Get real Ofcom, your light touch regulation isn't working

The public service broadcasting review exposes the regulator's failings

The trio of Ofcom grandees, who unveiled proposals allowing ITV to savage its regional news, were pretty snappy under fire at their press conference yesterday and you can see why.

They are trapped in a maze of contradictions and feeling pretty impotent.

They trumpet their mission in this public service broadcasting review, to recommend to government how quality can be maintained. But the reality is their influence is so limited that they fall back on the defence it's the system that is broken. And, in what sometimes seems like a displacement exercise, they propose future solutions.

But what about the system of regulation that allowed this to happen? As I sat in the press conference I thought back to Jocelyn Hay, the outgoing consumer champion, chair of the Voice of the Listener & Viewer who said bitterly in a recent Media Guardian interview that the public had been "hoodwinked" over assurances that the 2003 Communications Act would preserve the best of the old system.

Ofcom spells out that it has only limited scope to protect children's programmes in "the absence of a statutory basis to set quotas". I don't think this is what the public thought they were getting.

Let's get real and say light touch regulation hasn't worked very well in the global banking system, and it does not seem to be working very well for viewers in key media sectors either.

The unions, the NUJ and Bectu are rightly protesting about the £40m a year that ITV is going to excise from its budgets by cutting in the regions. Ofcom blustered about the evils of the old regime, which tried to micro manage, for example, by stipulating where local news stations were placed. But, frankly, that is the point.

We've swung from that (unfortunate) model to the current one in which Ofcom is virtually toothless, it has no powers to stop the cuts and, in addition, has precious little influence. ITV bluntly told the regulator it was making the £40m cuts, regardless.

So Ofcom, having actively facilitated the ITV merger back in 2003, can only judge after the fact when the jobs have gone.

The reorganisation, with news gathering hubs, enlarged regions - stretching from Penzance to Worcester for example - will also end distinct services for quite diverse heavily-populated areas such as the east and west Midlands. It sounds horribly familiar, like a macro version of the reductions that have so stymied local commercial radio and led to its decline.

The current system is far from perfect, but now it is heading to extinction. The cutback is also pretty crude in its pragmatic assumption that peak-time audiences are more important than the daytime ones who will be losing their regional news bulletins. What about older housebound people? What happens next time there are local floods?

Ofcom will argue it negotiated as hard as it could. It's just that its leaders seem so bloodless in their willingness to accept the position.

We're looking at a regulator that is powerful on analysis and research, presentation and consultation, but weak elsewhere. It is trying to create a consensus as power ebbs away from the (distracted) Labour government that created it.

Last week Ed Richards, chief executive of Ofcom, made a speech which ended rather wistfully: "We face important judgments. Get those judgments wrong and will there be a terminal cataclysm for our society? Of course not. It's just that our lives will be a bit narrower, a bit greyer, a bit duller as a result."

And there's the rub. He is trying to inch government towards what he hopes will be a decision and, consequently, limited legislation. But Ofcom cannot alter the constitution of Channel 4 so it can receive licence fee funds, nor can it strip the BBC of a share in BBC Worldwide, or devise a levy on blank tapes and downloads to support public service content.

For a nation facing inflation, job losses, bank rescues and recession, propping up Channel 4 and trying to build back a system of local and regional news services looks pretty minor.

Not a happy place to be.

Today's best video