[DTV]

The operations may be big, but they’re not at all local. Which is surely the point.

Depends on what you want. I'd say those three HQs offer more to their respective areas than the BBC English Regions are allowed to do. It's been said that BBC English regional news & LR is a good incubator for talent, well surely having numerous TV and radio stations, more scheduling flexibility on BBC1/2, local orchestras etc takes that to an even greater level - even if it does mean Tenby or Aberystwyth don't have a BBC local radio station. How could someone like Limmy (for example) get anywhere in England if they weren't in London or Manchester? He got commissioned by BBC Scotland however.

I think that the issue is that fundamentally 'local' news in England and in the three nations are two completely different things. Reporting Scotland, Wales Today and Newsline are, in large part, national news bulletins that primarily cover similar topics (i.e, politics/policy) to the main network bulletins, just focussed on one area and without international news. The kinds of local stories that make up the bulk of English regional bulletins are usually a second-tier story for the nations and, as such, viewers in the nations do no get that same local news provision as viewers in England.

Obviously, this is a function of the massive imbalance in regional government in the UK. The nations' programmes have to cover the devolved political institutions, while there is no meaningful decentralised government within England. There would be no need for the English regions to have the ability to produce political opt-outs as the nations do simply because there is nothing really to cover.

If you were starting from scratch, probably the sensible thing would be to have a three-stage process - first you have a single network bulletin covering international and UK-wide news; then the nations opt out to do Sc/Wa/NI political stories, leaving London to cover England-wide stories; finally everybody opts out to provide local news. But I suspect creating local news operations within Scotland and Wales would be difficult to justify given cutbacks in England.