Bristol Cable fought and won three campaigns

VaselineJune 24, 2024

0 4 minutes read

Bristol Cable fought and won three campaigns

For our 10th anniversary, we’re collecting some of our best work. Here we highlight some of the campaigns that Cable has run to improve the lives of people in the city and how you can help us continue by supporting our work.

The Cable turns 10 in July! To celebrate and demonstrate what we have been able to achieve with the support of our members, we are publishing a series on the milestones of our work over the past 10 years. Here’s to another decade, with your support.

One of the best things about being a membership organization is the direct connection we have with the people who support us. We may ask members and the general public, through our internal subscription system, to respond to our notices about what you would like to see on Cable.

We’ve often launched our campaigns this way. The people of Bristol told us what was important to them – justice, housing, the climate crisis – and we responded by campaigning on these issues. Here are some examples of campaigns we’ve worked on that came out the other side with tangible impact or success. (Plus, what’s next in Cable’s campaign plans!)

Remove the bailiffs

Cable’s 2018 “Boot Out Bailiffs” campaign came about after we asked our members at that year’s AGM if they wanted us to push for policy and political change that would benefit large numbers of people in the city. Members overwhelmingly voted that they should, and the Boot Out Bailiffs campaign was the first to be launched.

Bristol City Council was using a private company to send hammers to people’s doors if they fell behind on their council tax. After the campaign, the council announced plans to pilot a new “ethical” debt collection model that emphasizes early intervention, affordable repayment plans and advice. They are committed to using only agencies where people would not berather than not being able to pay.

Bailiffs were used 36% less in 2018 than in 2017, meaning 2,000 fewer Bristolians were visited by the hard ones, saving thousands of low-income residents suffering and hundreds of enforcement fees .

We also followed the story in 2023 to see how the situation developed five years later – and again when we discovered that the council had passed more than 2,000 council tax arrears over a six-year period to enforcement agencies months.

Independent. Investigative. Indispensable.

Investigative journalism strengthens democracy – it’s a necessity, not a luxury.

The Cable is Bristol’s independent investigative newsroom. Owned and operated by more than 2,500 memberswe produce award-winning journalism that digs deep into what’s happening in Bristol.

We are on a mission to become sustainable and our first target is to increase our membership income by 50% within 12 months. Can you help us get there?

Join Cable today

In disrepair: Bristol’s broken tenancy system

The housing crisis is one of our city’s most pressing issues, affecting almost everyone, whether you have a mortgage or rent. But over the past decade, the private rental system has seen a sharp rise in prices and a worsening of conditions, with bidding wars for substandard housing becoming the norm.

Over the decade we’ve been reporting, renters in the city have increasingly reached out to the cable about how unfeasible it has become to live here, and so was born our “In Disrepair” series on the landscape private rents in Bristol.

Last year, after sharing many years of reporting with the council’s Living Tenancy Committee, we were cited in a council motion as informing some of their resulting engagements. In particular, Green councilor Tom Hathway pointed out:

“The Cable highlighted the success of a rogue landlord database in London and actions on the motion now include reviewing enforcement policy and maintaining a public database of rogue landlord enforcement in Bristol if the government’s proposed landlord portal it does not materialize.”

Kill the Bill: Correcting the record

In 2021, Bristol again made national headlines after several protests related to the Police and Crime Bill, known as the “Kill the Bill” protests.

There was a fair amount of misinformation at the time: both police and protesters blamed each other for sparking the violence, and a police spokesman claimed that several officers were seriously injured, with broken bones and a lung perforated After several local Bristol outlets and protesters disputed this, Avon & Somerset Police withdrew the claim.

Our reporter Matty Edwards, who was there for several Kill the Bill protests, wrote an editorial for The Guardian outlining the order of events and setting the record straight. Since 2021, we have continued to report and uncover the consequences, which have seen many young people, usually first offenders, jailed for several years for the most serious riot charges the police could bring.

This included a Bristol Unpacked episode in which Neil Maggs interviewed Jasmine York, who was jailed for arson:

We continue to cover the consequences of the Policing and Crime Act sentences. You can read all our coverage here.

What’s next?

Even in our reporting, outside of a dedicated campaign, we are able to make an impact. For example, we revealed the name of a local cowboy builder who was running away from Bristolians, scaring him into returning money to some victims. A year later he was in court for fraud and was fined.

This year, we are working on a new campaign: Together for Change.

Knife crime has a devastating effect on the communities it affects. Never has this been clearer than what has happened so far in Bristol this year. In just a few weeks in late January and early February, four teenagers in the town lost their lives.

Together with three other media outlets in Bristol, Cable launched the ‘Together for Change’ campaign to better understand the social deprivation that leads to knife crime, to look at the actions of those in power working to alleviate the problem and to lobby for long-lasting change. not only to reduce knife crime but also to develop better social security for young people.

This work is ongoing and you can support it by becoming a member or Patron. The Bristol Cable is free to read in print and online, but quality journalism is expensive and free to members only.

Join today to support another 10 years of campaigning journalism for Bristol. #JoinTheCable

VaselineJune 24, 2024

0 4 minutes read

Remove the bailiffs

Independent. Investigative. Indispensable.

In disrepair: Bristol’s broken tenancy system

Kill the Bill: Correcting the record

What’s next?

Vaseline

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