Herefordshire parish with poorest behaviour named

Herefordshire’s most complained-about parish and town councils have been named.

Bartestree, west of Hereford, topped the new list of the parishes in the county which have provoked the most complaints against local councillors, with 14 out of the 23 total complaints recorded so far in the county since April.

These stemmed from a series of altercations involving a contentious playing field plan and failure to keep order at parish meetings last year.

A report of the monitoring officer’s investigation last autumn into the alleged code of conduct breaches at the parish put their total number at 19, of which 11 related to former chair of the council Coun Lin Hoppe.

Coun Hoppe has since resigned, describing the investigation as a “debacle based on fabrication and false assumptions”.

“The persecution continues unabated, another councillor has also resigned for similar reasons and there are likely to be two more resignations,” she said.

There have been other complaints about Bartestree’s councillors in previous years, the total since 2019 standing at 22, according to a list prepared for Herefordshire Council’s audit and governance committee next week.

Second on the list, and the county’s highest-placed town council, was Ledbury, with 19 allegations of breaches of councillors’ code of conduct since 2019.

Last June the town’s former deputy mayor John Bannister was rapped by the county monitoring officer for storming out of a meeting after being rude to a resident.

The only two other parishes with complaints running into double figures over the past five years are Walford parish council, with 17, and Llangarron, with 13.

Herefordshire Council only publishes details of complaints upheld by its monitoring officer. These number 41 going back to 2018, including two relating to county councillors.

This suggests that fewer than three in ten of the 134 total complaints against parish councillors made since 2019 were upheld.

In all Herefordshire has 137 parish councils, five town councils and one city council. Fewer than one in five of these has had a complaint against any of its councillors in the past five years, the figures show.