Democracy will suffer when local journalism disappears for good

Local reporters on local newspapers hold local authorities – who have a huge impact on people’s lives – to account

“Reality check. A standard HR exercise by BBC News,” said the BBC’s Huw Edwards, tweeting a picture of him and his mum swilling champers to show he’s going nowhere, after the broadcaster issued letters gauging interest for voluntary redundancy to its top presenting stars.

If only that were the case lower down the food chain, where the salaries don’t come close to the six figures he’s on. Young reporters covering local news commonly juggle the demands of paying off student loans and the increasingly difficult challenge of making rent.

It is understandable that the headlines focused on Edwards. He’s a star, and stars don’t often get handed papers offering voluntary redundancy, even from a cash-strapped corporation trying to save millions while under the close watch of the government.

But with the local elections fast approaching, it is the people on the ground who matter most. Edwards can be replaced. The impact further down the ladder will be far more severe.

Local reporters on local newspapers hold local authorities – who have a huge impact on people’s lives – to account. This is vital, particularly in cases where those local authorities have the capacity to behave very badly, as I’ve highlighted with respect to disability in the case of councils in York, Brighton, Hackney, Waltham Forest and more.

True, local authorities face real challenges as a result of central government starving them of resources. But they are also prone to arrogance and incompetence, and the two combined represent a lethal combination. Scandal is the inevitable result. Services suffer. The most vulnerable get hit hardest.

And yet, because local elections are typically characterised by low turnout and tend to serve more as mini-referenda on the government of the day than judgements on the performance of local councils, bad ones don’t get punished the way they should.

Local newspapers used to keep them honest. They sometimes still do. But they have been hollowed out. Their owners grew complacent, resting on their laurels until the internet arrived and forced drastic action.

Which leaves the BBC. There was a time local publishers were screaming blue murder as an ambitious and aggressive corporation sought to expand its reach, localising its digital publishing operation, driving its tanks onto the lawns of independent media.

Now, not so much. Is there even a battle when both sides are in retreat? Local radio and TV is also in rapid decline.

This morning I read a column in the East Anglian Daily Times, by Paul Geater. It was bemoaning the fate of “Look East”.

He said: “Am I the only person in this part of the world fed up with hearing about rows about trees in Wellingborough or closure plans for a factory in Corby?”

The latter pair are 100 miles and at least two hours drive (if you’re very lucky) from Ipswich. Local news this is not. Is a bulletin covering such a wide area going to pick up on a council scandal in, I don’t know, Bury St Edmunds? Some 71 miles from Wellingborough, an hour and a quarter in the car, if you believe Google’s wildly optimistic estimate of the travel time.

Local radio stations, meanwhile, are slashing their output, switching to “shared” programming in the afternoons. Which is, obviously, not local.

Answering Geater, the BBC’s Head of Content Production for East and London, Robert Thompson, talked about “modernisation”. (Maybe it’s due to having covered business for years, but when I see that word I immediately think “slash and burn”.)

It was only a few months ago that local broadcasters were being feted, having shown up their national colleagues by crushing Liz Truss. She nearly wrecked the economy, so they wrecked her premiership, and the economy was able to recover.

Would that happen to a future Truss? Would they get flayed for fouling up, or would they get an easy ride?

That’s the danger, isn’t it?

But Truss, really, was something of a sideshow compared to the day jobs of the presenters who took her to task. Jobs which involve covering what’s happening locally, keeping fingers on the pulse, and holding provincial powerbrokers to account as they did Truss.

Those local powerbrokers need it. There are too many parts of the country where there is no effective opposition in the council chamber; where councillors grow complacent, knowing their seats are safe almost regardless of what they do.

Britain has lately started to look like a country that doesn’t work very well. This is part of the reason why, and the decline in local journalism will make it worse. Rotten boroughs will stay rotten. Incompetence, and perhaps also corruption, will go unpunished.

Edwards, secure in his post, is an irrelevance to that. It’s very different with his lower-status, lower-paid colleagues. Licence fee payers need, and deserve, investment in local services – not just stars.