Question to the Department for Digital, Culture, Media & Sport:

To ask the Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport, with reference the Government's December 2025 BBC Charter Review Green Paper proposing the expansion of the Local Democracy Reporting Service, what steps the Government is taking to ensure that independent academic researchers are able to access the comprehensive set of content produced by that scheme.

The content produced by Local Democracy Reporting Service journalists is made freely available to the BBC and partners to the BBC’s Local News Partnerships scheme. The BBC is operationally independent of the government and the process for determining Partnership eligibility is therefore a matter for the BBC itself.