Local TV ‘good for communities’

local television could be a “glue that holds the community together”, UK Culture Secretary Jeremy Hunt said yesterday, as he discussed plans for new channels.

He said there was “palpable enthusiasm” for the idea the further you got from London.

Mr Hunt last month earmarked 65 towns and cities as possible locations for the new services, nine of them in Scotland.

Television stations in Tayside and Helensburgh, Dunbartonshire, are among those to have voiced interest in the scheme so far.

Speaking at a summit in Glasgow, Mr Hunt said the idea had much to offer the country. “I’m a localist,” he said.

“I think that the UK is far too centralised and would solve far more of its problems if we harnessed the ideas of people in their own communities and gave them more power to have effective local media to scrutinise local politicians.

“Canadian cities the size of Glasgow have profitable local TV stations and even a town the size of Fort William has a TV station that’s not profitable but is run by volunteers.

“It’s the glue that holds the community together.”

He said the cost of running a TV station would, for the first time, be cheaper than running a local newspaper, at an estimated £500,000, because the government was making part of the transmission spectrum available “pretty much free of charge”.

The spectrum covers about 60 per cent of the UK population, but the government hopes to roll out superfast broadband to 90 per cent of people in the UK by 2015, Mr Hunt said.