Culture Secretary’s announcement is welcome but there is always more to do
Culture Secretary’s announcement is welcome but there is always more to do
It started with an email on a Saturday evening in January. The situation was urgent, the impact was serious, the need was pressing.
Could the ECHO help? It’s a question that’s been asked thousands of times. Tens of thousands – maybe more. It’s been asked on the phone, in person, through Facebook messages and handwritten letters. And thousands of times – tens of thousands, maybe more, every day since 1879 – the answer has been yes. We can help.
We can help campaign for changes to the law on a national scale. We can help raise funds in the battle to protect vital services across Merseyside. We can help highlight substandard housing, rogue traders, campaigns on speeding or litter or pavement parking.
We can help connect people who have a worthy cause with the most generous people you could hope to meet – ECHO readers, who unfailingly show up with donations and support whenever a story of someone in need makes the headlines.
On this occasion, back in January, the request was from a care company with 26 migrant workers at immediate risk of losing their jobs and being forced to leave the country within weeks. This wasn’t because of anything they’d done wrong.
They were here legally, working hard to support some of our most vulnerable people. Doing everything even those who campaign for ever-more stringent legislation around migration, and champion fairness in the system, say they want.
And yet, because of a possible mix-up over paperwork (subsequently cleared up) at the charity, Caring Connections, which employed them, they faced losing everything.
As a journalist you need a healthy scepticism. Not every story is quite as it seems at the outset, and it’s our job to get to the bottom of the information we receive. On this occasion it seemed certain there must be another explanation. Perhaps it was at the Home Office where the mix-up had taken place. Perhaps the letter warning of such dire consequences had been sent in error.
But no. It was, genuinely, the case that 26 blameless workers were facing the prospect of deportation.
Reporter Ben Haslam picked up the investigation, speaking to the staff members and hearing their individual stories.
There is so much noise surrounding what we lazily term the “immigration debate.” Beneath the headlines, the facts (often not actually facts) and slogans, there are people. In this case, not just the people who’ve come to make a life here but the Merseysiders they work to support. This was a situation with no winners.
Thankfully, after we highlighted the story and the carers’ local MP Anneliese Midgley raised the issue, the Home Office reinstated the charity’s sponsor licence – meaning the 26 could stay. This is one example of the power of the local media but there are hundreds of others, every day, in newsrooms up and down the country.
It is a privilege to be the place people in Merseyside come to for help. It is our duty to highlight injustice, and an honour to have told the story of the city we love for 147 years and counting.
Regional media has never been more important. So we broadly welcome the announcement today from Culture Secretary Lisa Nandy of a new Local Media Strategy to help promote innovation, and particularly to encourage more young people to engage with journalism careers.
Government recognition of the role of the regional media in our national life, and practical support for us to keep growing across all the many platforms where we meet our readers, is good news. Nowhere is that link between a media organisation and its community stronger than in Liverpool.
We are the biggest-selling regional newspaper in England, and we were delighted to have been presented with four awards at the Regional Press Awards in London last week. We reach people in more places than ever online, with growing audiences on platforms including YouTube and TikTok which allow us to tell stories differently. And it’s been particularly pleasing to see how many people have given our Premium subscription service a try. You can find out more about that here.
We are not complacent, and there is always more to do. Sometimes that connection with the city can lead to criticism. Often that will be fair, at other times it won’t. But we’re big enough and old enough to understand that we’re trusted to get things right, and bearing the city’s name on our masthead is not to be taken lightly.
Government support is one thing, but it’s the support of the people of Merseyside on which the ECHO has always drawn its strength. The least we can do in return is to help out where we can.
