[Critique]

Quite a lot of criticism for BBC Local running an all England show last night when many regions had significant flooding and a major incident had been declared in Nottingham.

Responding to news events quickly has never been the BBC's forte, but it should have contingency plans to maintain local output during events such as this.

On the contrary, I’d say that quickly reacting to stories like this is exactly the kind of thing that BBC Local Radio used to do very well. However, it’s difficult for them to do now when local output finishes after mid-mornings and the format has changed from being predominantly speech to much more music-led, resulting in a significant reduction in the number of presenters each station has and a change in the format that those that remain are used to presenting.

Some years ago now I spent a bit of time in a BBC Local Radio newsroom, back when it was local output until 7pm, an all-England evening show and then shared regional shows from 10pm-1am.

There was severe weather one week, nowhere near as bad as what we’ve seen this week, but bad enough that it was a topic of conversation on the Breakfast show and they might have had a reporter out in the bad weather. At that point in the day though, it wasn’t that serious and plenty of other stories featured in the very newsy, speech-led Breakfast show.

Mid-mornings and afternoons were speech-led but nowhere near as newsy so the story didn’t feature again outside of news bulletins until drivetime, when the weather started to turn for the worse.

Accordingly, the station opted out of the all-England show at 7pm and I think the afternoon presenter came back and did three hours of special coverage. This particular station was where the regional 10pm show was broadcast from, so at 10pm in one studio they outputted the usual regional show. However, in the other studio they got the Breakfast show presenter back in to do another three hours of coverage for the local station! 5 Live took over at 1am as usual but then at 6am the local station team were back with more.

None of the presenters that banded together to produce that coverage are with the station anymore, and as local output finishes so early I imagine it’s extremely difficult to get the resource to put on ad hoc coverage like they would have done in the past. A real shame.