1. What assessment has the Leader of the House made of the ability of Wales’s digital infrastructure to deal with digital radio usage in Wales? OAQ51813

The Welsh Government has consistently stressed to the UK Government that one of the fundamental criteria driving digital radio switchover should be that the coverage in Wales is no less than that in the rest of the UK. We would not be in favour of digital switchover for radio until there is a guarantee of at least 97 per cent coverage for digital audio broadcasting throughout Wales.

The Deputy Presiding Officer (Ann Jones) took the Chair.

Thank you for that answer. The UK Government has indicated, of course, when it's going to consider switching over, or a date for that anyway, when 50 per cent of all radio listening is via digital platform, when national DAB coverage is comparable to FM, and local DAB coverage reaches 90. So, I was interested in your 97 per cent figure there. Those figures have been pretty much reached in England, and certainly as an average in the UK, so what additional infrastructure do you think we need to make sure that Wales catches up quickly?

Well, the big issue always in Wales is the difficulty of where the population is, and this is a problem for all of these sorts of services, and it's why we have a constant argument with the UK Government about what the proportional coverage should be. And that's because, as I'm sure I've expressed in this Chamber very often, everybody in Wales is spread out into every nook and cranny of Wales. So, we miss out quite large sections of the population, percentage-wise, if we concentrate on the high-population coverage areas. So, we have that constant conversation with them, and the difficulty is—it's exactly the same for much of the rest of the mobile coverage—we need a lot more masts in Wales to get the service out there. So, what we've been trying to do is make the UK understand that Wales has a specific issue and that we need a specific solution for it. It's not done through the broadband infrastructure, it's done through the broadcasting infrastructure. However, of course, you can pick up digital radio through the internet if you want to, and so our digital roll-out in terms of broadband will assist, but we're nevertheless insisting that the coverage should be good enough to cover the geographical spread of Wales as well as its population base.

May I assure the Cabinet Secretary that I'm not going to turn the internet on first thing in the morning? I want to listen to the radio in the morning in Aberystwyth, and it's not just smaller communities that are missing out on digital radio. There is a digital service in Aberystwyth, but there is no Radio Cymru or Radio Wales available, so we must ensure that our national broadcasters are available in all parts of Wales before we allow any switch-off of the FM signal. I speak as someone who has turned to digital for over 15 years. I'm a big fan of digital radio, but it causes me great concern that I can't listen to Radio Cymru and someone like Rhys Mwyn during the evenings in Aberystwyth.

Yes, I sympathise with that very much. Welsh Government officials have continued to raise this issue in meetings with the UK Government, the BBC, Ofcom, UK Digital Radio, and we continue to do so. In addition, our position in relation to DAB has been included in the Welsh Government's responses to various broadcasting consultations, including our recent response to the consultation on Ofcom's annual plan for 2018-19. Last October, UK Digital Radio ran a briefing session in Cardiff with a number of stakeholders to discuss recent developments in relation to digital radio. During that event, a number of organisations, including the Welsh Government, stressed again that, despite improvements in coverage of DAB in some parts of Wales, there is still a long way to go before we might contemplate any such switchover.