The BBC serves our region better than the Government

I WAS dismayed by the leader (The Yorkshire Post, March 19) regarding the BBC in which you state that Tim Davie is going “to deploy more staff to the North to ensure that its output – both on TV and radio – are more representative of the whole country”.

Have I missed something? Hasn’t the BBC had local radio stations around the country since the 60s and most cities have had TV studios for many years to broadcast local stories including Leeds?

MediaCity in Salford was chosen by the BBC to achieve decentralisation by moving staff to a northern location way back in 2006, it now employs around 3,200 staff at the site.

The BBC also has production facilities in Birmingham, which first started broadcasting radio in 1922 and TV programmes in 1949 via the Sutton Coldfield transmitter.

BBC Cymru in Cardiff have been broadcasting since 1966 and have recently moved into a new state of the art facility costing £120m, producing such programmes as Dr Who.

In Scotland the BBC have production facilities for radio and television at Pacific Quay and BBC Northern Ireland has the largest purpose-built TV production studio in all the six counties.

Hardly too London-centric, unlike our incompetent, untruthful and blunder-prone government.

The Government forced Channel Four to move out of London and three sites got chosen, Birmingham, Manchester and Leeds, which was finally chosen with approximately 300 staff positions, so it has a long way to go to equal the BBC’s staff numbers in the North. However they are keeping a presence in London.

The BBC offers, across local and national radio, TV channels, amazing programme quality and diversity to suit most people’s taste and to receive all this entertainment the cost is considerably less per day than buying your newspaper.

The BBC has some of the most watched, listened to, original programmes available in the UK – including Strictly, Blue Planet, EastEnders and Line of Duty.

Do you really think the BBC are out to smash regional newspapers?

Am I mistaken or don’t ITV, Channel Four, Sky also broadcast news programmes along with other commercial stations?

I fail to see how you can infer the BBC is not giving trusted and fact-based news.

Quite frankly I would pay the licence fee just for Radio Four.