The BBC Trust has released its interim conclusions regarding the BBC Management proposals on Delivering Quality First (DQF); which will determine the shape of the BBC until 2017. The written conclusions can be located here.

Trust Chairman Lord Patten announced the conclusions at the Oxford Media Convention on Wednesday 25 January 2012.  His speech mainly focused on asking BBC Management to look again at the planned cuts to Local Radio, specifically:

• to scale back the plans for BBC Local Radio stations to share their afternoon content with their neighbours, and to review the all-England sharing proposal;
• to ensure these stations continue to have adequately staffed newsrooms; and
• to give stations more freedom to protect some of their more specialist and content out of peak, both in sport or specialist music content.

The Trust estimates that this revised strategy should still equate to £10 million savings in local radio and current affairs, as opposed to the initial £15 million proposed in DQF (it also highlights that some of the savings required across other areas may be identified by the forthcoming John Myers’ review).

BBC Management will now be required to re-examine its Local Radio proposals, and bring forward alternative suggestions to inform the final BBC budget for the coming years, which are expected to be approved in March 2012.

RadioCentre is pleased to note that the Trust has prioritised the distinctiveness of Local Radio services.  We have consistently maintained that BBC Local Radio and local commercial stations must be complementary, and in order to do this BBC Local Radio should focus on news and serving older listeners.

While we understand that the BBC needs to make savings to meet the terms of its licence fee settlement, we do not accept that this should inevitably lead to its most distinctive output being diluted.  When we submitted our response to the Trust review of BBC Local Radio in December our recommendations for BBC Local were therefore to avoid networked content, increase the focus on local news and distinctive programming.  We are pleased to note that the Trust took many of these recommendations on board.