Seems they have quit long term forecasts....
This is almost certainly a bad piece of online journalism. I doubt _very_ much that the UKMO have abandoned generating LR forecasts. What they will likely have announced is reversion to the previous practice (from a few years back) of using it internally for development/verification purposes but not publicising its existence externally at all. So all that they may have abandoned is likely to be release of the forecast to the media.
For any non-UK readers, the problem has been a combination of the UKMO's bright idea of allowing their PR department to tart up the vanilla probabilistic forecast with terms such as the infamous 'barbecue summer' with the complete inability of UK media - including in this case the better quality ones - to explain the probability aspects of forecasting. As a result, when last summer turned out not to be a bumper year for barbecues, the UKMO were widely skewered by the media, even though at least some aspects of the underlying probability forecast were broadly correct.
