TEMPLATE

Celtic Radio and TV Festival
Truro: 31 March 2001

Tony Stoller, Chief Executive of the Radio Authority

ACCESS RADIO: THE NEXT STEPS

It is a great pleasure for me to be here in Truro, and a considerable privilege to be invited to address you this morning. I can make no claims myself to being a Celt, but I am a radio enthusiast, which I hope establishes some kinship between us. As Glendower almost said about Harry of Monmouth, not all the water of Wye can wash that passion out of me.

I also share with Petroc Trelawny the great benefit of having looked at radio from more than one viewpoint. Petroc has crossed the floor between Classic FM and Radio 3 (which locally, I gather, is rather like going from Land’s End to St Ives). I have been successively a listener, a regulator, a lobbyist, a radio station manager and then, after a spell as a shopkeeper, back to being a regulator again; and of course, still a listener.

So this is a rather special opportunity for me. Over the past nine months, the Radio Authority has been pressing Government to introduce what we have called ‘Access Radio’, something new which can make a significant addition to the medium, and to the involvement of people with radio. This has been an exciting prospect, and for a regulator to be the one suggesting such a radical move is a bold step. Janet Anderson will have indicated to you on Thursday that the Government is keen to see this new tier of radio established. What I want to do today is to sketch for you the background to Access Radio, ‘the story so far’ as they used to say in drama serials, and to outline what are likely to be the next steps towards its introduction.

There have been a number of milestone along the 40 year road which brings us to this point. The first local radio of the modern era was attempted by the BBC, as a VHF-only experiment in the late 1960s. Independent Local Radio (ILR) itself began in 1973, and the early network of just nineteen stations included as a matter of policy services for smaller areas even though many of the major centres of population remained unserved. Thus there were ILR stations in Swansea and in Plymouth, both respectably Celtic, and even in Reading which is perhaps less so, but has a place in my heart as I ran it between 1981 and 1984. It was orthodox belief in those days that stations of this size were as small as could possibly be sustained. Indeed, the response of the regulator of the time, the Independent Broadcasting Authority (IBA), to the Annan Report of 1977, which proposed more, smaller ILR franchises, was to consider a system of ‘negative rental’, effectively cross-subsidising smaller service such as Moray Firth in Inverness from the still pretty inadequate earnings of the larger ILRs.

In the mid 1980s, the Home Office (which was then responsible for broadcasting) attempted a community radio experiment with disastrous results for all concerned. A huge rush of applications, in some cases poorly-considered, and an uncertain administrative regime, led to its abandonment and could have set back the cause of small-scale radio indefinitely.

However, the radio arm of the IBA, already striving for separate identity from the restrictions of television thinking, was prompted to analyse the possibility for smaller-scale ILR services. When the Radio Authority was established in 1991, and there was a regulatory and licensing body able to seek radio solutions to radio problems, that idea was quickly given expression. During the ten year from the start of the Authority to the end of 2000, we have licensed 136 new services, of which 47 have been for coverage of 100,000 adults or fewer.

These initiatives, which are now a central part of Radio Authority licensing policy, have made possible stations right across the Celtic homelands of the UK. It would be invidious for me to name my own favourites, but as examples of the range of stations I have seen at first hand, here in South West England I have been able to visit Pirate Radio yesterday in Redruth. My journeys have taken me to Radio Ceredigion in Aberystwyth, to Nevis Radio in Fort William, to NECR in Inverurie and most recently to the Q stations in Derry and Coleraine. I do not presume to assert that all these are Celtic stations; but they most certainly are services wholly apart from the metropolitan bias of so much of the UK media, and are admirable for that reason, as well as, I am sure, many others.

The Radio Authority also introduced a new concept in 1991, as novel and exciting then as we hope Access Radio will be now. That was the Restricted Service Licence, or RSL. The RSLs grew out of the old Home Office special events licence, but the Authority expanded and developed the concept of special events and trial services to the point that nowadays there are between 400 and 500 of these short-term RSLs every year. As well as the service they provide locally, and the stimulant they offer to the establishment of permanent services, short term RSLs have given a huge range of people the chance to be involved with the media, and to do radio. We estimate that between 20,000 and 30,000 people every year participate in these RSLs. They are something which all of us at the Radio Authority are very proud of, and which – incidentally – we are determined should continue in any new regime.

We have gone further that just short-term RSLs, by stretching the powers given to us in the Broadcasting Acts just about as far as we think they will go without snapping! There are now nearly a hundred long term RSLs, serving defined institutions, usually with transient populations. These include student and hospital radio stations, and some even more surprising. I am sure that it will gladden the hearts of a group dedicated to the survival and flourishing of the diversity of cultures within the UK to know that there is now a long-term RSL broadcasting substantially in Nepalese; to the Gurkha garrison in Folkestone in Kent.

So far, you might say, so good. But we were not prepared to rest on these achievements, without examining what else might be done. Ahead of the publication of an expected Government White Paper last year, the Radio Authority embarked upon a review of all the work which we do, and the nature of radio licensing and regulation. As part of that, we looked again at what more could be done to involve people with the, what else radio could provide, and here and there what it was no longer doing. We recognised that with the retrenchment of BBC Radio and the consolidation of ILR as commercial radio, there was a gap in precisely that type of small-scale, innovative, unusual and perhaps even subversive radio which had in the past provided the medium with so much of its energy. We acknowledged that the growth of the Internet would stimulate people to look again at what could be offered to communities, but that the limitations of telephony-delivered services could then revive interest in free-to-air platforms.

In June of last year, therefore, we published "Radio Regulation for the 21^st Century", a submission to Government ahead of the anticipated White Paper. In that we set out our belief that

"the time has come to take the radical step of establishing a new third sector of non-commercial private radio."

"The Authority's vision is of a new approach to harnessing the individuality and potential of non-commercial radio, and of using radio to assist in the broader aspects of education, social inclusion and social experimentation…The purpose is to enable public access to radio in a new and imaginative way."

We recommended that a separate and new structure should be put in place to facilitate "Access Radio", as we dubbed it, and that Government should also establish a Radio Fund to provide at least start-up funding for new services.

We waited keenly to know whether Government would back Access Radio, and if so on what terms. The White Paper published in December gave us encouragement, but only some of the answers. It said that the Government was seeking "views on extending the diversity of radio service through 'Access Radio'", and in particular "whether the benefits of community radio would justify greater public intervention".

The White Paper set out the possible benefits of introducing Access Radio:

"very local community based radio can help increase active community involvement, and local educational and social inclusion projects;
"small radio stations can provide a nursery for the next generation of radio broadcasters – providing hands-on training and experience; and
"such stations can also satisfy the demand for access to broadcasting resources from specific communities, whether based on locality, ethnic or cultural background or other common interests."

The last point is one of the reasons I am here today.

To move matters ahead, we therefore at once set about crystallising the debate, by organising a seminar on Access Radio, which took place in London on 12 February. I can see some people here who attended, and I hope you will agree with me – although you may not have shared my sense of pleasant surprise – that this produced a remarkable level of agreement. With only a few dissenting voices, it became clear that there was a widespread feeling the Access Radio was an idea whose time had come; that it should comprise a separate tier of radio licences; that it would need to rely on such broadcast platforms as could be found, rather than on telephony delivery, at least for the early years, and that would necessarily mean making the best use of AM to supplement the painfully scarce FM frequency resources; that it would need to be sustained by mixed funding with, therefore, some restrictions on the nature and extent of commercial revenues; and that it would require its own, statute-based administrative regime, in order to keep it distinct from commercial radio.

With this in mind, the Radio Authority therefore re-inforced to Government our recommendations that Access Radio should be established as part of the new regime for the regulation of media and telecommunications in the new Communications legislation, a submission we published on 2^nd March. We are hopeful from statements made by Chris Smith and Janet Anderson, including in the House, that the basic argument is now won, and that the Communications Bill when it is published will include provision for Access Radio.

In that submission, we also repeated our proposal that, once Government had indicated its intention to make Access Radio possible in the medium term, we should get ahead in the short term to run a series of pilot experiments. I am delighted to say that we received a letter this week from Government giving us the go-ahead for those pilots.

What we want to achieve is to test the various models, technical platforms and administrative approaches, in order to make sure that, just as soon at the new legislation takes effect, the regulatory body (probably a new OFCOM rather than the Radio Authority) has done all the testing it needs in order to get ahead straight away with the new services. To do that, we need to be sure that the pilots embrace a wide enough range of approaches, covering different parts of the UK and varied types of area socially, in order to allow an all-embracing regime to be established. I will set out in a moment what principles we might adopt in conducting these experiments.

But first let me be clear what we are not able to do. The Access Radio pilots are not a way of jumping the gun on the new legislation. We are not trying to get permanent new services on air in the guise of experiments. The selection of localities and styles of service must be primarily to inform the future, not to pre-judge it. Government has made it clear that we cannot anticipate the new legislation, so we will have to work within the constraints of the existing Broadcasting Acts. We must also, at all costs, avoid the mistakes of the experiments of the mid 1980s. We will not be forgiven if over-enthusiasm and an uncontrolled rush, followed by failure, jeopardises what could be the last chance to give effect to the aspirations we all have for the third-tier of radio, and what it can achieve for our communities.

So the pilots need to be framed carefully and measurably. I suggest, although this is not yet settled Radio Authority policy, that they might be guided by the following nine principles:

First, the pilots need to replicate as far as possible the approach, patterns and structures which we presently anticipate will govern permanent Access Radio. They should be operated as not-for-profit services, in defined neighbourhoods, with clear public service content remits;
Second, these experiments should, as far as possible, contain examples of the types of socially-regenerative and educational links, which offer so much potential, and of training and development of local community capacity;
Third, the pilots should cover as wide a range as is practical of the different types of locality – urban and rural, socially successful and socially disadvantaged, and reflecting the diversity of the Home Countries – without becoming so numerous as to get out of hand;
Fourth, at least some of the services should be aimed at communities of interest within localities, not just all-embracing neighbourhood services, with the intention of establishing their role in serving minority groups and sustaining minority linguistic cultures;
Fifth, the pilots should, in so far as the current legislation allows, experiment with a range of funding models, both to examine their implications for Access Radio and to inform OFCOM as to how it should take account of the local broadcasting ecology in deciding how to protect existing small-scale services from unsustainable levels of competition;
Sixth, the regulations and administrative regime for the pilots should be modelled upon what we anticipate will be the eventual OFCOM arrangements, so that these can be tested and ‘de-bugged’ before they become a national standard;
Seventh, the licences for the pilot will have to be for a fixed term. That will pose problems when they near their end, because they will hopefully have attracted support from listeners, and we all need to give further thought to the issues surrounding renewal of licences, but unless we are clear from the beginning that these are finite services designed to test a concept we run the risk of making them just 'second class ILRs', and that would never do
Eighth, the licensing of Access Radio pilots must not interfere with the continued award of RSLs. The RSL regime is established and successful, and it must not be jeopardised by the experiment, however compelling this innovative idea will be for us all;
And ninth, the pilots themselves and the administrative and licensing regime must be monitored and researched formally, in order to provide a sound basis for their evaluation and for the proposals for the permanent arrangements which will follow.

I expect there to be some debate and discussion about these principles, including here this morning, so I will not be dogmatic about the regime which will finally be adopted for the pilots. However, from the criteria I have outlined, certain results would flow. This all suggests rather fewer than a dozen pilots; enough to provide range and evidence, but not so many as to become unwieldy to administer or too numerous to monitor and evaluate effectively. That will in turn require some careful selection, not least so that each service can meet more than one of the separate criteria, and here and there for the Authority to take some hard decisions.

My guess is that the Authority is unlikely to want to open up the process of selecting pilots to unlimited application, and to run a formal process of sifting and analysing applications. That would be effectively starting Access Radio here and now, rather than running experiments. It would be a huge administrative task, and take an unconscionable time, introducing delays we cannot afford. It would also not produce the range of monitorable experiments which are essential, as – inevitably – we will need to chose some experimental projects which are close to edge and risk failure, if we are genuinely to test the potential for this new tier. All of that leads to a conclusion that the Authority – advised I hope by an informed group reflecting the various interests in these experiments – will need to select the range of pilots based on available information rather than application.

Since the current legislation still applies, the pilots will need to find their own funding, from within the existing permitted categories, which might ideally include some provision for evaluation research. The Authority will set up, manage and fund the administration and licensing of the experiments. The Authority will use the same part of the legislation as for long term RSLs to facilitate licensing, and I hope that the expertise that Radio Authority staff have in this respect can be deployed in the administrative process.

The timescale is to a degree conditioned by the legislative timetable, which is not yet fully clear. My guess is that the relevant Bill may be before Parliament as early as the start of 2002, and this will mean that we must have at least preliminary indications of what tuning will be needed in the text of any Bill at that time. The definitive recommendations regarding the introduction of full-scale Access Radio will need to be available to OFCOM from its start, perhaps therefore the spring or summer of 2003. That all suggest that pilots of – let us say – one year’s duration, need to be running by at least the late autumn of this year, giving us only a few months to consult, investigate, design the administration, agree the evaluation processes and license the services. That would allow ‘progress reports’ to be made during the debates over the Communications Bill, and a full report and evaluation to be completed at or around the end of next year. Just!

None of this is easy. Much detail still needs to be settled, many outstanding issues have to be resolved. We need to avoid the frying pan of being too careful and traditionalist in our thinking, and the fire of over-enthusiasm and naivety. But it is exciting, to a level hardly felt since the early days of ILR. Then we had an idea which many people doubted would ever really worked, but which was sustained by the enthusiasm and belief of those who had faith in the concept of radio services, in local areas, for and by local people. ILR has moved on to become a major industry, and by common consent the media success story of the 1990s. Access Radio offers the Celtic communities and the nation at large the chance to try and match that during the coming decade. It is an outcome worth striving for.

Tony Stoller

Radio Authority

31 March 2001