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

To ask the Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport, with reference to her Department’s press release entitled Future of news is local, says Culture Secretary, as she launches the first action plan to back local news in a generation, published on 17 March 2026, whether she is taking steps to ensure that Government advertising is allocated in an (a) equitable and (b) transparent manner.

The Government understands that many news publishers, particularly at the local level, are operating in a challenging advertising environment. In our recently published Local Media Action Plan, we announced plans to support local media outlets across the UK. This included our commitment to make the best use of local media in government advertising campaigns, where this helps us reach our target audience and is a good fit for each campaign.

We are planning a package of measures to fulfil this commitment, including supporting independent local radio and smaller online news publishers to develop standards to better measure their audiences, so they can compete more effectively in the advertising market and carry government advertising, and championing local media as a high quality channel for commercial advertising, by demonstrating its value to the government marketing community through case studies and allowing these to be shared more widely. Government Communications takes an audience first approach and carefully considers which platforms can help us reach those we need to speak to. It may be the case that these audiences are reachable through existing channels. We keep our approach to reaching audiences under regular review, and undertake assessments of platforms as needed.