Stewart Purvis Proposes Key Changes For New Communications Act

Former Ofcom partner and ITN CEO Stewart Purvis CBE has called for quick action on ITV, a reversal of European regulation and relaxation of advertising and impartiality rules, in a speech delivered for the RTS Fleming Memorial Lecture 2010.
Entitled Calling Time on Analogue Regulation - an agenda for the next Communications Act, the lecture provided detailed proposals for the next Communications Act. Purvis, the Professor of Journalism at City University London, said that the polite game of poker ITV is playing with the Government will need to come to an end if the Government is going to deliver its very ambitious timetable for local television set out in the DCMS business plan this week."
Purvis proposed: "The ITV licensees should be invited to sign up for a clearly defined pattern of content for the nations and regions for ten years with no annual renegotiation downwards and in return the licences will be rolled over."
He continued: "If Britain doesn't want that kind of deal or ITV won't agree to it, then the only logical next step is to review the use of that spectrum and see if other interested parties have a better idea about how public value can be realised. I suspect that iTV will find it hard to take that risk."
Discussing European legislation, Purvis said Britain should "stop Europe taking us any further down the road to more statutory regulation" and should "pull back" from where it has gone too far already. He went on to argue that the UK should try to reverse recent trends in European directives and release from regulation the parts where our media has been "forced into it", and suggested some "sunset clauses" on existing regulations.
When discussing advertising, Purvis called into question the future of the European directive which defines the amount of TV advertising allowed in each hour. He proposed that local TV should experiment with a different system for advertising minuteage and allow "sponsorship around but not inside news programmes on local TV", making reference to PBS in the US.
Describing the "best way forward" on impartiality, Purvis said local television and radio "should be allowed to operate a self-regulatory model perhaps using a version of the PCC code which requires accuracy but not impartiality".
Despite proposing statutory regulation should remain for incitement to crime, racial hatred, the protection of children and unwinnable competitions, he controversially said that complaints about lesser "harm and offence", about fairness and privacy from viewers, could be moved from Ofcom and instead handled by a self-regulatory body.
Past speakers at the RTS Fleming Memorial Lecture have included John Birt, Richard Attenborough, Howard Stringer, George Russell, Trevor Phillips, Patricia Hodgson, Lord Currie and Sir Michael Lyons. This year's lecture took place at the Cavendish Conference Centre, London, on Thursday November 11.
(KMcA)