This week MP David Drew criticises ITV's decision to cut its budget for regional news SO does the news matter to you? I hope that it does and that you will be as annoyed at me at the decision of ITV to strike £40million off its budget for regional news production.

This will entail putting West Country TV together with the old HTV area to try to provide coverage for the whole of the south west.

There is a sop demanded by Ofcom the broadcasting regulator. This is that the network will split for 15 minutes each day for the main evening news programme to provide stand alone coverage for the sub region. However other news slots that occur during the day will disappear completely.

Two things make me particularly sore at these proposals. First that Ofcom, which is supposedly the guardian of public service broadcasting, has been so weak in response to ITV's cost cutting.

It remains the responsibility of ITV to account for what public interest content it delivers for the state monies it receives. Ofcom has quite simply failed to meet their obligation to push ITV to find alternatives.

This decision will I believe come back to haunt both ITV and Ofcom as they will cede local news programming entirely to the BBC. Eventually this will cause ITV's share of viewers to fall even more dramatically - something at a time of declining advertising revenues they can ill afford.

There is a second factor that really annoys me. Many of you will know that it has taken a great deal of time to get the wider Stroud district into the same broadcast area. For years some of us heard rather more about Birmingham, Oxford and Nottingham than we ever did about Gloucestershire. Now if and when this proposal goes through we may get used to hearing about Plymouth, St Ives and Exeter than our own vicinity.

Sadly this appears to be a done deal. I have and will continue to protest on behalf of viewers and particularly those excellent journalists and broadcasters who stand to lose their jobs.

This, quite simply is too big and diverse a region to think that it can be best served by one overarching news service.

In due course of time ITV must re-think their fixation with savings in their news provision. In the short run the situation will be bleak. Let us hope that the BBC will not follow suit. Though they will get more viewers in the short run there is always the danger of a race to the bottom and we deserve more than that.