts, and not just news that someone does not like—that gets bandied around a lot.

Finally, I echo the thoughts of the NUJ general secretary on the Localism Act 2011. Former council buildings in my patch are being taken over as community assets and I would certainly support ideas and developments on that model for taking over local newspapers. I am very open to innovative ideas for new local journalism models. I would look at levies on social media and online companies—the internet—tax breaks, investment funds and community trusts, because after all, for the sake of our democracy and our constituents, local news really does matter.

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[Kelvin Hopkins (Luton North) (Lab)]

It is a great pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Nuttall. I will not speak for long, because I know that others wish to speak.

I support the National Union of Journalists in its campaign. I am a member of the NUJ parliamentary group and, as a strong trade unionist, I think it is important to support it. I am concerned about the suffering of many NUJ members who have lost their jobs or the possibility of career advancement due to the decline of local newspapers, but I am equally concerned about the decline and loss of local news outlets and reporting. I am amazed by what the hon. Member for Castle Point (Rebecca Harris) said. In my town, which has 200,000 people, newspapers have declined, been squeezed and disappeared. They are not all gone, but they have certainly declined dramatically over a long period.

I was first a councillor in 1972, which makes me quite elderly. I remember those days well. It was typical for the local newspapers to send reporters along to council committees. I would be chairing a committee, and there would often be journalists there from multiple competing newspapers. I knew them well. They were often highly skilled and knew their politics. I tried to ingratiate myself with them occasionally by saying nice things about them, but they said, “Don’t trust us. We’re all just the same.” It was a good, humorous, robust relationship with high-quality journalists who saw a future for themselves in journalism. One of them was Larry Elliott, who started at the local evening paper that we had in those days and went on to become economics editor at The Guardian. Not everybody reads The Guardian, but Larry Elliott, a very fine journalist, started his days at the Luton Evening Post.

Those were the career possibilities for journalists in those days. I suspect it is not like that anymore. However, local democracy is what I am really concerned about. It is important to have newspapers with different owners in the same town, so that they compete with each other. They are more truthful and accurate and try harder to get stories right if they know that another newspaper is covering the same issue.

Interestingly, all those years ago, we had an evening newspaper, which was very good, a weekly paid-for newspaper and a weekly free newspaper. The weekly free newspaper was owned by a wealthy proprietor who happened to be a member of the Labour party. I am not saying that our newspapers should have a political bias, but it was interesting. He was not just a token member—I do not want to upset my colleagues in the party—but leaned to the left as well, so we had a lot in common. Having a left-wing millionaire proprietor of a giveaway newspaper was an interesting experience. We got a genuine spread of opinion across the town. Democratic views were expressly, which was healthy.

That has changed. The free Sunday newspaper recently merged to become Bedfordshire-wide, with hardly any Luton coverage at all. We have a paid-for newspaper, but even there, the number of journalists has been squeezed and squeezed, so we do not get as much in the way of reporting. As my hon. Friend the Member for Bishop Auckland (Helen Goodman) said in her excellent opening speech, there is a small amount of local news surrounded by national articles and massive amounts of advertising.

During the first 15 or so years of my time in this place, every five weeks, local MPs—Conservative and Labour—were given a column to themselves. That is all gone—doubtless the newspapers have no time to sub-edit our articles, or whatever they do—and local democracy has suffered tremendously from the narrowing of news. Fortunately, we have an excellent local BBC news station and very good local radio.

I support the NUJ in its campaign to save local newspapers. We have heard a summary of its survey, but I thought I would quote in full what Séamus Dooley, the NUJ acting general secretary, said at the launch of the report this week:

“Journalism is a pillar of democracy and this survey should be of major concern to anyone who cares about local, regional or national government. The stark decline in journalism is a direct result of disinvestment in editorial resources. This survey points to a deep crisis in local and regional news provision. There is an urgent need for government and media organisations to halt that decline, to examine ways of developing sustainable media business models operating in the interests of democracy and the public interest. The price of a continuous decline is too high for citizens to pay.”

That says what we need to hear today and I hope the Minister takes note. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Bishop Auckland on launching this debate, and other Members who have spoken for the fine speeches that we have heard, all of which have been interesting. I have never been a journalist myself, although I used to write a 1,000-word article every month for the Socialist Campaign Group News. It did not have wide circulation, but some of us, including the leader of our party, have been regular columnists for it. I have done journalism in a sense, but I was not an NUJ member, and the paper circulated among people with my opinions.

I have said what I came to say. I hope that the Government take note; that the decline in local news coverage and local newspapers is arrested; and that they will flower again in future.

--- Later in debate ---

[Kelvin Hopkins]

In my early life in politics, reporters went out and met people, spoke to them and interviewed them at length. They got to know the local politicians, the local community and the local areas; they were really in touch with the local community, and they were better for it.

[Rachael Maskell]

My hon. Friend makes an excellent point. That is exactly what journalists want—to be the people who are uncovering the stories, building the relationships and really getting that personal touch into their stories—but the limitations that are now placed on them are curbing their ability to do those things.

We are also seeing a reduction in the number of photographers—a profession that has not yet been mentioned today. The York Press, which would once have had six, seven or eight photographers, now has only one professional photographer, with others freelancing. A photograph tells a story, and there is an art in being able to get that photograph well. We are often requested to send in a photograph, so readers get the typical line-up instead of the creative story that a photographer can provide. We need to remember the essential role that photographers play and the pressure that they, too, are under when they contribute their skills to produce a paper.

We need to think about what we want for the future of our papers. We can all agree that the corporate ownership model has not delivered the local democratisation of news, and that we need to rethink it. That is why an inquiry would be so timely: it would ensure that we could look at all the options that are now open to local papers.

I have had some discussions about what a co-operative model looks like. I both agree and disagree with my hon. Friend the Member for Bishop Auckland (Helen Goodman); I think it is too late to start looking at that kind of model when a paper is failing. We need to look at it now. We need to build local co-operation from the community into papers, to ensure that there is a local eye on what is happening, not just a distant editor doing their best, possibly over a number of publications, or even just their own paper, but who is not based in the local community.

How do we bring that local voice right into the workings of a paper today? We need to raise the voices of journalists, the people working day and night on our papers, to ensure that they have real input into the shape and the future of not only their own publication but their industry, to make sure that they can use their professionalism in determining what a real community paper looks like.

I certainly support suggestions about hypothecated taxation being a means of supporting the industry in the future, ensuring that there is a real wall between content and income sources but ensuring that papers receive the injection of income that is obviously needed to keep alive the vital democracy that they provide.

We face the challenges that I have set out and we must ensure that we respond to them, because these papers and in particular their journalists, who are at the frontline, are looking to us. At the moment they are just part of the wider corporate picture, and if the money is not returned to these corporate giants, which we have heard monopolise the sector, we could lose a real element of our social democracy and we will regret that when it is gone.

I thank the NUJ for raising this issue with Members of Parliament, I thank the Backbench Business Committee for recognising the urgent need for this debate, and I ask the Minister to ensure that there is a proper inquiry into what is happening now to our local media, particularly our local print media, so that we can sustain the sector and put a proper model in place for the future.

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[Kevin Brennan (Cardiff West) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Nuttall. It is also a pleasure to sum up for Her Majesty’s official Opposition.

I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Bishop Auckland (Helen Goodman) on her speech and on persuading the Backbench Business Committee—I thank it, too—with other colleagues to grant this debate. She made an extremely passionate case for local media. Her proposal about the importance of treating local media as a community asset was echoed by others. She also talked about models and ways that we can take that forward in the future.

The hon. Member for Colne Valley (Jason McCartney) told us about his career as a local journalist. I am surprised he did not get a Pulitzer prize for his reporting of the football in Bishop Auckland, but he made some sensible suggestions on the way forward for local media, and his speech will bear careful study by the Minister following the debate.

We also had a very good speech from the hon. Member for Dwyfor Meirionnydd (Liz Saville Roberts). She listed Welsh language titles during the course of her speech. Fortunately for Hansard reporters, the Welsh language is highly phonetic, unlike the English language, so they will have no problem whatever in spelling all the names of the publications she mentioned in the course of her speech.

We also had a very good speech from the hon. Member for Castle Point (Rebecca Harris), who said how blessed she was with the richness of local media provision in her constituency. She castigated the local press for their accurate reporting of age, and I think we all had a tinge of sympathy with that pertinent point.

My hon. Friend the Member for Luton North (Kelvin Hopkins) made a strong case for local papers and told us about his column in a socialist publication. It did not sound like it had a mass circulation, but he did have the consolation that he was trying to form a mass movement.

[Kelvin Hopkins]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. The paper did not have a mass circulation. It had a rather limited circulation, but it was not a commercial paper, so it was not in any way undermining journals across the country.

[Kevin Brennan]

I am sure the press barons of this country are mightily relieved to hear that.

My hon. Friend the Member for York Central (Rachael Maskell) spoke with a great deal of wisdom about the role local media can play in local emergencies. She described how in the floods, the local media were a very important public service and not just reporting organisations. She was also the first Member today to mention the importance of photographers. She emphasised the value of adopting a co-operative model for local media not just when they get into trouble, but before that so that it is not just a response to a crisis. I thought that was an interesting point.

The hon. Member for Ayr, Carrick and Cumnock (Corri Wilson) expressed concerns about the monopoly of media ownership, about which she made some good points. Speaking from the Scottish National party Front Bench, the hon. Member for Motherwell and Wishaw (Marion Fellows) spoke about the “Scottish Six”, BBC funding and the new channel that will be on the BBC in Scotland. I am on record being highly critical of the amount of money given to Wales in that same announcement. Scotland got £20 million and Wales should have got £12 million, but we only got £8 million. Additional investment is nevertheless important. She also mentioned Gaelic language provision. I am an avid watcher of BBC Alba when it covers the Guinness Pro12 rugby matches. Despite the commentary being in Gaelic, I think I can pick up enough of it to understand what is going on. She made a useful contribution to the debate.

I was quite surprised that we were not joined by the right hon. Member for Tatton (Mr Osborne) this afternoon.

[Kevin Brennan]

Perhaps he is too busy, as the hon. Member for Colne Valley says—we know that he has many jobs that he has to perform. I understood that the right hon. Gentleman’s purpose in taking the editorship of the Evening Standard was to bring that experience from outside the Chamber into Parliament. I would have thought that this afternoon’s debate might have afforded an appropriate opportunity for him to allow us the benefit of his wisdom and knowledge on this subject.

[Kelvin Hopkins]

My hon. Friend is making a very good point. I wonder if he might inquire if the right hon. Gentleman has joined the NUJ.

[Kevin Brennan]

I think it is more likely that he has bought the NUJ rather than joined it, having looked at his entry in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests. Nevertheless, we miss him. I hope that the Minister, who I know is very friendly with the right hon. Gentleman, will send him our warm regards and our regret that he was unable to join us. I am sure he is very fruitfully engaged elsewhere, rather than being here in this debate in Westminster Hall this afternoon in our House of Commons.

I should also thank the Minister for kindly gracing us with his presence, albeit slightly late. I am sure there was a very good reason why he was not able to be here. As a man known for his humility, I am sure he will explain that to the Chamber when he gets up to address us after I sit down.

[Mike Gapes in the Chair]

Since other Members have given us the benefit of their experience, I will do the same. I started off after university as a news editor of a local community paper in my home town of Cwmbran. It was a fairly humble publication called Cwmbran Checkpoint, but nevertheless we did a lot of journalism of the kind that Members have talked about—reporting on local council meetings, holding the local council to account and publishing stories of local interest.

Of course, the media have been transformed in the 30 or so years since I performed that humble role—much more humble than that of the right hon. Member for Tatton, obviously. We had golf ball typewriters, we laid out the text using wax rollers and we had Letraset to make headlines. It was very different back then in the analogue world—the Minister is far too young to know anything about that, but he can read about it in the history books. It was a very different world than we have now. Hon. Members have rightly pointed out that the technological revolution that has taken place over the last few decades has transformed media and had a big impact on local media in particular.

We have all agreed this afternoon that regional and local media are crucial to the strength of our communities and the health of our democracy. It is, therefore, a pleasure to speak in this debate in the week celebrating Local News Matters. Whether on paper or on screen, local news has a wide readership, reaching 40 million people a week. People continue to trust local journalists, perhaps a bit more than they trust national journalists. In some ways, perhaps there is an analogy with politics: people are generally in favour of their local MP but not necessarily in favour of politicians in general. The same impact is seen sometimes in local journalism.

I am sure that every hon. Member—we have heard from many this afternoon—is able to name local papers, news websites, radio stations and even, these days, local TV stations in their constituencies that help create a sense of local pride and identity, and inform residents about local issues. In my city of Cardiff, there are many outlets, including Radio Cardiff, Wales Online, the Western Mail and the South Wales Echo, not to mention the local BBC productions and Welsh-language publications such as Y Dinesydd, all of which make an important contribution at a local level.

However, as we have heard, research by the Press Gazette suggests that local and regional news provision is reducing. Since 2005, 200 newspapers have ceased circulation and the number of journalists has more than halved. We can all wax lyrical about our constituency’s local news provision and its contribution to our local communities, but the reason we are having this debate is that the future of those outlets is far from secure. There are fewer local papers, fewer local journalists and fewer local editorial teams, being run by an ever smaller number of conglomerates. As we have heard in the debate, about three quarters of the local press is owned by a mere four companies.

It is not just about the number of papers and reporters. There is also the issue of independence and the resources available to journalists and editors to hold authorities to account at a local level. Research by Cardiff University that followed the trends in local journalism in Port Talbot from 1970 to 2015 found that over time, as hon. Members have mentioned, fewer and fewer stories were informed by journalists attending meetings in person, while the use of managed media sources, such as press releases, rose to more than 50%. Journalists increasingly quoted high status sources, with less input from members of the public. Naturally, that affects the ability of local media to scrutinise those who make decisions about their communities.

I do not think anyone is suggesting that we can turn the clock back to the days when I and others started out—to an analogue age when local newspapers were pretty much the only source of local information. Modern technology, starting a long time ago with TV and radio and now with online media sources, social media and so on, offers huge opportunities for the democratisation of news and the diversification of views, but also for the potential proliferation of fake news, as hon. Members have mentioned. Even though we cannot turn the clock back, we need to ensure that current and future technological developments are working to benefit everyone.

Local and regional news provision is transferring from one format to another, but local and regional services on TV and radio need support too. The National Union of Journalists has been mentioned several times in the debate. It undertook a survey of the closures of BBC district offices covering local TV and radio. I would like to share the results of that with the House today. Pointing out that the BBC is due to announce another round of cuts to the regions in the near future of perhaps £15 million out of a budget of £150 million, the survey’s results show that, over the past 10 years, more than 20 district offices have closed, and that, once the district office closes, the designated reporter is often close to follow. In many towns, the nearest BBC reporter is now over an hour’s drive away, which makes localised news coverage increasingly difficult.

For example, 10 years ago, BBC Radio Gloucestershire had three reporters: one for Gloucester and Forest of Dean, one for Cheltenham and Tewkesbury and another for Stroud and the Cotswolds. Now, only one reporter covers all six constituencies in that area, and the post has been vacant since the end of September. There is no longer a day reporter covering drive-time stories. Instead, there is only an early reporter working from a satellite car for the breakfast show and a late reporter covering stories for the next day. Likewise, 10 years ago in Lancashire, there were four district studios. Now there is only one, and only two full-time and two part-time reporters. The Newcastle, Durham, and Sunderland offices all closed in 2011, as I am sure my hon. Friend the Member for Bishop Auckland is fully aware.

News services that have moved or begun online often have issues too. Companies are struggling to replace lost print revenue with new profits generated online. A News Media Association survey found that 81% of media organisations’ revenue comes from print readership and only 12% from digital. However, the industry continues to close its newspapers in favour of digital formats. When one visits a modern local newsroom, as I am sure many hon. Members here today have done, one is struck by the extent to which stories and deadlines are driven by online clicks, with advertising revenue related to those trends. That sparks fear of a genuine danger that clickbait journalism will be encouraged and will replace real local reporting. It would be a genuine shame if all our local news outlets eventually mirrored the Mail Online sidebar of shame in their approach to reporting. That is the fear and the potential danger of that approach.

Be it in print or on screen, the trends that I and others have outlined are of course long term and have been developing over decades. I mentioned the NUJ’s survey of the closure of BBC district offices. Other public service broadcasters are also crucial to regional and local news. The Welsh language TV channel, S4C—Sianel Pedwar Cymru—focuses on Welsh issues and consistently features local news and views from around the country. Again, rather than wholeheartedly supporting the channel, the Government’s policies are creating uncertainty about its future. In my letter to the Minister on St David’s day, I asked the Government at least to freeze S4C’s funding until the independent review of the channel is completed, and to announce the review’s terms of reference. Instead, they have offered only a six-month freeze and further talks mid-year, and they still have not launched the review. I am afraid the UK Government are dragging their feet on setting up the review, and we want to know why. S4C and Welsh audiences deserve better.

This gives me the opportunity the right to put the Minister right on his somewhat ludicrous rewriting of the history of the establishment of S4C, which we have heard him rehearse several times in the Chamber recently. Yes, it was established under Mrs Thatcher’s Government, but only after a long and bitter campaign by Labour and Plaid Cymru, which forced them to withdraw proposals that would have breached their own manifesto.