The BBC Trust, governing body of the publicly-funded broadcaster, on Friday rejected proposals by Mark Thompson, BBC director general, for the development of BBC Local, a £68m network of local websites which commercial newspapers and radio stations had said would ruin them.

”The right thing to do is not to come back to it [BBC Local] for a good long while,” Mr Thompson, the director general of the BBC said on Friday. ”We should move on and not return to it for the foreseeable future.”