Nottinghamshire Live is again calling on Nottinghamshire County Council’s Reform UK leadership to end its ban on the publication after a major element of it was lifted. A private meeting between two journalists and senior Reform politicians at the county council on Monday (September 29) saw an important element of the Nottinghamshire Live ban being lifted just over a month after it was first introduced.
Yet many elements of the ban still remain in place, affecting Nottinghamshire Live’s ability to cover the biggest authority in our area on behalf of hundreds of thousands of council tax payers. The ban was first confirmed on August 26 and has seen Nottinghamshire Live, along with the three BBC-funded local democracy reporters we manage, being denied interviews with county council leader Mick Barton.
Nottinghamshire Live has also been taken off the county council’s distribution list for press releases and will not be invited to any publicly-funded council events. The meeting on Monday means this ban has now been lifted for the BBC-funded local democracy reporters we manage, but remains in place for the rest of the Nottinghamshire Live team.
The ban was first introduced due to unhappiness from Reform’s county council leadership about an article on local government reorganisation, which contained a claim that those not voting for Councillor Barton’s preference on the issue could be suspended. The claim was put to the councillors concerned and to Councillor Barton himself and none of them took the opportunity to publicly deny it before publication.
The ban was seemingly watered down weeks after it was first introduced. The county council initially said Nottinghamshire Live would be banned from speaking to Councillor Barton and any of his councillors, but the council leader then said the ban only applied to himself.
The three local democracy reporters managed by Nottinghamshire Live will now be added back to the authority’s press mailing list and will be able to engage in interviews with Reform councillors, as well as receiving invitations to events. The same will not be true for any other Nottinghamshire Live journalists.
We are again calling for Reform UK’s Nottinghamshire leaders to lift the ban in full. The continuation of the ban in any form is affecting our scrutiny of a taxpayer-funded authority with a budget of over £1 billion, covering a population of 800,000 people by delivering vital services ranging from schools to social care.
The situation has been condemned by Prime Minister Keir Starmer, a cross-party group of former Nottinghamshire County Council leaders, Nottinghamshire MPs and the 43,000 people at the time of writing who have signed a petition calling for the ban to be reversed. The ban was even mentioned in the US Congress when Reform leader Nigel Farage was grilled on the issue during a discussion on freedom of speech.
The lifting of the ban for our local democracy reporters is a welcome step in the right direction. Yet for full public transparency to be restored, Reform must go further – and fast.
