The audience councils are one way--but by no means the only way--of trying to assess public opinion. People who are interested in the BBC and what it does are invited to become members of the various audience councils. They hold regular meetings, and the trustee who has responsibility for that regional nation attends. They have a wide-ranging remit to comment on the BBC's services, offer feedback to the trust, and raise questions with them.
I think the trust would be keen to emphasize that is not the only way in which we seek to gauge public opinion. We do regular polling. We do a lot of public consultation, as Daniel mentioned earlier, whenever we have a new proposal for a new service. We try very hard to get the public to take an interest in what we do.
That process has been absolutely transformed in recent years by BBC online. In the past--and I think this is a problem familiar to many public bodies--you would try to get the public to comment on something, do everything you could to contact them, and end up with perhaps half a dozen letters. Now several thousand people regularly email us, offering views on message boards right across the online site. We are not short of feedback from the public now, and that's an enormous advantage to us, even though sometimes, to be honest, we can create so much feedback that it becomes overwhelming. But that is very much better than the half a dozen letters we used to get in the past.