Local Councillors: Recruitment, Retention and Well-being

Question for Short Debate

Asked by

To ask His Majesty’s Government what assessment they have made of the impact of increasing abuse and intimidation on the recruitment, retention and wellbeing of local councillors; and what action they intend to take in response.

My Lords, I am grateful to all noble Lords who have expressed a wish to speak in this debate. I draw noble Lords’ attention to my role as a non-exec director at MHCLG.

Four years ago, when I left local government, there was growing concern about the rising levels of abuse directed towards councillors and council candidates. I wish I could say that the situation has got better since then. Sadly, it is worse—much worse. My purpose in securing this debate is to continue to raise awareness of the scale of the challenge faced and to ensure that we do not simply accept it as the new norm for our democracy.

The evidence before us is stark: rapidly escalating levels of abuse and intimidation are having serious and detrimental effects on who is willing to stand for elected office, how long they wish to hold elected office and how they are being prevented from serving effectively during their term. An LGC survey last year revealed that online abuse and a lack of respect from the public are the biggest deterrents to people serving as councillors. When viewed alongside parallel evidence that women, LGBT people, Muslims and those from ethnic minority backgrounds face disproportionate abuse on social media, we should be extremely concerned at the chilling effect that this is having on the diversity and talent pool of those seeking to serve their local community.

This is not a theoretical challenge; it is happening now. One Labour councillor reports three colleagues taking time away due to abuse; one of them was

“very close to a breakdown”.

Another said:

“People are vile online … Facebook is particularly toxic”.

Women councillors report doxing, stalking and AI-manipulated images. The noble Baroness, Lady Grey-Thompson, president of the Local Government Association, relays multiple accounts of women facing the normalising of harassment, being photographed in public and having their locations posted online, with some now

“frightened to go to meetings”.

The LGA’s 2025 Debate Not Hate survey records many severe incidents: a councillor’s car firebombed; a parish chair’s predecessor assaulted and left with a fractured skull; death threats and slurs aimed at LGBT+ and Muslim councillors; and persistent co-ordinated misinformation and harassment on social media. Disorder and intimidation at meetings are escalating. Crowds menaced councillors, objects were thrown and serious damage was done to council buildings in Swale last December. In the same month, an effigy of council leader Councillor Alyson Barnes was burned in Rossendale.

Physical assaults on individual members are not rare outliers. In June last year, Councillor Jordan Tarrant-Short was repeatedly punched in the head in Rochdale. In September 2025, Councillor Paul Kendrick was assaulted in Norwich. In October 2025, Councillor George Finch, the leader of Warwickshire County Council, was assaulted and abused in Nuneaton town centre. Just a few months ago, during the election campaign in Kent, Councillor Thomas Mallon was attacked on a doorstep and suffered lasting nerve damage as a result.

My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Forbes, for bringing forward this timely debate and for his powerful opening speech. The growing abuse and intimidation aimed at those who serve in public life is a fundamental threat to our democracy and the integrity of our democratic processes.

Having spent much of my 30-year career in political campaigning, I know at first hand that councillors are at the heart of our communities and, very often, our political parties. Yet, unlike many of those in national politics, they often operate with little support. They work from their homes, make themselves readily accessible to residents and balance public service with careers and families. That openness is a strength of our local government, but it leaves councillors uniquely exposed. We must consider the chilling message that this abuse sends to those considering public life. Why would talented people put themselves forward if it means exposing families to harassment and physical threats?

This challenge cannot be separated from the increasingly polarised political environment in which many councillors now operate. While people should be free to express their views on conflicts, political disagreement must never become a pretext for racial or religious hatred, including the alarming rise in antisemitism in recent years. This has been compounded by the rise in single-issue independent campaigns dominated by toxic identity politics and international issues, even when the office sought is a local one.

I urge the Government to ensure that the Defending Democracy Taskforce further examines these local threats. We also need concrete action now. We cannot simply ask for more reports, more recommendations and more delay. Will the Minister set out what further practical steps can be taken now to protect councillors from increasing abuse and intimidation? If we do not act now, I fear that fewer and fewer people will step forward to serve, and our democracy will suffer.

My Lords, I am grateful for the opportunity to speak in this debate, and I thank the noble Lord, Lord Forbes, for bringing it forward. I declare that I am the head of the Labour office at the Local Government Association and I have been a councillor for 12 years. I have literally just come from the LGA this morning where we were discussing this very topic.

I am making my remarks with immense personal sadness that we are having to have this debate at all. I will not lie: following the recent elections, there have been moments when I have shed tears about the abuse that people who I call friends have had to face in these local elections. That in 2026 we must stand here and discuss the abuse, harassment and intimidation of elected councillors is a damning indictment of where our public discourse has arrived.

Councillors are not distant figures in Whitehall. They are neighbours; they run food banks; they sit on planning committees and housing panels. They are the most accessible tier of our democracy, and that accessibility is now being weaponised against them. I have examples from councillors and candidates I know personally: cars set alight, sustained stalking campaigns, a candidate punched and knocked out recently on the doorstep. Just an hour ago I heard of a 74 year-old councillor in Plymouth being attacked in a stairwell. These are not abstractions; these are the lived realities of people who put their names forward to serve their communities.

I come here today with some solutions. Three things must change. First, our institutions must do consistently better. Operation Ford was a welcome step, but it cannot be a one-off. Returning officers and monitoring officers at local authorities must be properly equipped, trained and empowered to act when elected members face threats. The Electoral Commission must play a more active role in setting and enforcing standards of conduct around elections. The Home Office must develop a far deeper understanding of the specific nature of this threat. Without that, enforcement will always lag behind the harm. I welcome the recent government proposals and action on councillors’ addresses being public on websites.

My Lords, I add my thanks to the noble Lord, Lord Forbes, for initiating this important debate. Abuse of local councillors is not new; I am afraid it goes back a long time. I was a local councillor for over 25 years—I chaired various committees and was leader of the council for 19 years—so I will talk about a few personal examples. From the moment there was a change of control, there were demonstrations at the town hall. People ran a gauntlet of abuse and threats, and many council meetings were disrupted by order papers flying through the air from the public gallery, which was usually subdued only when demonstrators were removed by the police. For a long period, the police kept crash barriers at the town hall, as they were there so much.

For individual councillors, demonstrations outside their homes and threats through the letterbox were common. At that time I had small children, and I had to contend with being burned in effigy outside my home on many occasions. Of course, I was not there—I was at the town hall—so it was my young children and my wife who had to suffer it. One particular demonstration comes to mind: when it was finished and they had taken their photographs—this shows my influence—the people in the wheelchairs were all able to get up and push their wheelchairs away. Obviously, I had some effect: the power of a councillor.

I am using my own examples, but even today much of this is organised by people in mainstream political parties, so I slightly feel that we are also reaping a bit of what our own political parties have sowed in the past. Now it is so much worse with social media, because they do not even have to show a bit of courage by showing up outside your house and shouting at you; now they can just do it online under a fictitious name and you will never know who they are.

Public anger over policies is often driven by government policies coming down to councils to implement. For most people, the layers of government are totally opaque. Making hard decisions goes with the job of being a councillor—except, of course, when councils do not do that and we have poor councils as a result. We have all seen the result of those poor councils that do not make decisions. The police and judiciary must take seriously the threats, they must take action and they must penalise as necessary. It is not, and never can be, normal politics to abuse someone. This has to be treated with seriousness and there has to be a price for that kind of behaviour.

I remind noble Lords of the advisory speaking time limit. If speakers run over, that will simply reduce the amount of time the Minister has to respond, because this is a time-limited debate. I would be grateful if speakers could stick to three minutes.

My Lords, I declare that I am a vice-president of the LGA. In the LGA it was a pleasure to work closely with the noble Lord, Lord Forbes, as leader of the Labour group, and subsequently with the noble Lord, Lord Jamieson, as leader of the LGA.

When I became leader of the Welsh Local Government Association, I made a clear commitment: respect and equality would not be an option; they would come first. That commitment feels more urgent than ever, because intimidation in public life is not declining—it is evolving and getting worse. We have codes of conduct and processes, but process is not protection. People are staying silent because they feel intimidated, fear the consequences or are told that this is simply part of politics—it is not.

When abuse is dismissed as “banter” or ignored, it creates a culture that would not be tolerated in any other workplace. It does not stop at the council chamber door: it follows people home, online, anonymous and relentless. Many of us know that from personal experience. I have had paint thrown over my car and someone was arrested for threatening to kill me.

We say we want new voices in public life, but we are already losing them. Too often, it is younger councillors, particularly young women, who face the worst abuse and decide that it is simply not worth it. That is talent lost, representation lost and trust weakened. Leadership matters, culture matters and tone matters.

My Lords, I am at a slight disadvantage in this debate. I am one of the few participants who has not served as a local councillor, so I do not have the coalface experience that others do. I will talk about this issue from the point of view of my work as director of the Free Speech Union. Since I set it up six years ago, we have taken 317 cases—I checked yesterday—coded “local government” in our case database. Of those, 141 were about members of the public who had been complained about by councillors or council employees.

The pattern we encounter again and again is that when members of the public say things that councillors find disagreeable but that would nevertheless be protected speech under Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights, they are complained about, sometimes with devastating consequences, on the grounds that what they have said constitutes harassment, misinformation or hate speech, even though it is clear-cut that their comments are protected.

I have time, so I will give one or two examples of people we went to bat for. Last year, two police officers from Greater Manchester Police paid a visit to a grandmother in Stockport who had posted in a Facebook group calling for the resignation of two local Labour councillors, after the Mail on Sunday had exposed comments in a WhatsApp group in which they expressed the hope that a troublesome member of the public in their ward would die. This scandal involved Andrew Gwynne when he was a Health Minister, and he had to resign as a result. Nothing she said could possibly have been perceived as meeting the threshold for harassment, yet two police officers, having been tipped off by the partner of one of these councillors, paid a visit to her house. There are countless such cases. In another case we are dealing with at the moment, a member of the public objected at a meeting of his parish council to the imposition of a 20 mph zone in his village. Two Green councillors promoting this proposal complained that they felt his comment was harassment.

My Lords, like the noble Lord, I have not been a councillor, but I was married to one and am the mother of one. We have heard all the appalling facts and stats. As chair of the Jo Cox Foundation, I am deeply concerned about the impact that abuse and intimidation are having on councillors, their families and, ultimately, our society. No one should have to risk their safety to serve in public life, yet that is exactly what is happening across the United Kingdom, with damaging consequences for our democracy.

The political atmosphere is becoming increasingly hostile. Too many elected representatives and those considering standing are avoiding engagement, limiting their visibility or stepping away altogether because of safety concerns. Too many excellent change-makers are choosing not to stand in the first place. These pressures, as we have heard, fall disproportionately on women and those already underrepresented in our democracy—the very people whose participation makes our institutions more representative and resilient.

Our local councils should reflect the communities they serve, but instead this trend risks narrowing who feels able to take part. We are moving towards a culture where abuse is dismissed as part of the job, but it is not: it is a systemic problem rooted in wider inequalities and pressures across the political ecosystem, and it is worsening across democracies globally. If we fail to act, our councils will reflect an ever-narrowing section of society, with serious implications for the decisions made and the services delivered.

We need an inclusive democracy, one in which people feel safe and confident to participate in robust but respectful debate. Freedom of speech is a cornerstone of our democracy, but it must never be used to incite violence, spread hatred or justify harassment. We need a democracy that enables political parties to thrive. Councillors, who are the lifeblood of all political parties, are the people who are rooted in our communities.

My Lords, I express my gratitude to the noble Lord, Lord Forbes, for bringing this subject before us today. I was shocked to hear many of the incidents that he relayed to us. For the first time in many years, I began to think that perhaps my decision to give up as a councillor back in 2014 was not such a bad one. It is a decision that I have regretted, really, ever since I made it. I served five terms, and I very much enjoyed them. One of the reasons I decided not to continue was that I felt it was becoming acceptable to attack elected members. I felt we were having targets painted on our backs, and it was not a situation that I was prepared to continue to be a part of.

When I left local government at Havering Council, I was invited to go abroad to help advise councillors there and see their culture—in Fiji, as it turns out. I was phoned up shortly afterwards by the organisers, who told me there was no space left in Fiji, so in fact they were sending me to Basra—and could I come into the Foreign Office for my kidnap training on Tuesday? I went and did it, and I found councillors there who were very keen on helping their community, but they all constantly accused each other of corruption and all required bodyguards. It was a culture that I really would not want to see developing here, a future culture that we do not want: there was a constant churn, a constant change of members, no learning from previous experience and very little progress for the citizens of that city, quite apart from the elected members.

In the little time left to me, I will speak in support of a comment made by my noble friend Lord Udny-Lister about part of this being about the lack of power that councillors now have. People expect us to be able to achieve things and yet, very often, we are just relaying bad news to them. That is creating expectations and then letting them down, which is bound to lead to problems.