Belong’s new report, Stronger Together: What We Know and Must Do About Cohesion, joins a growing stockpile of reports diagnosing the same deteriorating conditions: economic insecurity, resentment, racism, declining confidence in institutions, polarisation and a social-media environment that rewards heat over understanding.
The problem is no longer a lack of diagnosis. We have accumulated warnings, frameworks, inquiries and recommendations. We know that cohesion is weakened when people lack trust, voice, meaningful contact and reliable local information. We know that misinformation exploits institutional distance and social fracture.
What remains absent is the sustained, cross-sector commitment to build the civic infrastructure that prevents these problems from hardening.
This report should therefore not simply be welcomed. It should be read as further evidence of a policy failure: influential institutions repeatedly identify the symptoms of a broken information environment while declining to treat community, civic and independent media as a strategic and sustainable part of the remedy.
A Familiar Diagnosis, A Disappointingly Familiar Prescription
Belong is right about the severity of the challenge. Its account of online misinformation, hostility, polarisation and local authorities’ sense of powerlessness is recognisable to anyone working in local media or community development. Its call for reliable local information, trusted voices and better public dialogue also makes sense.
But the recommendations are too comfortable.
The proposed answers lean heavily on social contact, volunteering, sport, “difficult conversations”, digital literacy and further review of the social-media problem. These activities may have value. They are not, however, a serious substitute for rebuilding the information and democratic infrastructure that has been allowed to weaken across much of the country.
There is an important difference between identifying plausible good things and establishing that they will make a material difference at the scale of the problem.
The report repeatedly presents sport, volunteering and social contact as routes to cohesion. It gives examples of local initiatives and invokes the potential of the 2028 Euros. Yet it does not provide a sufficiently clear account of what works, for whom, in which circumstances, over what period, and with what measurable effect on misinformation, political trust, inter-group hostility or local democratic resilience.
The problem is not that sport or social contact are unhelpful. The problem is that they are asked to carry too much of the argument.
A football session can create a positive encounter. A volunteering scheme can build relationships. A community event can reduce isolation. But none automatically creates an ongoing local public sphere in which misinformation can be challenged, institutions scrutinised, conflicting experiences heard, and residents equipped to understand decisions affecting their lives.
Nor does the report show how short-term social-contact interventions survive when the funding ends, the convening organisation moves on, or the next flashpoint arrives.
Reviewing Social Media Is Not A Strategy
The report is also right to say that local authorities cannot redesign global platforms or control their algorithms. But its response risks turning that limitation into another justification for low ambition: more digital-literacy programmes, more skills, better rebuttal and implementation of wider government commitments.
Again, these are useful components. They are not a strategy in themselves.
Britain has now had years of reports acknowledging that social platforms profit from outrage, fragment audiences, accelerate misleading claims and weaken shared understanding. The policy answer cannot remain “review the issue”, improve people’s resilience and hope that trusted information becomes easier to find.
The question is what local institutions and communities can build in the space that platforms have damaged.
That requires practical experiments with alternative local information systems: community radio, local digital outlets, civic newsrooms, participatory journalism, neighbourhood correspondents, multilingual information networks, public-interest media partnerships and shared editorial infrastructure. It requires testing their contribution to trust, participation, media literacy and community resilience—not simply assuming that the established national providers will meet every local need.
Yet, Belong’s report barely enters this territory.
Community Media is Not an Optional Partner
The report says councils should support “trusted local media”, community organisations and respected local institutions. That is the right instinct, but it is a thin acknowledgement of a much larger need.
Community, civic and independent media should not be treated as useful partners to be contacted during a crisis or channels through which official information can be distributed. They are part of the local civic infrastructure that can make a community more capable before a crisis:
- They can provide trusted, context-rich information.
- They can surface local concerns before they turn into rumour or resentment.
- They can offer spaces where people are contributors rather than targets of messaging.
- They can connect schools, libraries, voluntary groups, health services, councils and residents.
- They can build practical media literacy by involving people in how information is made, checked and shared.
Most importantly, they can create a continuing local public sphere.
Treat Media as Foundational Infrastructure
The Foundational Media perspective starts from a simple proposition: access to trustworthy, independent and locally meaningful media is not a luxury, and not an optional cultural add-on. It is a public good, comparable in its civic importance to the systems that enable people to learn, participate, connect and care for one another.
In practical terms, that means recognising that community, civic and independent media can:
- Provide trusted, context-rich information in moments of uncertainty;
- Create dialogue across social, cultural, generational and political difference;
- Make institutions more visible, intelligible and accountable;
- Support participation, voice and media literacy through practice, not only instruction;
- Preserve local memory, cultural identity and lived knowledge; and
- Connect residents, voluntary organisations, services, schools, libraries and local democracy.
This is media as connective tissue across multiple domains: public health, housing, education, local government, youth work, culture, climate resilience, economic development and democratic participation. Influential organisations working on cohesion need to think at that level.
If cohesion is foundational, then the means by which people understand, discuss and shape the life of their community is foundational too.
The Green Paper Does Not Yet Meet The Test
The DCMS Green Paper, Watch This Space, recognises the relationship between trustworthy information, social cohesion and democracy. It acknowledges the role that local media can play in de-escalating tensions. It proposes action on the prominence of trustworthy news and media literacy.
But its practical scope remains limited. It is centred on public service media, television distribution, platform prominence and established news providers. It may improve the discoverability of trustworthy local news, but discoverability is not provision. Prominence does not create a newsroom, a community radio station, a civic publishing network, a local reporter or a participatory space for public dialogue.
There is still no dedicated community and civic media strand, no durable route to capacity funding, no programme to test locally accountable media models, and no framework for measuring their social value.
The result is a policy landscape that diagnoses the collapse of local trust while declining to invest seriously in the institutions that could help restore it.
Patience Is Wearing Thin
Media reformers have heard this language before: resilience, trust, participation, dialogue, literacy, partnership. These words are not wrong. But they become evasive when they are not matched by institutional change, investment and evidence of practical delivery.
After years of reports that identify the same failures and then go nowhere, patience is wearing thin.
Belong has influence. That creates a responsibility to do more than repeat a familiar set of socially agreeable interventions. Its future work should put community, civic and independent media at the centre of its account of cohesion; commission evidence on what locally rooted media infrastructure achieves in practice; and argue for sustained funding, shared governance and cross-sector partnerships.
The same challenge applies to DCMS, local government and every organisation that invokes social cohesion while overlooking the local media environment.
We do not need another report that tells communities to meet, talk, volunteer and play sport while the institutions that allow them to know one another, question power and make sense of their shared lives remain fragile or absent.
We need a serious programme of investment in foundational local media. Until that happens, the policy response to cohesion will remain incomplete.