Thanks Slippery Pete, that makes a lot of sense. I guess I'd always assumed that most of that sort of thing was automated these days, I'm not entirely convinced by reducing the area from 20,000ft to 10,000ft it would really save them that much time but it sounds like you're in the know.
It seems though that whilst we might represent a small percentage of the aviation community but are the ones most in need of such services as we don't have large flight planning departments behind us.
I'd also be interested in seeing where these extra resources have been diverted to and am surprised that a bigger deal hasn't been made out of this, considering it's a reduction in services. Although TAFs are generally more useful in terms of safety and increasing their accuracy and hopefully their frequency would be very useful it seems like that hasn't really happened and that overall they've just done this as a cost cutting measure. I'm still seeing Prob 30s that never come about, which are issued in the morning with no adjustments made throughout the day at all to common locations which makes me feel like the TAFs frequency and accuracy have still not been increased or improved.