Community radio in the United Kingdom

This article needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. Find sources: "Community radio in the United Kingdom" – news · newspapers · books · scholar · JSTOR (April 2023) (Learn how and when to remove this message)

In the United Kingdom, community radio refers to a system of licensing small, micro-local, non-profit radio stations, which started in 2002. In its early days, the pilot scheme was known as access radio. New legislation paved the way for this additional tier of radio, starting in 2005, and hundreds of community stations have since been set up. Unlike commercial radio licensing, which is generally advertised to cover a specific region, community radio stations are usually limited to broadcast areas smaller than commercial or BBC local stations, nominally within a 5 kilometres (3.1 mi) radius of their transmitter.^[1]