BBC Trust consultation on local radio and news in England

The BBC Trust is currently running a public consultation on the topic of BBC local radio and local news and current affairs in England.

“The purpose of this consultation is to review BBC Local Radio and BBC local and news and current affairs in England. It covers: BBC Local Radio in England; BBC regional news and current affairs in England on TV; and BBC local news online.”

However, this particular review does not include:

“The BBC’s national news and current affairs output, i.e. news made available to, or targeted at, UK wide audiences. This was considered in our review of Network News and Current Affairs published in April 2014

BBC news and current affairs output made for and broadcast in Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales. This will be considered in a separate review, due to start later this year

Editorial standards and impartiality. Service reviews do not consider editorial standards or give an assessment of accuracy and impartiality. However, as high editorial standards are a key component of high-quality speech and news services, we will consider any issues around compliance with editorial standards through this review.”

The consultation runs until September 28^th 2015 and the online survey, together with more details, can be found here.

On a related note, readers may be interested to know that despite the BBC Trust having partially upheld a complaint concerning the wording used in articles about comments made by the former MP David Ward over two years ago and an amendment having subsequently been made to an article appearing on the UK Politics page of the BBC News website, another article on the same subject still available in the ‘Leeds & West Yorkshire’ local news section of the website continues to exhibit the same inaccurate language which was the subject of the complaint upheld by the BBC Trust. Clearly then the issues of communication and continuity might be among those raised in this consultation.