If Keir Starmer Wants to Avoid Government Misspending, He Should Pay Local Media to Expose It

If a single question can ever be a useful guide to understanding another person’s politics it is surely the perennial: “What policy would you introduce if you were prime minister for a day?” If the respondent says something about public spending and poverty, it’s safe to presume they are on the left. Tax cuts indicate a Thatcherite bent. Immigration, meanwhile, is the likely response from someone on the hard right. 

A more interesting question, though, is this: What policy would you introduce that would cost very little, cause minimal disruption and have an outsized impact? 

There’s an argument for scrapping the two-child benefit cap, though a sceptic might say £2.5bn still represents a lot of money. Abolition of the monarchy would, despite significant savings, upset some people and lead to a constitutional re-wiring unseen since Oliver Cromwell. Other proposals might include scrapping the House of Lords, or moving parliament outside London. Personally, I like all of the above – but they don’t meet our strict criteria. 

It’s a question I often ask myself,  accumulating a personal list over the years. There’s doubling councillors’ pay, while halving the number of them – the aim being to improve the calibre of local politics. Then there’s the proposition that everywhere should have local elections, at the same time, every four years (this would actually save money, in addition to increasing turnout – hence it’s probably too sensible to happen). And how about the idea that, if you want to own a UK media asset – say The Sun newspaper – you need to reside in the UK and pay tax here?

These are all good – or at least I like to think so. But there’s one proposal which outdoes all the rest for sheer impact: subsidies for local newspapers. 

We know less about local politics – things happening around us that directly affect our lives – now than during much of the last 150 years, due to the collapse of local news, particularly daily print papers. Ironically, despite the advent of social media, meaningful reporting on dodgy dealings and council screw-ups has been vastly diminished. Before the 2008 crisis, there were 13,000 journalists working in local media, today there are just 4,000.

Across the country, more than four million people live in news deserts, with places such as Gateshead and Bridgend having no local press at all. Inhabitants of such places may be barraged with content, but when it comes to valuable information concerning the world that surrounds them, there is silence. Port Talbot, in south Wales, lost its weekly newspaper in 2009. Awareness of local politics collapsed as a result, with researcher Rachel Howells documenting an almost 90% decline in reporting of local council and public meetings in the town between 1970 and 2013. The demise of local news is akin to turning off the lights when it comes to scrutiny of public officials and the decisions they make.

Occasionally you still catch a glimpse of what local reporting can do. In 2022, Portsmouth’s only local paper, The News, broke the story that a new border control site – ordered by the government and built with £7m of local money – had been unnecessary, and may even be demolished because it’s unlikely to ever be used. Within days, the story found its way into the national media. The sometimes abstract sense that the Tories were incompetent, particularly in relation to Brexit, was perfectly distilled in a powerful example. 

The border post story got the coverage it deserved (eventually) because of the scale of the screw-up, and because Portsmouth still has a paper. Yet slightly less jaw-dropping tales go unmentioned all the time – leaving our political debate less informed. Did you know, for example, that in the same city, Portsmouth, the outsourcing giant Colas demands £5000 to plant a single tree? Or that, when the council looked into resurfacing a playpark, and installing a new swing to make it accessible for disabled children, it was quoted £180,000? That’s enough to make any quantity surveyor faint – but because there aren’t enough local journalists to make these stories public, debates around value for money inevitably focus on the need for cuts rather than the astonishing idiocy of outsourcing. Good journalism is a necessary precondition for not only an informed public sphere, but effective, efficient government. One could even argue subsidies for local papers are an investment in exposing bad decision-making and reducing waste – thus ultimately saving the taxpayer money. The more I learn, the more firmly I believe that.

In the long term, I suspect many would be happy to pay for high-quality local journalism. In Norway, the government subsidises local papers. Norwegian consumers clearly see and understand the benefits, ranking as the population most willing to pay for news of 47 surveyed by the Reuters institute. Government assistance, therefore, should be seen as a foundation for innovation and excellence, rather than a replacement for consumer demand. We’ve tried the alternative for the last two decades – a laissez-faire approach – and it has been a social disaster. 

But how would we pay for it? After all, the parameters for this policy-wish include being cheap – and meaningful subsidies for local media would probably touch a billion pounds. Even if they are worth it in the long term, how do we fund them now? 

A first step could be to reduce the size of communications teams in the public sector. London’s Metropolitan Police, for example, has 92 people working in its media team. This is all the more absurd given that, with the demise of the Evening Standard as a daily paper, the capital doesn’t have a city-wide outlet capable of continuous news-gathering. Imagine if some of that money was redirected towards the likes of the Camden New Journal and Southwark News (maybe the Standard too – provided Evgeny Lebedev leaves) to not only do more ambitious journalism, but run events and build large communities around their work? 

The rest of the required funding could be recovered through taxes on Meta and Alphabet. After all, they have gobbled up digital ad revenue – which killed much domestic news in the first place. We are not talking massive sums for either company, perhaps no more than £150m each. It is tempting to also shift money from the BBC by reducing its podcast output (a Today podcast, really?) and the footprint of BBC Online. But making savings there should instead help repair BBC underfunding since 2010, and expand original newsgathering at a national level.

 For one billion pounds a year, we could revive not only the local news industry but scrutiny of decision-makers too. That isn’t optional if politicians are serious about ‘levelling up’, and effective politics outside the M25. I’m all for devolving powers in England – that includes having more metro mayors. But for that to really work we’ll also need a renaissance in local news.