ITV’s regional news bulletins would be replaced by 80 city-based stations under a Conservative government, under a plan for reforming local television unveiled today.

Jeremy Hunt, the Conservatives’ culture spokesman, said that his party was opposed to taking £50 million to £80 million a year from the BBC licence fee to prop up regional news on ITV.

Rejecting the “topslicing” proposal unveiled by Labour last month, Mr Hunt said that he wanted to follow the Canadian model and try to create a new tier of commercial city-wide stations. “Topslicing feels like an attempt to prop up an old model of broadcasting. Do people in Nottingham want to hear news about Leicester and Derby? I don’t think so,” Mr Hunt said.

The Shadow Cabinet member threw his weight behind a scheme devised by Roger Parry, the former chairman of Johnston Press, who said that it was possible to set up 81 new television stations covering four fifths of the country after 2012. However, Mr Parry said that such stations would be viable only if they used cheap technology, cut costs by using volunteers and relied on a core schedule of syndicated “food and gardening” programming.

Previous attempts to create such channels, of which the only survivor is Guardian Media Group’s Channel M in Manchester, had failed, Mr Parry argued, because “Brits have been so wedded to BBC and ITV that efforts to match their standards have been too expensive”. However, he believed that the success of YouTube meant that people were now prepared to watch more simple television if it meant that they could get local news.

In Canada a community channel has to be provided in every town where there are at least 6,000 cable subscribers. Rodgers TV, part of a phone and cable group, runs 33 local stations reaching a total of one million people a week.

ITV wants to abandon its increasingly costly regional news services after 2012, but has agreed to continue them if external funding is provided. A spokesman for ITV said that it welcomed the Conservative ideas as an “innovative contribution to the debate and will study the proposals carefully”.

It is unlikely that ITV will reject the plans as long as it is able to slash its own spending on regional news in England. Independent ITV companies in Scotland and Northern Ireland are keen to maintain their relatively more successful services, even if it requires public money to do so.

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