[Omnipresent]

Matt Deegan provided a more balanced view, even suggesting that VILOR may not be the ideal playout system - and I do go along with his theory that it will come down to the loss of familiar presenters rather than the ins and outs of whether a show is local, regional, networked etc.

onaudio.mattdeegan.com 

I agree with a lot of what Matt says.

There's nothing inherently wrong in having regional / all England programming on BBC local stations, but much of it seems so generic. They've replaced local programming with networked shows across small clusters of stations but much of it is just filler - it really makes no difference whether it's networked across 3 or 39 stations.

The budget for local radio is still very substantial - estimates I've seen put it at well over £100m. A good programmer given the freedom and that kind of budget could come up with decent regional / all England formats to supplement local programming, but like the combined BBC News / World News channel, the BBC seems to give us the worst of both worlds.