Community Radio

Radio Scilly is a community radio station, licenced by Ofcom.

That means we are not-for-profit. We don’t pay shareholders dividends. We operate on a break-even basis. A bit like a Parent Teacher Association or a Gig Rowing Club. We receive enough income from the Scilly Lottery, T shirt sales and advertising to make ends meet. And that’s it. That means we’re not awash with adverts like some mainland station. We sell airtime on an annual basis and once we’re full, we’re full!

Radio Scilly stands on our ‘own two feet’ and don’t take grants now we’re up and running. In fact, our Scilly Lottery gives grants to clubs and groups in Scilly, so we really are putting something back into island life!

We are a unique radio station reflecting Islands’ news, views, conversation and discussion. And anybody can appear on our programmes. Our presenters’ age range is from 12 to 79 years! We have a listener consultative panel that includes Merryn Smith as a representative of the Councillors, Steve Watt, a Council Employee, John Bird, as a representative of the Gig Clubs and Bryce Wilby and Julie Hicks from the Five Islands School. The last meeting was on July 26th 2010.The group makes suggestions on our programmes and shares feedback and comments about our broadcasts from the groups and organisations they represents.If you would like to let us know about your ideas for making Radio Scilly even better, get in touch.

It was up to Radio Scilly to decide what we wanted to commit to providing for islanders when we applied for the licence. We’re actually offering more local programming than we legally have to. And we’re offering a daily news service, something that we have chosen to do as we feel that there is a demand for a daily local news service for the islands, even though we don’t have to as part of our obligations.

You can see our statutory Ofcom report for 2011 here.