Memorandum submitted by UKRD Group
There is a temptation to set about providing
copious quantities of written material to justify what was, for
us, a difficult decision. To be the first commercial radio operator
to return a licence to the regulator is not necessarily where
any operator would wish to be! However, I will simply make my
point as briefly and as succinctly as I can.
The station, based out of Stroud in Gloucestershire,
was a small station with a low audience in a relatively unimpressive
commercial marketplace within which to operate. Quite simply,
the regulatory regime which wraps itself around these types of
stations and in respect to Stroud, this one particularly, is so
far out of date and out of touch with the realities of the commercial
marketplace as to beggar belief.
In spite of our open, honest and fulsome engagement
with Ofcom, and our attempts to seek relaxations spread across
nearly two years of negotiations and discussions, the inflexibility
and wholly inappropriate application of content and infrastructural
restrictions lead directly to the closure of this station. In
short, it is Ofcom and its refusal to manage its regulatory regime
in accordance with changing market and commercial conditions that
forced UKRD to close this radio station.
The station had never made a profit, had a poor
signal resulting from low power and difficult topography and suffered
from inappropriate levels of content control and what was, in
essence, "input" regulation as opposed to "output"
regulation.
The key to the stations survival was to co-locate
with its close neighbour (about fifteen miles) in the town of
Cheltenham. We sought to simulcast the core and bulk of the stations
service but confirmed out intention to INCREASE the levels of
local news and directly relevant Stroud output. So, we were in
effect upping the local nature of the output to the listeners
in the Stroud area beyond what it actually was at the time of
our request; though it was to be delivered from just outside the
stations licence area. This was unacceptable to the regulator
which insisted that we maintain split programming and all the
costs that involves, though we could co-locate.
This illogical decision meant that the station
was doomed to commercial failure and, as a result, we returned
the licence to the regulator, having no other choice. A commercial
radio group is just that, commercial! We are not in the privileged
position of the BBC and cannot rely upon the public purse to sustain
our operation, however inefficient.
The regulatory regime which operates in the
UK is directly responsible for the closure of this radio station
and I was not in the least bit surprised to read of a second licence
being returned only a little while ago and a few months after
we took our decision. I am firmly of the view that unless there
is a radical rethink around this whole area, there are potentially
dozens of stations which face the same fate.
I do not travel in much hope of radical change
as it appears that there is what I best describe as being an "embedded
culture of management and control" at Ofcom which shows little
sign of being adapted to acknowledge the reality of the commercial
environment we face and in which we have to operate.
March 2007
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