Keep Longwave

BBC Radio 4 Longwave will come off the air in the early hours of Saturday 27th June, the BBC has announced – three months sooner than was previously anticipated. The move represents a final abandonment of the BBC’s longest-standing listener base, after just over 100 years of national coverage on longwave.

News of the shutdown date was uploaded to the BBC’s website on Monday 11th May.

Since the closure of longwave was mooted in March 2023, an international campaign has been underway to save it. More than 7500 supporters have so far signed a petition to keep Radio 4 Longwave, and 25 MPs have signed an Early Day Motion calling for its closure to be discussed in parliament. This is in addition to several more MPs writing to the BBC and to the Department of Culture, Media and Sport to raise awareness of the issue. Furthermore, our report Still Speaking to the Nations was handed to the BBC in June 2025, detailing a wide variety of reasons for retaining longwave and including tens of listener comments testifying to why the service is so important.

However, this campaign has fallen on deaf ears, and the BBC continues to push ahead with the closure of its oldest and most widely accessible platform, which can be heard nationwide and across much of Europe. In doing so, the BBC has signalled its disregard for listeners in rural areas under-served by other transmissions, listeners at sea and listeners abroad – including in Ukraine and Russia, where the longwave signal is uniquely able to penetrate without risk of censorship.

Unfortunately, the BBC has not yet responded to our report, or shared publically an ‘impact assessment’ that was supposedly being carried out in 2025 regarding the closure of longwave. Instead, the corporation continues to provide free advertising to purveyors of very energy-hungry ‘smart speakers’ and to push digital ways of listening, many of which are not accessible to much of longwave’s current listenership. The BBC’s interim Director-General, Rhodri Talfan Davies, has been contacted for comment and has not yet responded.

The Campaign to Keep Longwave continues to urge supporters to contact the BBC and to contact your MP to make your views known. We may have now only a matter of weeks to save this vital service.