Surf 107.2 recently narrowed the range of listening choice by dropping a number of its specialist music shows in favour of more shallow and mainstream material.

We already have one mainstream commercial radio station locally - Southern FM - and it's doing very well for itself. Southern responded to the arrival of Surf by becoming noticeably more hip than it used to be, which has done it no harm at all.

Surf has reacted to this challenge, not by forging a clear identity for itself as something different, but by becoming more like Southern - as loud, brash and commercial as it can afford to be as the poor relation.

With Southern Counties Radio in remote Surrey most of the time, we are getting less of a local service from the BBC than we used or ought to. At the end of the day it is cheaper for the BBC to broadcast endless pensioner phone-ins from Guildford than to create original programming in Brighton for more than three hours a day.

The decision to delocalise Radio Brighton into Radio Sussex and then even further into Southern Counties Radio was taken centrally in London by BBC officials with no account of local preferences or wishes.

We will never get away from this pattern of impoverishment until we have some more stations here. These would be non-profit making, arranged with the aim of providing public service broadcasting, offering facilities and airtime for a diversity of new talent, musical tastes, opinions, ideas and artistic performances completely overlooked at the moment.

With the Radio Authority now proposing a form of access radio as the next stage in development, Brighton is the ideal place for this sort of alternative service to begin. We really deserve better radio than we are getting at the moment.

-Norman McLeod, Preston Road, Brighton