Hannah Richardson

Hannah has covered attempts to topple a mayor, coronavirus, our Queen’s death, the cost-of-living crisis, a local election which bucked the national trend and the defections and deselection of longstanding councillors betrayed by their own party. But the stories that have stayed with her most are those of local people.

Sharon reached out in February 2022 after Ian’s death, claiming his care home had been stealing from him for almost two decades. Hannah spent a year compiling evidence – including receipts for items unsuitable for Ian – and corroborating Sharon's claims with first a city council report and then an Ombudsman report. Sharon and Hannah spoke every few months, updating Hannah on the reports’ progress and Sharon's conversations with the council and the home. In February 2023, Sharon sent an advanced copy of the Ombudsman report. The relationship Hannah had built with Sharon enabled her to bring an anonymised report back to real people through her quotes, Ian’s photographs and Sharon's fears she was still missing answers. A month after publication, the city council reopened its internal review. Sharon and Hannah maintained contact and they spoke again after the review identified more failings. Hannah ran an exclusive on the second report. Since Hannah's articles, Sharon has been approached by the BBC and ITV. She also hopes to take the matter to court, and Hannah intends to follow that case. The article did 99k page views. A CQC report into Leicester hospitals’ maternity services revealed countless families were failed, including the parents of two-day-old Ansh Joshi. Because of Hannah's initial article, she was contacted by a charity and offered an interview with them. SHe decided to separate their story into a human interest piece on the family’s devastation and a second piece on calls for an external maternity review. While other platforms ran their story, focusing on calls for the review, Hannah believes her coverage went beyond and captured their raw grief and trauma. Their quotes brought to life the brutal pain of losing a child through failure by the people supposed to protect him.

Hannah revealed a proposed 70% rise in bills during a cost-of-living crisis for those on the city council’s heating network after spotting it in a council agenda and doing the maths. She later discovered an eventual 580% rise was on the cards after a councillor she had built trust with leaked an internal report to her. There was real worry about how people could afford this. Naz was among those who would be impacted by the rise. Her fear over how she would be able to pay the additional costs reflected the mood of all facing them and her quotes helped me highlight the human risk. Ultimately, pressure by councillors, backed by press scrutiny, led the council to rework the increases to a lower tariff. It would have been easy to have passed over this issue, it only impacted around 2,500 people. But for those 2,500 people, Hannah helped get a more positive result.