Hereford Today is an independent news and information site for Herefordshire. We read the public record and publish what is in it, and we keep the practical local pages accurate.
The county
Hereford, the county’s only city, sits on the Wye roughly in the middle. Leominster is north, Bromyard east, Ledbury south east, Ross-on-Wye south and Kington west on the border. Around 193,000 people live across a very large rural area, which means long distances to everything and a set of local concerns dominated by roads, rivers, farming and the state of the market towns. We name the actual town or village in every story.
One council for everything
Herefordshire Council has been a unitary authority since 1998. Planning, waste, highways, licensing, council tax, schools and social care are all its responsibility, so unlike most of England there is no question here about which body to ask. That also means its committee papers and registers are the single most useful record of what is happening in the county, and hardly anyone reads them.
What we work from
The council’s planning register and committee papers, licensing notices, police.uk crime data, HM Land Registry sold prices, Food Standards Agency hygiene ratings, Environment Agency flood warnings for the Wye, the Lugg and the Frome, and company filings in The Gazette. The condition of the Wye and its catchment turns up repeatedly in planning and environmental papers here, and we report what those documents say rather than characterising the dispute ourselves.
Tips and corrections
In a county this rural, residents almost always know first. Email hello@herefordtoday.co.uk with a tip, an event worth listing, or a correction. Tips are treated in confidence, and corrections are made quickly and noted on the page.
Hereford Today is part of Future Business Media. We are independent of the council and of everyone else we report on.