Dave Rushton Director, Institute of Local Television and Public Interest Fellow, Department of Geography & Sociology, University of Strathclyde 

Local Identity and Spectrum Rights, A5, two chapters, 32 pages, ISBN: 1 899405 09 7

Publication date: 08/04/08, £8.50 inc p&p, Order through academic book distributors or This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it

The terrestrial delivery of spectrum is always local. Combinations of local transmissions from relays and transmitters are configured to provide regional, nation and state-wide service.

The television broadcast spectrum bands remain crucially important because these can be received using existing TV aerials and the network of terrestrial television transmitters has been supported by the TV licence fee. In short, the network of UK transmitters is supported by direct public investment from viewers while spectrum can only be used efficiently if the actual number of viewers of each service is compared with all possible users. Research suggests that local television will be more watched than the more marginal television channels that might otherwise ‘occupy’ local spectrum - the 'digital dividend' released with digital switchover.

It's only be a matter of time before the goodwill between the commercial public service television companies (eg ITV and SMG) to support 1152 transmitters to reach 98.5% of households is threatened by digital competition from services delivered using just 80 transmitters reaching 90% of the population (unevenly distributed by region and nation).

Yet, the television licence fee is financing the construction of a comprehensive public service digital TV network, and it is this wide reaching asset, with ample spectrum available for local use, which local television requires to deliver a universal public service, state-wide. Following Professor Martin Cave’s report to the Treasury in 2002, economic opinion on spectrum use has refocused the language of communications regulation to depend on the feelings and attitudes of the participants in the discourse. Shifting spectrum regulation into markets will absolve Government, regulator and operators of responsibility for spectrum use by defining value and waste in market rather than technically efficient terms. 

Yet regulation of the electromagnetic spectrum represents, and might continue to represent, a democratic purpose, providing a shared benefit, however sub-divided, as a ‘common good’. For spectrum to retain this public value the devolved administrations and local authorities must assert spectrum’s democratic as well as economic purpose, securing spectrum use for each nation, region and local area to introduce a more reflective communications regulation through locally accountable spectrum use.