Can Community Radio Keep Local Audio Alive?

At a time when the survival of local radio in the UK is under threat, community stations offer an alternative for hyperlocal news and much-needed training. But how can these platforms be made more sustainable in the digital age? And can they play a role in keeping local audio alive?

Community station Radio Jackie is a stalwart purveyor of local news to South West London; it holds the title of the capital’s oldest independent radio station. However, during the Covid-19 pandemic, it lost some 80 per cent of its income. They weren’t the only ones; scores of small community radio stations faced closure as advertising fell off a cliff and costs became insurmountable.

But Radio Jackie knew that their listeners needed radio more than ever at this time. Their busy programme allowed them to bounce back despite cuts — but it hasn’t been easy.

Can Community Stations Keep Hyperlocal News Afloat?

Radio listenership boomed as remote working kept more of the population in their homes. This benefited the commercial sector in particular, which saw a record 36.3 million average weekly listeners in the first three months of 2020, according to the UK’s radio audience researcher RAJAR.

The subsequent rebirth of commercial radio since the pandemic has underlined the difficulties of keeping local radio alive. “We can’t compete with commercial radio [for income],” says Radio Jackie’s station manager Steve Mowbray. “I think that the days of radio, as I know them, will be over in ten years.”

Community radio is different to commercial radio, though; the steadily rising third sector of the industry, after local commercial and local BBC radio, has emerged as a much-needed source of hyperlocal radio across the UK. The UK Community Radio Network (UKCRN) now estimates a total of more than 350 community stations, filling the gap left by a dwindling focus on traditional “local” news and topics across the commercial and BBC radio sectors.

Research into community radio shows it has clear benefits — a study into radio listeners during the 2020 pandemic by the University of Northampton and UKCRN demonstrated that local community radio has an “overwhelmingly positive” impact on health, employment and community cohesion.

“With community radio, they’re really being spoken to all the time,” says chief researcher Dr Alison Hulme, who explains that participants would even be more likely to trust their local community station than national stations. Yet this vital sector faces consistent underfunding.

BBC And Commercial Cutbacks Stations

Local radio has long been under threat. In 2020, Bauer rebranded some 50 local stations to remove their local identity, replacing more than 40 local breakfast shows to form super regions for radio. It followed a move from Global just a year earlier to cull local breakfast shows on Capital, Heart, and Smooth. More broadly, hundreds of local commercial stations have closed over the past 20 years.

At the same time, the most traditional form of local radio offered by the 39 BBC stations has reduced following unpopular £500 million-saving job cuts in 2022, where the local radio services merged and there were cutbacks on programming.

Then, in September 2024, a spokesperson announced that they “expected to see an overall reduction of around 500 BBC public service roles by March 2026.” As the BBC enters negotiations with the government over the future of the licence fee after the end of the current charter period in 2027, the role of local radio will once again be reconfigured.

Once the hub for local radio, the BBC’s cuts to its local stations have been keenly felt throughout the industry. Of the total license fee, MPs in support of the National Union of Journalists (NUJ) found that just £7.60 is spent on local radio.

For its part, the BBC says it cares deeply about local reporting. Chris Burns is the controller of local audio commissioning for BBC England and says the organisation has invested more in online platforms to augment the offer of BBC Local Radio.

He adds that despite widespread cuts, local radio remains important to the BBC. “Your local radio station is your front door to the rest of the BBC,” he says, adding the BBC works closely with the Community Media Association and local stations: “They are much more localised than we can ever be. So I think we can both be good partners for each other.”

For some, though, this is still a “worrying approach” of cuts that has significantly reduced the breadth of programmes offered. Laura Davison is the NUJ’s general secretary, an organisation which ran a campaign to ‘Keep BBC Radio Local‘, garnering support from MPs across party lines and London Mayor Sadiq Khan.

“We continue to engage with the broadcaster over our concerns and have vocalised our opposition to proposals for new digital stations using funding from licence-fee payers,” says Laura. “To thrive, local radio requires greater investment and commitments to ensure its sustainability and accessibility by all those who trust its journalism.”

Stagnant Government Funding For Community Radio

However, for Steve, who maintains Radio Jackie’s continued all-day programme of light-hearted breakfast news shows, music programmes and local traffic alerts, “there is still an appetite [for community radio].” For local radio leaders like Steve, survival is about a combination of relatability to a community of listeners and a heritage in the local area. But there remains a question of how it’s funded.

The main source of grant funding for community stations is currently the Community Radio Fund, allocated by the Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) and managed by Ofcom. For the 2024/25 period, the fund offered a total of £400,000. Distributed in grants, this fund supports non-profit, Ofcom-licensed community stations.

However, funding has remained stagnant since 2005, despite rising inflation. According to the founders of UKCRN, Martin Steers and Nathan Spackman, each community station needs anywhere from £1,200 to £30,000 a year to run, which covers running costs and some staff — with most work done on a volunteer basis. They also emphasise that the sector has seen unprecedented growth since it formally began twenty years ago, expanding from an initial cluster of about 12-15 stations to some 350 today.

The limitations on how exactly stations can spend their grant money are equally a cause for concern amongst community radio leaders who can’t afford staff. DCMS grants are allocated for specific projects, rather than contributing to general running costs — of which community radio stations are in dire need.

“It becomes a difficult vicious circle that I’m seeing most stations in with not having members of staff,” explains Nathan, vice-chair of the Welsh Community Radio Network, alongside co-founding UKCRN. “It makes it really hard to sustain the station, because paying your own bills or your day job takes priority over running your radio station.”

Aradhna Tayal Leach, managing director of UK audio charity Radio Academy, advises stations to diversify income streams and harness social media and online platforms. “Grants are becoming harder and harder to secure,” says Aradhna. “Government funding has dropped. Nobody can really rely on one single source of funding.”

Donations could present a crucial alternative funding source — but, again, it takes time and resources. “You can’t put radio behind a paywall because it’s free to consume,” adds UKCRN’s director, Martin. “So I think there is an untapped opportunity to try and facilitate audience support.”

However, some changes are on the horizon. In December 2024, the DCMS announced new measures to generate growth and greater financial sustainability in community radio. These amendments will come into effect in April 2025 and include the removal of a £15,000 cap on advertising and sponsorship income for the majority of community stations, and the renewal of over 300 community radio stations’ licenses for a further ten years.

Commenting on the new measures, Stephanie Peacock, minister for sport, media, civil society and youth, said they were “a clear signal that this government has community radio’s back and we want it to grow and thrive for years to come.”

However, while these measures will allow stations to generate more money to reinvest in their operations, UKCRN campaigners are now asking for new rounds of analogue licensing and have long demanded a rise in the Community Radio Fund.

Martin, who is also Station Manager at NLive Radio in Northampton, cites the “final death” of local radio and changes to local BBC programming as two major shifts in the radio landscape. “In the last 15 years, more and more local news has happened within community radio,” he says of the sector’s burgeoning role.

Who Is Tuning Into Community Radio?

“Community ought to be the future, but it needs to be done well,” says media transformation specialist and radio broadcaster Chrissie Pollard. The former BBC radio and TV presenter has decades of experience on and off the mic, and currently volunteers as a presenter on Dorset’s Forest FM.

Chrissie argues that Ofcom is held back by a fear of commercial stations, which may be threatened if community stations receive more funding and advertising. “Community radio has no idea if it has a big audience or a little audience. And I do think that’s because of Ofcom — they won’t do it because of upsetting the commercial stations.”

RAJAR’s listings of audience figures could provide a crucial insight into listener rates for community stations and their funders, and is readily used by BBC and commercial radio stations. In their latest sector-wide national report, RAJAR found that 87 per cent of the UK’s adult population are tuning in to their selected radio stations.

BBC Local radio received just 4.6 per cent of the weekly listening share in its area, but its weekly reach is at its highest level since September 2023. While not yet overtaking BBC figures, local commercial radio nonetheless accounted for 27.2 per cent of the national listening share each week.

Voice FM in Southampton is one of the only RAJAR-listed community stations, clocking in an average of 10.4 hours a week per listener as per RAJAR’s latest quarterly listening report.

But RAJAR is inaccessible to most community stations, explains Nathan, who is also operations director and host of a community radio station, Bro Radio, which broadcasts through the Vale of Glamorgan, South Wales.

He estimates that a RAJAR subscription to track listener rates would amount to anywhere between £10–12,000, something which community stations on an income of about £30,000 can rarely justify.

What Will The Future Of Community Radio Look Like?

A lack of legacy planning may be what scuppers community stations. In the wake of closures including Hermitage FM and Carillon Radio in North West Leicestershire, Gloucestershire’s Severn FM, and Skyline Gold in South Hampshire, it is the retirement of long-running small teams that indicates that there is no one else left to keep the programmes on air.

To ensure that a community radio can progress to the next generation and continue to be a “training ground” for aspiring radio journalists, researchers highlight the widening ability of a station’s programmes. By combining podcasting, social media promotion, and presence on local DAB platforms, a community station will aim to reach a wider demographic beyond the traditional, older-skewing radio owners and commuters on their car journeys.

Rod Maxwell, presenter of The Late Late Lunch Show at Radio Alty in Altrincham, Greater Manchester, looks positively towards the future of community radio. “As long as there are people who have got the time and the commitment to making local community radio work,” he says. “But it’s exactly the same as if you’re running any voluntary group in your area.”

“It relies on those people who are working, sometimes full-time jobs, but for no money,” adds Rod. “You need enough of the community around you to support you and to help fund it.”