SATURDAY witnessed the largest rally of people with disabilities that anyone can remember happening in Newcastle as part of a national series of 'hardest hit' events throughout the UK.

The message from that rally and in other parts of society is that the axe brought down by the Government’s spending cuts is falling in all the wrong places.

There are capacity and geographic inequities to what is happening.

This isn’t only levelled at Government cuts. The proposals from the BBC following the decision to freeze the licence fee for six years are equally flawed in terms of equity, and also in respect of the fundamental role of the BBC as a public service broadcaster. The fee freeze equates to around a 16% cut in income for the BBC, about £340m.

The National Union of Journalists described the decision as a watershed moment for the corporation, recognising that these massive cuts could lead to a completely different kind of organisation emerging from whatever changes take place.

Efficiency savings are nothing new to BBC staff, or any other part of the media industry.

Those that engage with operations in this sector can’t fail to have noticed that the people responsible for sound, lighting, camera and interviews is now, more often than not, the same individual.

Weekend work has been minimised and the terms and conditions of skilled and talented individuals persistently eroded, with most camera operators, for example, being moved on to spurious ‘self- employment’ contracts, akin to what is happening in the increasingly unregulated construction sector.

Strategically, some of the proposals for managing these cuts do completely undermine the real value of the BBC. What is distinctive about the BBC is its regional added value.

In the same way that local newspapers are read in greater numbers per capita than national titles, so regional current affairs productions are more important to the public than the national stories.

This does provide something distinctive for the BBC, something that separates it from the increasingly transnational media market, and something that makes a public service contribution; it is this public service ethos that should drive the decisions about the focus for future BBC productions.

The BBC Trust must take these views into consideration and resist the temptation to further undermine important regional media content. Make your views heard via the BBC Trust Website.

:: Kevin Rowan is regional secretary of the Northern TUC