The Local Democracy Reporter (LDR) scheme was launched in 2017 to address a growing democratic deficit: the shrinking capacity of local news providers to report on councils, mayoral offices, and public institutions. Funded by the BBC and administered through contracts with regional news organisations, the scheme has placed over one hundred and sixty reporters across the UK to cover civic affairs. It is widely acknowledged that this work helps maintain a basic level of accountability in public life. But when considered through the lens of civic and cultural democracy, and evaluated against the principles of the Foundational Economy, serious structural concerns emerge.
The Local Democracy Reporting Service (LDRS), has an annual budget of approximately £8 million. This funding supports a network of 165 journalists employed by various local and regional news organisations across the UK. These reporters are tasked with covering local authorities and other public institutions to ensure transparency and accountability in local governance.(BBC)
In December 2024, the BBC announced a 6.5% funding increase for the LDRS, effective from July 2025. This uplift is intended to reflect in a similar rise in the minimum salary levels for Local Democracy Reporters.(HoldtheFrontPage)
According to data obtained by the National Union of Journalists (NUJ), the BBC’s funding per LDR role is £38,299 outside London and £40,551 in London. These amounts are meant to cover all employment costs and expenses associated with each role.(nuj.org.uk)
Since its inception in 2017, the LDRS has produced over 440,000 stories for more than 1,100 different news outlets, highlighting its significant contribution to local journalism in the UK .(BBC)
The Public Interest News Foundation (PINF) has described, the UK has undergone a dramatic consolidation and desertification of local news. A once diverse and pluralistic local news landscape has been reduced to a handful of dominant commercial groups, operating under centralised, profit-driven models. This has led to vast areas of the country—both rural and urban—becoming news deserts, where local stories are under-reported or ignored entirely. Local journalists have been cut, newsrooms closed, and public interest reporting displaced by clickbait and content aggregation.
In this context, the LDR scheme risks functioning not as a means to revive civic journalism, but as a mechanism to prop-up a failing model—one that is increasingly reliant on indirect government subsidy, regulatory protectionism, and a centralised system of editorial and operational control. This creates a contradiction:
the public is funding a service that is supposed to strengthen democracy, but that service is being delivered by the very companies that contributed to its decline.
From a Foundational Economy perspective, this is a misuse of public value. Foundational services—like healthcare, transport, education, and yes, media—should be structured around principles of care, universality, and collective benefit. Foundational Media assumes that access to reliable, participatory, and inclusive journalism is a civic right, not a commercial afterthought. It calls for media infrastructures that are rooted in place, relationally accountable, and designed to sustain long-term community capacity, not short-term profitability.
Yet under the current LDR framework, contracts are overwhelmingly awarded to large commercial providers. These organisations operate with minimal local presence, rotating staff, and limited commitment to embedded civic relationships. Their priorities are shaped not by the needs of local residents, but by boardroom strategies to cut costs and centralise content production across vast regions.
This weakens the social gain of the scheme and sidelines the cultural and civic value that more participatory, place-based media providers offer. Community radio stations, independent news cooperatives, and civic journalism initiatives are already doing the work that the LDR scheme aspires to support. They convene public dialogue, build trust, and cultivate spaces of belonging. But these organisations are rarely invited to participate in the scheme, often excluded by procurement models that favour corporate scale over public value.
If we are to truly rebuild local democratic culture, then we need to shift our investment. The LDR scheme should no longer be seen as a patch for commercial collapse, but as a vehicle for systemic renewal. That means rethinking who delivers the journalism, how they are embedded in community life, and what role the public should play in shaping the civic conversation.
We must ask:
who is entrusted to tell the story of our civic life? Is it those who extract value from our communities—or those who live, work, and create within them?
To fulfil its democratic promise, the LDR scheme must align with a Foundational Media approach—supporting locally accountable, socially rooted, and democratically governed journalism. Only then can we move beyond a crisis of provision toward a shared culture of civic understanding and participation.