Digital terrestrial switchover 'on track'

The Public Accounts Committee of the House of Commons has said that the UK's digital terrestrial switchover timetable is "on track".

The Committee, which tracks government spending, noted that digital TV takeup has exceeded the expectations of the Department for Culture, Media and Sport and the Department for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform but raised concerns over the voluntary "digital tick" scheme, designed to highlight digital-ready TVs in shops, and inadequate Parliamentary scrutiny of spending on projects such as the digital help scheme.

"Only half the staff in the two thirds of stores which use the digital tick logo understand what it means," the committee said. As of December 2007, more than a quarter of TV sales consisted of analogue-only sets, and the committee criticised the "significant number of televisions on the market" with "built-in obsolesence". The DCMS and BERR both agreed "that this was not satisfactory" but said that a blanket ban on the sale of analogue televisions may not be legal "under European Commission law" - despite such a ban having been imposed in France in 2001.

The committee also said that the decision to fund the digital help scheme and switchover information campaign through the BBC licence fee settlement effectively removed £803m "from the normal parliamentary supply process and the statutory arrangements for scrutiny of public expenditure". Concerns were also raised that were the low takeup of the digital help scheme in the Copeland area replicated across the country, there would be a nearly £250m surplus in the money ring-fenced for the scheme - but that at no time did the DCMS or BERR prepare contingency plans for what would happen to any extra cash. One option proposed by the government in response to the committee's concerns was to return the excess cash to licence fee payers, but "they did not provide a complete account of how and when this could be done".