Throwing in the towel

From the end of this month, the town of Stroud (in Gloucestershire, not far from Cheltenham) will be without a local radio station as UKRD closes down Star 107.9, but what's unprecedented is the fact that UKRD decided to hand back its Stroud licence to Ofcom because the company claims that it couldn't make the station commercially viable.

Last year UKRD wanted permission to run the Stroud station from nearby Cheltenham, but Ofcom said that it couldn't agree to the request for programme sharing, presumably because that would technically deny other commercial operators the opportunity to provide a local service for this particular area. (Quite the opposite from the ITV regional franchises.)

UKRD claims that "heavy-handed regulation" helped made the Stroud licence unviable, though I suspect that the station was just unpopular with its audience as well as (perhaps) suffering from a restricted coverage area. There are lots of radio stations that just play music tracks so a station with a small coverage area needs to do something that's really distinctive.

Therefore small local community radio stations require the active involvement of local people to be truly effective; they need to provide a service that goes well beyond just reading the local news headlines in order to attract an audience large enough to become viable. Just providing a 'local'-sounding service that actually comes from somewhere else fools few people.

Ofcom seems confused as to what to do next having been caught by surprise, but the next step could be to readvertise the Stroud licence as a temporary RSL station, giving a potential operator a trial run before signing up for a much longer licence.