Jeremy Hunt MP: If the BBC has surplus cash it should be returned to licence fee payers or used for a local TV revolution

Jeremy Hunt MP is Shadow Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport.  He blogs here.

Today the government is going to make its long-awaited statement on Digital Britain. For those of us that think that competitiveness in new economy businesses is vital to Britain's future, this is a very important moment.

Sadly judging from one particular announcement that has been trailed, the government looks like it is more interested in propping up old business models than encouraging the rapid adoption of new models upon which our prosperity will depend. It is rumoured that regional news will be supported from now on by diverting around £100m of licence fee money to commercial broadcasters. Here are three reasons why this is wrong:

1. If there is spare money at the BBC (and many of us suspect that proper National Audit Office scrutiny of BBC expenditure would reveal a lot of waste) should we not at least consider giving it back to licence fee payers before doing anything else? The BBC has just pushed through an inflationary licence fee rise (even though there is no inflation, which is why we opposed it). This rise would be more than cancelled out if this "surplus" cash was used to reduce the licence fee from its current £142.50.

2. What people want is not regional news but local news. Regional news is an outdated model based on the old ITV transmitter regions. The East Midlands region covers Nottingham, Leicester and Derby for example. But people in Nottingham do not have the slightest interest in what is happening in Leicester or Derby - they want to know what is happening in their city. It is a disgrace that Birmingham Alabama has eight local TV stations and Birmingham in the UK - four times the size - has none. Rather than propping up an old business model the government should be working out ways to usher in a new generation of super-local TV stations - surely of vital importance to support our campaign for more locally-elected Mayors.

Jeremy Hunt MP: What I learnt in China

Last Saturday Jeremy Hunt listed the ten questions he was seeking to answer during his visit to the Beijing Olympics.  In this Platform the Shadow Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport outlines some answers...

ONE: The Beijing Olympics are reputedly costing $40bn. That is more than double our budget, and China has the advantage of much lower labour rates. So where is the extra money going? Is it on Beijing's infrastructure? Is it simply vanity in wanting to host the world's best ever Olympics? I'd like to understand where the extra money is going.

The answer is simple: venues and infrastructure. The $40 bn (not officially confirmed) covered brand new, state of the art, permanent sports venues. London is rightly being careful not to build permanent structures unless we know there will be a good legacy use for them. Oh and the Chinese threw in two new tube lines as well. We did actually try out the tube when there - at less than 10p a ride it felt good not be debiting our Oyster cards a fortune...

TWO: What are the practical things that can go wrong? In Beijing's case they have dealt with pollution by banning cars and forcing factories to shut, but this kind of totalitarian response is inconceivable in London. We need to be smarter in our planning for potential pitfalls. In particular how good are our transport estimates for a tube system that is already bursting at the seams and how well will our security plans cope with the threat of terrorism?

Hugh met the person responsible for transport in 2012. It is a major worry. In particular, the Chinese had dedicated "Olympic" lanes running through Beijing to ease the traffic for those with Olympic passes - something that works fine when you have 6 lane highways running through the middle of the city. I doubt Londoners, with our much narrower streets, will be as willing to accept the kind of constraints on traffic that might cause.  Security remains the big unknown - we have the interim security report due in September and the final one by the end of the year so we will have a better sense of the anticipated threat at that stage.

THREE: The International Olympic Committee reportedly said that we cannot have the shooting at Bisley and the equestrian events in Windsor Great Park as they are too far from the Olympic village. This means we will have to spend money on temporary facilities that will be pulled down rather than enhancing permanent facilities as part of an Olympic legacy. Why then Beijing has been allowed to spread events across seven cities, including hosting the equestrian events as far away as Hong Kong?

Mixed signals here. The truth is that venues have to be approved by the international sports federations, who base their decision on the quality of the facilities offered. They are unlikely to oppose moving a venue if it meant better legacy facilities. The question is money - moving the shooting to Bisley would probably cost more than current plans - and whether the Olympic budget has that slack. I did however sense a politically-correct bias against shooting amongst British 2012 organisers which I thought was totally unacceptable.
 

Jeremy Hunt MP: The ten questions I'll be seeking to answer in Beijing

Jeremy Hunt MP is Shadow Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport.

Yesterday I left for the Beijing Olympics along with my Shadow Sports Minister Hugh Robertson. It is a great privilege (and great fun) to be going, but we will be there with the much more hard headed objective of trying to learn any lessons for our own Olympics in 2012. So here are 10 questions I will be seeking to answer:

ONE: The Beijing Olympics are reputedly costing $40bn. That is more than double our budget, and China has the advantage of much lower labour rates. So where is the extra money going? Is it on Beijing's infrastructure? Is it simply vanity in wanting to host the world's best ever Olympics? I'd like to understand where the extra money is going.

TWO: What are the practical things that can go wrong? In Beijing's case they have dealt with pollution by banning cars and forcing factories to shut, but this kind of totalitarian response is inconceivable in London. We need to be smarter in our planning for potential pitfalls. In particular how good are our transport estimates for a tube system that is already bursting at the seams and how well will our security plans cope with the threat of terrorism?

THREE: The International Olympic Committee reportedly said that we cannot have the shooting at Bisley and the equestrian events in Windsor Great Park as they are too far from the Olympic village. This means we will have to spend money on temporary facilities that will be pulled down rather than enhancing permanent facilities as part of an Olympic legacy. Why then Beijing has been allowed to spread events across seven cities, including hosting the equestrian events as far away as Hong Kong?

FOUR: People judge an Olympic Games differently in a developed to a developing country. For China 2008 is intended to be a "coming out" as Tokyo was for Japan in 1964 and Seoul for Korea in 1988. Developed countries are judged much more on issues such as whether the games turn a profit and whether the facilities are used afterwards or become white elephants. What will London need to achieve for 2012 to be a success?

Jeremy Hunt MP: Five hours culture for fifty pence

Jeremy Hunt MP is Shadow Culture Secretary.

Last week was another classic example of a flaky government announcement coming unstuck. This time it happened literally within minutes. Andy Burnham, clearly responding to requests from Gordon Brown to make announcements - any announcement - that might give the impression of government initiative (the "vision" thing) announced a plan to give all children a "right" to 5 hours of cultural activity.

By 8.20 in the morning he had been forced to admit to John Humphrys that it was only an "aspiration". Then it emerged that we do not currently measure how many hours of "culture" children receive. Many may be getting more than 5 hours, some undoubtedly less, but how can you have a policy without being able to measure whether it has worked or not?

Next John Dunford of the Association of School and College Leaders slammed the proposals given that no one had thought out precisely where in the curriculum these five hours would sit. Next to cookery? Instead of citizenship? Nearby the 5 hours of sport that have already been promised and not delivered?

Finally we worked out that the amount of money assigned to the pilot areas for the project was less than 50 pence per child per week - getting five hours of culture out of 50 pence needs a course in magic, let alone culture.

Andy Burnham rightly received near universal derision for an ill-thought out "eye-catching initiative" that should never have made it past the drawing board. More's the shame, because culture does matter. But if the government were serious about policy, they could start by taking a look at:

• Red tape that is putting more and more schools off organising school trips, including cultural ones. Parents for example worry about volunteering in case they get sued if something goes wrong.
• Bureaucracy over things like music festivals, which mean piles of forms have to be filled in especially if children are involved. Why do CRB checks have to be repeated time after time - driving both organisers and volunteers potty.
• Provision of music lessons. There is lots of evidence that learning a musical instrument helps both literacy and numeracy, yet up to 40% of primary school children who would like to are unable to learn an instrument.

Greg Clark MP and Jeremy Hunt MP: Conservatives are today's progressives

Shadow Cabinet Office minister Greg Clark MP and Shadow Culture Secretary Jeremy Hunt MP summarise the arguments of their new paper: 'Who's progressive now?'

ConservativeHome warmly welcomes this publication.  Principle one of our manifesto is the idea that the centre right is now the home of progressive politics.  Earlier this year we editorialised in favour of a greater emphasis on the issues that Dr Clark and Mr Hunt now champion so eloquently.

Download a PDF of the paper here.

For too long, Conservatives have allowed our values to be denigrated by our opponents.   Too often we have not challenged the Left's assumption that its motives are more noble than our own.  Nowhere is this more apparent than the use of the word 'progressive', which has become a synonym for left-of-centre values.

Yet throughout the history of British politics, the Conservative Party has regularly been the progressive party – the party of reform, the party that confronted vested interests and championed the disempowered, the party that was oriented towards the future rather than to yearning for the past, the party that was impatient rather than complacent, the party that was ambitious for what it could achieve for the country, rather than defensive in its management of decline.

In our pamphlet we describe six dimensions that, taken together, convey the essence of progressive politics:

• an idealism that the world can be a better place in the future than it is today
• a suspicion of uniformity and a respect for diversity
• an active concern for position of the least fortunate
• an antipathy to unmerited hierarchies
• a concern for non-material as well as financial goals 
• a sense of responsibility for the future, including the notion that we have duties beyond our own lifespan

Far from belonging to the Left, these progressive principles are a virtual statement of the values that are driving the Conservative Party.

Jeremy Hunt MP: Brown's U-turn on supercasinos masks damaging gambling liberalisation

Jeremy Hunt MP, Shadow Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport, outlines Brown's failures on gambling policy.

When is a U-turn not a U-turn? The answer, it appears to be, is when political imperatives rather than policy analysis dictate government actions. That is why the Gambling Act, which came into force on 1st September, is such a disaster.

Gordon Brown became Prime Minister knowing that he had to establish himself as the “change,” sufficiently different to Tony Blair to prevent the electorate thinking they needed a new party in power if they wanted a new administration. Cancelling Manchester’s “supercasino,” a measure Gordon Brown himself had supported as recently as March this year, seemed to fit the bill. It played to the “son of the manse” image and had the additional political benefit of winning support from long standing opponents of gambling liberalisation.

But when you unpick what has now happened in gambling policy, Gordon Brown has actually done exactly the opposite. We now face a gambling free for all with untold consequences in terms of the growth of problem gamblers. Professor Jim Orford of Birmingham University has talked about the new Act creating an additional 1 million gambling addicts.