As reported by the Newspaper Society: The NS had argued strongly that the proposal would amount to a grotesque erosion of the public’s right to know and would greatly damage local democracy.
Sue Oake of the NS said “The NS and individual local and regional newspapers produced cogent evidence of the value of public notices in local newspapers, and that their removal would lead to licensing matters being decided without local knowledge and debate. We are delighted that the Government has recognised the force of our arguments”
At a Westminster Hall debate last month, Conservative and Labour MPs roundly condemned the Home Office plans saying they would not save the taxpayer any money and could lead to residents being kept in the dark about controversial applications for licensed premises in their communities.
The Government’s response to the consultation can be found here. The relevant section reads:
“The Government has listened to respondents’ concerns that this might affect access to information about new licensing applications, reducing opportunities for local people to have a say and explain the impact of potential decisions. Community engagement in licensing is important to this Government. We are not proposing any changes to the requirement for licensing applications to be published in local newspapers.”
Meanwhile, an amendment to the Local Audit and Accountability Bill to end newspaper publication of statutory public notices, tabled by Lord Tope, vice president of the Local Government Association, was withdrawn in a debate in the House of Lords yesterday.
Speaking for the Government, Baroness Hanham said that public notices were “vital for local transparency and accountability”. She said: “Research by GfK for the Newspaper Society found that the reach of local newspapers was much greater than council websites: 67% of the respondents to that survey had read or looked at their local newspaper for at least a couple of minutes within the past seven days, compared with 9% who had viewed their council website. Some 34% of adults questioned had not accessed the internet at all in the last 12 months.
“The most recent internet access quarterly update from the Office for National Statistics, published in May, shows that 7.1 million adults in the United Kingdom - 14% of the population - have never used the internet. Two-thirds of over-75s, a third of 65 to 74 year-olds and 32% of disabled people, as defined by the Disability Discrimination Act, have never used the internet. There are quite a lot of people, therefore, who do not, would not and could not use the internet for these notices.
“The GfK research for the Newspaper Society showed that local papers are spontaneously cited as the way in which most people - that is, 39% - expect to be informed about traffic changes, for example.”
She said that, following a consultation on removing planning notices, the previous government “concluded that some members of the public and community groups relied on the statutory notices in newspapers, and was not convinced that good alternative arrangements could readily be rolled out. A recent debate in the other place on alcohol licensing notices showed the strength of cross-party feeling against repealing the requirement to publish the notices in newspapers.”
She added: “It would be unfair to remove statutory notices in the blanket way that is being proposed while independent newspapers still face unfair competition from local authority newspapers.”
