Sarah Booker-Lewis
Sarah Booker-Lewis focuses on how local political decisions are made and what they mean in practice for people and places. She reports as a local democracy specialist, using detailed coverage of Brighton and Hove City Council and other accountable bodies to make complex procedures, votes and policies clear to the public. Her work is distinguished by close attention to council committees and documents, and by a consistent effort to connect formal decisions to everyday consequences for residents, businesses and community groups.
Council meetings and local democracy
Sarah is the local democracy reporter at Brighton and Hove News, covering Brighton and Hove City Council and democratically accountable organisations. She routinely reports from full council, cabinet and overview and scrutiny committees, explaining the rules, the arguments and the outcomes around issues such as planning reforms, budget decisions and governance arrangements.
Her recent pieces range from debates over greater council transparency, to challenges over the independence of scrutiny after casting votes block reviews, to disputes over planning rule changes described as an “affront to democracy”. She consistently foregrounds motions, amendments, call-ins and petitions, showing how opposition parties, backbench councillors and members of the public use formal mechanisms to influence policy. Through the Local Democracy Reporting Service contract retained by Brighton and Hove News, her coverage is shared with partners including the BBC, regional newspapers and local broadcasters, extending the reach of her detailed reporting on town hall politics.
Planning, housing and the built environment
A large part of Sarah’s reporting focuses on how council decisions reshape the city’s housing, streets and public spaces. She covers planning committee agendas and reports on proposals such as converting former council-run nurseries and old school buildings into flats or temporary housing, creating large shared houses, and building new blocks of “affordable” homes on former commercial sites. Her stories follow schemes like 42 new flats replacing Victorian cottages, art supplies stores becoming multi-storey housing, and derelict pubs turning into residential developments, tracking each through the planning process and capturing councillors’ concerns over design, density and community impact.
She also reports on policy tools around housing, including tighter rules for short-term lets such as Airbnbs, ombudsman decisions ordering compensation over poor cleaning in council blocks, and disputes over communal laundries in social housing. Even in pieces about specific sites, she links individual applications back to wider themes of housing need, temporary accommodation, and the balance between residential use and commercial or community space.
Licensing, nightlife and local businesses
Sarah regularly reports on licensing decisions and their effect on nightlife and small businesses. Her coverage includes applications from social clubs seeking to sell alcohol, coffee shops looking to extend into evening restaurant trade with drinks licences, and new venues combining retail and residential space. She follows the progress of these cases through licensing committees, documenting objections, conditions and refusals, and showing how public safety, noise, saturation policies and local economies are weighed against each other. She also reports on the relationship between the council and the city’s nightlife, including stories in which operators of gay venues and other entertainment businesses call on councillors to support and protect the sector.
Across these pieces, she gives space to business owners’ voices and sets their experiences within the framework of licensing law, local policy and political priorities.
Transport, accessibility and social care
Transport schemes and their impact on disabled and older residents are a recurring strand in Sarah’s work. She reports on red route proposals in main roads and their implications for loading, parking and blue badge holders, as well as concerns about uneven paving, street clutter and electric vehicle charging points affecting accessibility. Her stories often originate in council motions or committee debates that seek to adopt a “disabled-first” approach, and she traces how these motions are handled through the council’s structures.
In social care, she covers decisions to close facilities such as Wellington House day centre, recording protests from relatives and carers, last-ditch call-ins by opposition councillors, and decisive votes in overview and scrutiny committees.
She also reports on education and equality, including council papers on how disadvantaged pupils still struggle to match better-off peers and decisions by primary schools to cut their intake in response to falling rolls. Across these topics, she focuses on how policy choices affect vulnerable groups and how elected members account for those impacts.
Local democracy reporting and recognition
Sarah’s role as a local democracy reporter is backed by long experience in local journalism, including work as a reporter, chief reporter, production editor, web editor and trainer of journalists. She has worked in local news since the late twentieth century and has spent years teaching and mentoring new reporters alongside her own reporting. Her local democracy coverage has earned national recognition, including the Local Democracy Reporter of the Year award in 2025 and previous honours for her use of social media to cover general elections in Brighton and Hove. Through the Local Democracy Reporting Service, her council reporting is carried by outlets such as the BBC, The Argus, Sussex World and local radio stations, giving consistent town hall coverage to audiences across multiple platforms. Her journalism is characterised by diligence, balance and detailed explanation of council processes, making her a key interpreter of local political decision-making for a broad public.
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