In an article in this week’s New Statesman, Mark Thompson says that merging or closing local radio stations is not the way forward for the BBC ……We’re in the middle of an open debate inside the BBC about its future. One idea was whether you could merge local radio with Radio 5 Live or reduce local radio in some way. Although local radio is relatively cheap to run, when you run 40 radio stations in England, you have to multiply the cost. The point of local radio is that if it’s not local, it’s not doing its job. It’s reasonable for people to have a debate about merging or shutting local radio but that’s not the way forward for the BBC.