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Mr. MacShane: Does the Minister accept that CBI and other surveys tend to cover the more advanced and stable British firms, but the problem arises in the great mass of firms that are not surveyed, in which parental leave is not part of contractual relationships? In particular, how does he address the problem of moving from good will or lack of it on the part of the employer to giving the employee the right to assert parental leave if he or she needs it?
Mr. Taylor: Maternity leave is provided for in law. I was intending to show in that passage of my speech that there is an increasing trend towards paternity leave schemes, but they are voluntary. The Government believe that they should be developed on a voluntary basis at present.
An article published this October by Industrial Relations Services states that the lack of legislation in these matters
I welcome that, and I dare say that the hon. Gentleman does, too.
We certainly do not want that success to be put in jeopardy by possibly well-meaning, but potentially calamitous, interference from Brussels. The European agreement on parental leave is likely to become another piece of burdensome and unnecessary European legislation.
When that happens, many British businesses will breathe a sigh of relief that the United Kingdom has opted out of the social chapter and its damaging consequences for jobs and the economy, just as they did when we blocked the proposed directive on parental leave last year.
That directive would have had truly horrendous implications for employers in the United Kingdom and across the Community. It would have forced employers to give employees at least three months' leave following the birth or adoption of a child. It would also have stipulated minimum leave entitlements for other family reasons.
Mr. Taylor:
The hon. Gentleman may favour it, but the proposed directive could have meant an annual bill of
£200 million for British firms--expenditure that many of them could ill afford. In his previous intervention, the hon. Gentleman asked me whether the surveys had reached smaller firms. Those smaller firms would bear the brunt of the £200 million that they could ill afford.
The new agreement is not much better, except in one important respect: it will not apply in the United Kingdom. It means that we are free to continue the existing voluntary approach that is delivering what workers want and what businesses can afford, rather than what people in Brussels or Opposition Members think they should have.
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,
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.
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:
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:
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
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:
"has not diminished the incidence, scope and growth of contractual agreements providing such arrangements in this country. Indeed, there is increasing evidence that the incidence of paternity leave, in particular, is growing in the United Kingdom."
"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."
"we intend to fund the additional transmitter out of next year's capital budget",
"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"--
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