What is a coalition likely to mean for UK media policy?

Posted by Julia Glotz Thursday, May 13th, 2010

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Media policy was never likely to feature particularly highly on the new government’s “to do” list and the emergence this week of the UK’s first coalition government since the Second World War is unlikely to lead to its being given any greater priority. Indeed, it does not feature at all (bar pledges to review libel laws and the ending of storage of Internet and e-mail records without good reason) in the seven-page coalition agreement published yesterday.

With the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats moving into office together, the UK media industry is getting not one but two largely unknown quantities bundled together into a combination whose effects are still difficult to gauge. There will be a rush to get a handle on what policy initiatives would emerge from a Conservative media policy under the new culture secretary, Jeremy Hunt, that is tempered by the Liberal Democrat presence in government.

It will be particularly interesting to observe what happens to some headline Tory policies about deregulating the UK media industry – relaxing rules on cross-media ownership, scrapping the Contract Rights Renewal (CRR) mechanism that restricts how ITV can sell advertising time on its main channel and curtailing the role of communications regulator Ofcom.

Received opinion suggests that the Liberal Democrats are likely to put a brake on any attempts towards radical deregulation and would be sceptical about a large-scale transfer of powers from Ofcom to the new Department of Culture, Olympics, Media and Sport. The regulator’s decision to impose a wholesale must-offer obligation on BSkyB is unlikely to come under pressure under any scenario – suggestions that a Tory government would intervene on that decision belong to the realm of conspiracy theorists.

For the BBC, the influence of the Liberal Democrats should mean that the Corporation can breathe a little more easily than might have been likely under a majority Conservative government. Cuts to core areas of the BBC do not appear to be something that the Liberal Democrats would easily countenance. But the BBC Trust – the Corporation’s governing body, about whose viability both the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats have expressed doubts – seems unlikely to survive for long.

One interesting point will be what happens to the Digital Economy Act which was controversially rushed through during the “wash-up” period of the last parliament. Both parties voiced concerns about the Labour government’s proposals and the way the legislation was rushed through to the statute books. But while Liberal Democrat leader (now the UK’s new deputy prime minister) Nick Clegg vowed to repeal it only a few weeks ago, Tory leader and prime minister David Cameron warned that repealing the Act would constitute an “unacceptable setback to the important measures it contains”.

A “Great Repeal Bill” of swathes of Labour legislation is expected; the question will be whether such a measure would erase all, some or none of the Digital Economy Act.