David Ellesmere welcomes news that the BBC are to look again at planned cuts to Radio Suffolk, a vital part of our local media, serving Ipswich and Suffolk.

It’s great news that the BBC is looking again at planned cuts to Radio Suffolk. I’ve said before that our local media - our newspapers, radio and television stations - are a vital part of the glue that holds our community together. They are what helps make Suffolk distinct from the rest of England and Ipswich distinct from Suffolk.

But local media are under pressure as never before. Any national organisation that provides local services will look to cut costs by centralising and providing a standard service for everyone. The end result of this trend with the media will be a national news service with a heavy bias towards London.

This is a trend that has been going on for years but has sped up recently because of the state of the economy. But I can’t help feeling that it’s a little bit different in the case of the BBC. In this case it’s something that has been deliberately forced on them by the Government.

Firstly the Government announced that the license fee – the BBC’s main source of income – would be frozen for six years. Secondly they added extra costs by making them pay for the World Service, which had previously been funded by the Foreign Office. The inevitable result is that services will be cut and that Radio Suffolk will be one of those in the firing line.

And I don’t think this is accidental either. These decisions were made very early on in the life of this Government when disgraced former News Of The World editor Andy Coulson was still David Cameron’s communications chief. It was a time when the Government still thought it would be a good idea to curry favour with Rupert Murdoch by weakening the BBC.

I can’t help feeling that if the phone hacking scandal had broken a year earlier the same decisions wouldn’t have been made and the BBC in general, and Radio Suffolk in particular, would be in a lot stronger position than they are today.