It’s been a breathless summer of sporting excellence, and very hard to tear ourselves away from watching the unbelievable successes of the Olympic and Paralympic athletes. A personal highlight was when I told my 5 year-old daughter that another of Britain’s boxers (in this case, Luke Campbell) had won a gold medal. Her instant reaction was: ‘That’s great…what was her name?’
The Department, and government as a whole, has of course just been through the reshuffle – with the result that Jeremy Hunt has now moved to Health. As well as wishing him every success in his new role, we’ve also warmly welcomed our new Secretary of State, Maria Miller, previously a Minister at the Department for Work and Pensions.
Ed Vaizey retains his brief as Minister for Culture, Communications and the Creative industries, and he will be chairing the next in the seminar series this Thursday– which will be a round-table focussing on radio. The accompanying paper and agenda are available on the Communications Review website, and as with the previous seminar sessions, full video of the event will be published on the website soon afterwards.
A second milestone for next week is the deadline for responses to the first four seminar papers – which is this Friday (14 September). Given that it’s been the summer – meaning that people have generally either been on leave, or extremely busy – we appreciate that it has been difficult to have responses finalised in time for this deadline, but we’d recommend to all those wanting to contribute to the review process, and to make their views known ahead of policy formation, to make every endeavour to meet this. The deadline for responses to the radio paper is slightly later – 28 September.
There is still the opportunity to comment on any or all of the papers in public, in the comments threads, where some lively discussion has been taking place. A visit to the consumer seminar paper, for example, shows that subtitling and other accessibility issues are high on the agenda for a great many people. Please do keep these comments coming, either on these public comment threads, on twitter (using #commsreview), or via the Comms Review inbox. We are reading these, and all views are being taken on board as part of the process.
It’s a bit hard to believe that the games have now come to a close. However, today’s parade through central London of Olympic and Paralympic stars will no doubt be a fitting finale, and will demonstrate the extraordinary impact their endeavours have had on everyone.