The loss of ‘local’ – and the struggle to understand the reasons for BBC radio cuts

And like millions, I love local radio. The growth of local stations on the airwaves over many decades told its own story – it would not have occurred were there not enough people tuning in.

Local radio stations are a friend to many, many people – offering music, voices, news, entertainment and information that means something to them; delivered by presenters who are important to them.

While local radio stations will obviously not get as many listeners as the big national stations – BBC and commercial ones – there are many instances where, in a particular part of the country, the most-listened-to station is a local one. The regular Rajar listener figures prove this – and show that huge numbers of people, as many as ever, value local radio.

But for reasons which many of those listeners – me included – do not really understand, the tide has turned. Those in charge of our radio services have decided they don’t need to be as local as they have been for many years, despite those listener numbers remaining strong and pretty consistent.

In terms of commercial radio, there are huge numbers of stations out there – more than ever before if you include those available on DAB, apps and online as well as those with FM slots – but the number of companies running them is relatively small, which means more stations are coming under big umbrellas and gradually losing their own identities, being slowly and not-very-subtly rebranded to fit the desires of their parent companies to rule the world.

I’ll examine in another article very soon a prime example of this – Bauer Media’s remarkable and in my view quite unfathomable decision to close down Wave 105, one of its most successful local stations, serving Dorset, Hampshire, West Sussex and the Isle of Wight and ‘rebranding’ it Greatest Hits Radio South Coast (which, by the way, is a station that alreadys exists). The decision to close Wave has prompted a huge response and if you can find one single listener who thinks it’s a great move, you’re doing better than I am.

But for now, let’s look at BBC local radio. The Beeb, in my opinion, has a habit of going all out to serve people who don’t use its services – and to hell with the people who do. They are desperate to cater for people who might start paying some attention to their stations or particularly their website, even if it is at the expense of people who already do. I cannot quite get my head around why this is.

So it was that a couple of years ago the BBC decided to cut much of its local radio output and redirect the money into online services – such as expanding the local news sections of its website, when such news is already available through other local media sites.

I must declare an interest here – I have been employed in local papers for 34 years and it is getting harder and harder to provide local news in a way customers are prepared to pay a little for, and the BBC expanding what they do online (without the need to support it with adverts) is only going, over time, to reduce the number of outlets from which people get their news.

Newspaper editors say BBC is the neighbour from hell.

For radio listeners, the cuts to the BBC local stations have meant them losing presenters they know well, presenters they respect, presenters they trust, presenters they have grown to look forward to hearing at an alloted time of the day or week – presenters they can email or phone if they want to get involved in their show.

Even before Covid came along and changed our world, people depended on local radio – with the BBC stations high up the pecking order – and when we were unable to socialise, and needed reassuring voices telling us what the hell was happening, not just with our lockdowns but in the wider Covid-hit world, those local stations took on a new importance. To some, those presenters were the most regular voices they heard in those lonely times.

But the BBC decided local radio didn’t need to be quite… well... quite as local. It has decided a large number of presenters – and presumably others behind the scenes – are not needed, and that the latter part of every weekday and much of the weekend can be regional or in some cases national. So for many of the hours when you could previously listen to programmes you knew were local, well, you can still listen to the same station – but local it is most certainly not.

For example, BBC Radio Solent listeners can no longer hear Paul Miller, Alex Dyke, Pat Sissons – and more like them. BBC Radio Sussex and Surrey listeners will have suffered their own ‘losses’ in the same way – so will listeners to BBC local stations all over the country, and not because any of these shows or people were unpopular or hemorrhaging listeners. Some affected presenters have been mentioned in the House of Commons, such has been the depth of feeling among listeners moved to ask their MPs to get involved.

The BBC also seems to have decided music is not an important part of its local radio output. A number of programmes that were more music-based than your average BBC local magazine-style show with news and chat have been axed – to the fury of their loyal bands of listeners.

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Had it been the case that these music programmes did not attract decent numbers, you’d have struggled to defend them being dropped, But they did attract decent numbers – and many of those who listened to them will now have taken their ears elsewhere on the days, evenings or nights when they used to listen, rather than switched their allegiance to whatever the BBC has put on in the same time slots.

If you try to get to the bottom of why the BBC have done what they have done to their local radio service, you may struggle to get answers.

And I have not even talked yet about how the way did it. In many cases they left experienced presenters in the dark over their futures then forced them to apply for their own jobs, to record new ‘audition’ clips to show what they could do, and jump through various hoops, in some cases with no realistic chance of them keeping their jobs.

One person who was in one of the local BBC centres when it was going on told me: “The way the whole process has been handled is nothing short of an utter disgrace.”

I am luckier than most local radio listeners in this respect in that I am a journalist, and therefore have access to the BBC press office. So I asked some questions – then asked some more when I got a statement and some background information in return.

I should say that the press officer I dealt with was polite and efficient, always replying and actually giving me more information than I thought I might get. But the process left me frustrated that the BBC are still not really explaining to listeners why they have cut their beloved local radio so deep in a way that will surely see more and more desert them.

I think the best way to present my exchanges with the BBC is to show you the questions I asked, what the response was, what the follow-up questions were and what the final responses were.

It’s an exchange that could continue – and maybe I will continue it. But now, with many of those much-loved local programmes gone, their familiar hosts not to be heard anywhere (although some have pleasingly been snapped up by other stations), it seems as good a time as any to get this out there – and maybe ask other listeners if they can make sense of it all or have questions of their own.

My questions were, in the main, quite general, as you will read. But I am a Hampshire resident and I have listened over the years to a lot of Radio Solent’s output.

I love Solent’s sport service – which happily seems to have been untouched by the cuts – and those who follow me on Twitter / X will also know one of my favourite programmes of recent years has been the magnificent Stereo Underground (SU), which began in 2014, has built up a huge following, not just in the Solent area, and became one of the most downloaded local radio programmes on BBC Sounds, with Richard Latto at its helm.

At first, this mixture of indie classics and alternative anthems seemed to have survived the cull – but when 2024 dawned, as other music-based programmes were deemed surplus to requirements, the bad but perhaps inevitable news came – the January 31 edition of Stereo Underground would be the last on the BBC (more about that week in a moment...).

Devotees of the programme have been delighted to hear Stereo Underground live on in other places – on Mixcloud and a number of community radio stations. It has within weeks had more than 1,000,000 minutes listened to on Mixcloud and is topping the ratings for a number of genres on that platform. But I shouldn’t think the BBC will care about such numbers, as it should.

When January 31 came around, SU listeners were looking forward to giving the programme a big send-off from its BBC slot (which had already been changed from its popular Saturday evening slot to a midweek one). 8pm came, they were all tuned in… only to be greeted by a generic, clearly-not-local, though ironically music-based programme that offered no explanation for why Stereo Underground was not on.

So when I contacted the BBC for some answers on the whole local radio issue, I asked a couple of specific questions about SU – with me believing that their ‘thinking’ on why this programme was not wanted might help us understand the wider wipeout of local progammes. Sadly I was to be disappointed on that point.

Here then are my questions and the responses, about which you can draw your own conclusions and have your own opinions…

My initial questions:

Why has the BBC slashed its cherished and unique local radio services while investing in local news websites which are already well catered for by local independent publishers?

What were the driving forces behind the local radio cuts and what consultation was done with listeners?

How many presenters have left BBC Radio Solent and Radio Sussex/Surrey in the past 12 months, either leaving contracted positions or regular freelance work?

Is it now the BBC's policy not to continue on its local stations any programmes that are music-led?

With reference to one programme in particular that has ended on BBC local radio, Stereo Underground, this was understood to be the most downloaded local radio programme on BBC Sounds over quite a long period ... is that correct and why cut such a popular programme?

Many Stereo Underground listeners were dismayed when the advertised final edition on the BBC was not broadcast on Weds Jan 31, despite appearing in the BBC Radio Solent schedules - no explanation was given. Why was it not broadcast?

The BBC’s response – in the form of a statement and then some guidance…

A BBC spokesperson said: “We are modernising our services so that however licence fee payers choose to get their local information, we are there across radio, television and online. All 39 BBC Local Radio stations provide local programming throughout the week, local news bulletins on the hour, and our full local sports programming. We continue to listen to our audiences as well as giving them a voice.”

Guidance:

We haven’t cut our budgets – our overall budget for our local services remains the same.

In 2022 we announced that there would be changes to all schedules outside peak listening hours. All of our stations continue to hold local decision makers to account, entertain our audiences and provide the best sports coverage week in and week out.

Our changes reflect a clear trend across all audience groups of growing online usage. Recent Ofcom research showed the most common way to access local news was online (89%) followed by TV (53%), radio (34%) and print newspapers (22%).

There will be more original journalism across all platforms, in-depth investigations, 130 additional journalists across the country and a clearer, more creative on-demand audio offer on BBC Sounds.

The BBC has had a long-standing local online presence and when Ofcom reviewed our plans last year they concluded that they were unlikely to impact more than 0.5-1% of existing local media revenues.

The BBC invests millions of pounds every year to support high-quality news jobs within the local commercial sector. We fund the Local Democracy Reporter Service (LDRS) - a unique network of 165 journalists all employed by commercial newsrooms – to scrutinise the work of local authorities across the UK. Since its inception, it has produced more than 370,000 original stories for over 1,100 news outlets.

In terms of Stereo Underground we don’t recognise the downloads claim you provided; we don’t release figures for individual programmes, BBC Sounds release all headline data in a quarterly report. We were unable to broadcast the final episode Stereo Underground. It was replaced with a pre-recorded programme.

Some points answered, then – others not. So I went back with some follow-up questions arising from the statement and guidance.

These were my questions:

1 Re. listening to your audiences - were local radio listeners consulted at all - and if so, how - about the changes to local radio programming?

2 You say your overall budget for our local services remains the same. But have you cut the budget for local radio output and put those savings into online services?

3 You say your changes reflect a clear trend across all audience groups of growing online usage. When you say all audience groups does this include all age groups? Inclusing over-65s? If audience groups are not divided into age groups what are they divided into?

4 Why was it not possible to broadcast the final episode of Stereo Underground on January 31?

Again, responses came from the BBC press office and they were as follows:

1 Since publishing our plans in late 2022, we have been listening to audience feedback and made further adaptations such as adding extra programmes on weekday afternoons, weekend breakfast and weekend daytime to reduce the size of the geographic areas being served by the new programmes. The BBC typically carries out formal Equality Impact Assessments (EIAs) for closures or reductions of service that will limit audiences’ ability to access our public services in some way. We do not carry out formal EIAs on editorial or programming changes.

2 Budget has been reprioritised to online services.

3 Over the past three years, the number of over 55s using the BBC’s online services has increased by more than 20% to over 11 million. Even audiences aged 65-75 now consider online to be a more important source of news than radio. According to OFCOM 93% of people in the UK had home internet access in 2022, up from 87% in 2019. That includes 70% of Over-75s with home internet access (in 2022) and that has grown considerably since 2019 (52%).

4 We cannot comment on this (the Jan 31 Stereo Underground) any further.

So there it is – some explanation of the background to the direction the BBC has gone in. But – is it just me, or does it still leave you thinking they have cut a vital part of the service so as to add to something not as important to what we want from them as an organisation?

Oh and Stereo Underground listeners will just have to wonder why that last show went unbroadcast.

There will be more debate to be had on this over, I’d imagine, quite a long time. But if you think you’re going to get back local radio as it was before these changes, I think you’ll be disappointed.

As I said earlier, the BBC are not alone in cutting much-loved radio programmes and presenters – more soon on others going the same way.

For now, please enjoy what’s left of ‘local’, because even that may not be around much longer.

Do you have an opinion on the BBC local radio cuts? Email [email protected]