When will FM be switched off?

A lot of people are under the mis-conception that because analogue TV will be switched off in 2012 that also means that FM and AM radio will be switched off in 2012 as well. This is not correct, because as you will be able to read below, no date has been set for FM to be switched off by -- there hasn't even been a date set for AM to be switched off by. FM will eventually be switched off, but it almost certainly won't be before 2017, and it is more likely to be in around 2020.

Ofcom chief executive refuses to set date for FM switch-off

The following quote was made by Ofcom's chief executive, Ed Richards, in a speech at the Radio Festival on 10th July 2007:

Problems with switching off FM

1. There are 100 - 150m FM radios in use, but only 5m DAB receivers have been sold so far.
2. By the time FM can be switched off, the UK will have switched to using DAB+, so the 5m DAB receivers sold so far will be obsolete by then.
3. The BBC's Controller in charge of digital radio said recently that increasing coverage of its national DAB multiplex to the last ten percent of the population was "prohibitively expensive" and that "hybrid solutions" would be required. This means using DRM and/or DRM+, but there are virtually no receivers available that support DRM and the DRM+ standard hasn't been released yet.
4. No mass-produced cars contain DAB car stereos, let alone DAB+ car stereos. 
5. If FM is switched off when there are millions of cars that don't contain DAB+ car stereos, radio faces losing millions of in-car listeners -- DAB+ car adaptors could be produced, but having something like this on the dash-board would be an invitation to thieves to break in, which would lead to millions of people simply not bothering to buy a DAB+ car adaptor and just abandoning radio in favour of listening to CD/MP3 on their car stereo instead.
6. I've been told by someone that has a relation in the car industry that DAB is "years away" from being installed as standard in mass-produced cars because the cost of the FM receiver section of a car stereo is tiny in comparison to the cost of including DAB. 

Notice that I didn't mention the issue of sound quality, which is because by the time FM can be switched off we'll have switched to DAB+ and the sound quality will have improved a lot compared to what it's like now, and also there will be broadband Internet radio streams for all of the bigger UK radio stations providing higher quality than on DAB+ -- in fact, we should see the vast majority of bigger UK radio stations providing broadband Internet streams providing higher quality than we're likely to see on DAB+ within the next year or two. Indeed, virtually all of GCap's stations are being streamed at 128 kbps WMA already, and the BBC stations will be streamed using 128 kbps AAC by the end of the year.