One of the aspects of the broadcasting bill, and I am not going to go into details as I hope it will be published quite shortly and people can then see it for themselves, but the main intent is a single broadcasting regulator, covering both commercial and public sector bodies. It will be broken down into two sections, a compliance committee looking at and making sure that standards are set and a contracts committee, separate but within the same organisation that licences are given out in a fair and transparent way. One of the aspects within that is the establishment of codes and the implementation of codes around standards in the advertising area. There are different aspects to that and people here will know some of the ones that the Government is considering – one of the ones is the drinks industry where it involves the Minister for Health, the Minister for Enterprise and ourselves. There is a policy perspective there coming from a number of Government departments that have to be taken into account and are been taken into account and are being considered by the Government at the present time. One of the other areas where I have had a personal interest in the past and I am looking forward to the bill being able to set out some guidance on it, although not restricting the new broadcasting authority excessively, is the area of children’s advertising. My experience - coming from very simple experience of having four young children under nine - about three or four years ago when they were aged three, four and five, walking down the supermarket and having my child pulling me and screaming and fighting and crying because I didn’t buy whatever. Inevitably a product full of sugar, inevitably the one high in fat, inevitably the one that if it didn’t have the other two had salt in it. I was actually driven so much by that experience, I started to do a survey by watching advertising for about two months and listening to what ads were going through and what particular products were being advertised and I am afraid to say, picking a couple of product categories, it wasn’t the stuff that I wanted my child to watch at home. So I think that it is appropriate to have codes that steer advertising in a certain direction without being excessively restrictive, trying to get that balance right between enterprise, our environment and empathy and that is our continued task in government.
Thank you.