Ewan Petrie
Ewan Petrie connects political decisions in Scotland with the everyday pressures on households and public services. He is a political correspondent for STV News, covering cost of living, local government finance, party politics and major public sector questions. His reporting leans on insight pieces, explanatory features and broadcast interviews that follow policy from parliament chambers to council offices, hospitals and high streets.
Cost of living and household bills
A core strand of Petrie’s recent work tracks how rising bills and taxes filter through to households. In his “‘Awful April’” coverage he sets out how multiple household costs increase from the start of the month, linking national fiscal decisions to what families pay for council tax and other essentials.
Insight pieces on council tax hikes explain that local authorities face multi-million budget gaps, and detail how those pressures translate into some of the largest council tax rises for decades. He returns repeatedly to the theme of affordability, looking at how policy changes compound for ordinary households rather than treating each rise in isolation.
Petrie also follows anti-poverty interventions intended to blunt those pressures. His reporting on calls to increase Scottish child benefit to £40 a week focuses on campaigners’ arguments and the potential impact on low-income families. That work sits alongside coverage of homelessness charities pressing for more affordable homes, tying individual stories of housing insecurity to national and local policy responses.
Across these pieces, the through-line is a close link between political decision-making and concrete changes in people’s weekly budgets, housing options and financial resilience.
Local government, public services and social policy
A second focus is the strain on local government and frontline services as budgets tighten. Petrie has written successive insight articles on council tax rises across multiple Scottish councils, spelling out the scale of increases and what they mean for local services. He highlights how financial shortfalls at council level drive difficult choices about where to cut or invest, framing debates over tax hikes as part of a wider story about public service sustainability.
His reporting extends into the health and social care system, with pieces on ambulance delays and patients waiting hours for help illustrating the operational consequences of stretched services. In “Life on the frontline in Scotland’s fight against coronavirus” he co-authors a feature from a hospital setting, speaking to staff and patients about rising case numbers and the pressure on wards. These stories connect policy, funding and staffing decisions to lived experiences in emergency care, social care and housing, keeping the emphasis on how vulnerable people encounter the system at its limits.
Elections, parties and high-profile political battles
Petrie covers electoral politics with an eye on how national narratives are shaped by local concerns. In a recent piece he returns to a local community to ask voters what worries them ahead of an election, using doorstep conversations to test party campaign messages against everyday priorities. His reporting on internal party contests and challenges to long-held strongholds, such as coverage of a solo bid that threatens to turn an established seat into a political battleground, shows an interest in how individual candidates and local fractures can reshape wider party fortunes.
He also reports on high-profile cases where politics and the courts intersect. The article on Nicola Sturgeon giving her account of her husband’s embezzlement situates legal proceedings within the broader context of party leadership, public trust and governance. Earlier in his career he worked on major stories including high-profile trials and incidents for UK broadcasters, experience that informs his ability to handle complex, sensitive political stories involving criminal allegations and reputational risk.
Across these pieces he treats elections, party disputes and legal controversies as connected parts of a single political system, rather than isolated events.
Infrastructure, tourism and economic development
Petrie’s politics coverage often follows infrastructure and economic development projects that carry both local and national significance. He has reported on calls for the First Minister to award ferry replacement contracts to specific shipyards, detailing arguments about procurement, industrial strategy and the impact on island communities.
Coverage of the CalMac network and debates over how best to build new ferries links transport reliability, public spending and community needs.
His work also touches on tourism and regional economies, including stories on visitor booms pushing tourist hotspots to breaking point. Those pieces explore how increased footfall strains local infrastructure, services and environments, and how political decisions about investment, regulation and support shape the balance between economic opportunity and community impact. Beyond written articles, Petrie fronts broadcast segments such as interviews around the Greenock Ocean Terminal project on STV News at Six, speaking with local leaders and business figures about what major developments mean for jobs and the local economy.
This combination of infrastructure reporting and economic insight gives his political coverage a strong practical dimension, rooted in how large projects alter everyday life.
Before focusing on politics at STV News, Petrie worked as a broadcast journalist and producer for national and Scottish broadcasters, covering major incidents, trials and public interest stories. That background underpins a style of political reporting that moves between institutions, communities and front-line services, keeping attention on how decisions made by governments and councils play out on the ground.
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