Rise in councillor complaints

The year to the start of April was a bumper one for complaints about councillors in Herefordshire, new figures show.

This has prompted concerns that councillors are making formal complaints about each other’s conduct that should be sorted by other means.

There were 47 such complaints over breaches of councillors’ code of conduct in financial year 2023/24, which a report prepared for Herefordshire

Council’s audit and governance committee called “a significant increase” and the highest figure since 2018.

More than one in four complaints were generated by fellow parish, town or county councillors – a figure which “continues to appear higher than expected when we consider that the code of conduct complaints process is predominantly meant to be for the use of the public”, the report says.

Members have been increasingly filing such complaints “rather than settling their differences of opinion appropriately”, it adds.

Nearly two-thirds of complaints have been over “disrespect”, or failure to disclose an interest.

But councillors have “wide discretion when expressing political views” – and “only the most egregious of comments” are likely to breach the code of conduct in this way, the report says.

Council officers have recently given guidance to councillors on this in a bid to cut the number of such complaints.

Nearly half of all the complaints since 2019 arose from just four of the county’s 137 parish and town councils.

Joint top of the list were Ledbury town council and Bartestree with Lugwardine parish council, each with 22 complaints over their councillors’ conduct.

The figure for Bartestree was swollen by a slew of complaints, numbering 14 in all, regarding the chair’s and other councillors’ conduct over a controversial playing field proposal last year.

Third came Walford parish council with 20 complaints over the period, and Llangarron with 13 – though the last of these was over two years ago.

At county level, there were ten complaints against Herefordshire councillors, all within the last financial year.

Herefordshire Council only publishes the outcomes of individual complaints when these are upheld by its monitoring officer.