Lord Lucas (Con)

My Lords, in moving my Amendment 207 I will speak also to my Amendments 208 and 209. I am grateful to the noble Baroness, Lady Wolf of Dulwich, for adding her name to these; I am sorry that she cannot be here today. Clause 98 refers to newspaper notices. The purpose of requiring notices in local newspapers is to inform the public. Most of the public now get their local news from sources other than traditional local newspapers. As the Government accept the need for notices—as evidenced by Clause 98—and we are looking at a system that costs the public purse around 50 million quid a year, I hope that they will agree that the notices that they are requiring and paying for should be placed where people will read them. My amendments propose a much-needed update to the 1881 definition of a newspaper, which is what rules these notices at the moment, to allow local councils to place public notices in relation to planning and infrastructure with trusted, professional and widely read online local news outlets. That was what the 1881 legislation achieved in its day—it made sure that these notices were placed where people would read them and in publications that they could access and trust. We need to move that on a bit. The local news industry has undergone a deep transformation with the rise of online news and the decline of printed papers. Last year, more than half of traditional regional dailies had a circulation of below 5,000 copies. Comparatively, the average local independent online news outlet attracted almost 500,000 unique users. Across the UK, digital outlets established in the past decade or so are connecting with growing audiences; I would name the Bristol Cable, the Waltham Forest Echo, the Manchester Mill, the Greater Govanhill in Glasgow, VIEWdigital in Belfast, and many others—including, of course, my local Eastbourne Reporter. There have been countless calls in recent years to review the public notices system to support the regeneration of local news, including by the Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Committee’s Sustainability of Local Journalism report and the House of Lords report The Future of News, published less than a year ago.