Contribution
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Dr Allin-Khan; it is great to see you at the top table, keeping these debates in order.
This is an important debate. The connection that Members have shown to their local titles speaks volumes about the significance that they hold in their communities. In my own town, titles such as the Oldham Evening Chronicle, The Oldham Times, Oldham Reporter and Manchester Evening News, as well as the wider ecosystem that includes Oldham Community Radio, ITV Granada and BBC North West, contribute to trusted, deep-rooted reporting that has told the story of Oldham, Chadderton and Royton for well over a century in some cases.
None of those outlets has been able to stand still; each has felt the pressures of a rapidly changing media landscape. In the UK, print news consumption has decreased from 59% of residents in 2013 to just 12% in 2025. I pay tribute to the journalists, editors, photographers, production teams and printers who keep that ecosystem alive; above all, I pay tribute to the local reporters who turn up to court hearings, local council meetings, planning committees and community gatherings. Even in an age of live streams, real understanding still comes from being in the room—hearing the side conversations, tone, and context before and after the formal debate has taken place. I also acknowledge the fantastic work of the more than 165 BBC-funded local democracy reporters whose work is shared across multiple titles. By August 2025 this scheme, funded by the licence fee, had produced more than 500,000 stories.
The transition to digital has been deeply challenging, however. In many towns and cities, the daily printed paper is no longer the anchor that it was. News now appears instantly and freely—and often without any attribution at all—across apps that are designed to capture attention and keep users locked to the platform, rather than directing them back to the journalist who created the work in the first place. Commercial advertising has also migrated to global platforms, but the platforms do not send anyone to cover Oldham council meetings, the magistrates court or community events.
It is a fact that the UK has historically been slow and timid in confronting such challenges. We have a highly regulated broadcast media and press in this country, yet multibillion-dollar platforms operate with standards far below those that we expect of our newspapers and broadcasters. A newspaper is a publisher; it takes full legal responsibility for its content and is subject to clear regulation, complaint mechanisms and restrictions on foreign influence.
Platforms such as X or Facebook are still not held to the same standards. Some are deliberately structured to amplify foreign influence and cause political disruption, without any consequence at all in the law. Yet those platforms rely on journalism created by others to hook in readers and give credibility to their feeds; there, it sits alongside misinformation, conspiracy theories, racism and online hate. A public good is used to normalise extreme content, which grooms and radicalises its audiences through the algorithms.
How do we sustain local media in a world where facts and fiction are constantly blurred? Other countries have recognised the challenge and have acted. In Australia, the news media bargaining code requires platforms such as Facebook and Google to negotiate payments to publishers or face binding arbitration. As a result, nearly 250 million Australian dollars a year now flow back into Australian journalism, supporting around 30 organisations and saving local titles that might otherwise have folded. Across the European Union, article 15 of the copyright directive requires platforms to pay for the use of news content. France, Germany and Spain now have frameworks ensuring that revenue is distributed from the tech giants. Those models are not perfect, but they prove that intervention is possible, workable and effective. They also mean that the UK now is an outlier.
There is no good reason why we cannot take action. The issue could be addressed by the Government introducing a proposal for a British news co-operative, jointly owned by regulated news organisations, empowered to negotiate collective licensing agreements with global platforms, backed by firm legislation and distributing the dividend to support a vibrant local press. If we take action, those titles that we have all talked about today will be something of the future as well as something of our proud past.