A national project set up to help local investigative journalism in the United Kingdom is set to be replicated overseas.

The Bureau Local was founded 18 months ago by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, and has established a journalistic infrastructure enabling over 750 journalists, technologists, community-minded citizens and specialist contributors to work together on different stories.

The network has published over 185 exclusive local stories and revealed the power new voters had in flipping seats ahead of the 2017 snap election, the cuts to domestic violence refuges across England, the councils heading toward financial crisis and through the building of its own database, the number of homeless deaths across the UK.

Now the Bureau is helping German non-profit organisation Correctiv launching its own scheme based on the model called Correctiv.Lokal.

David Schraven, publisher of Correctiv, said, “we are inspired by the success of the Bureau Local. It is a brilliant idea to combine local reporting on a multi-town basis with great data journalism at a national level.

“We hope our adoption of this model in Germany will be as successful as it has been in Britain.”

He added: “We hope our cooperation with the Bureau of Investigative Journalism will grow. It is important to keep strong relationships between journalistic organisations in Europe.

“We need to understand what the real problems in Europe are and where the solutions could be. We need partnership.”