Two councillors have been exonerated after they faced complaints about comments made during the general election.
They were among 28 complaints about councillors made to Brighton and Hove City Council so far this year, according to the latest standards report.
Nine of them have been made since April and are newly listed in the report. The subjects include comments made to the media and the registration of a neighbourhood forum as a private company.
A report to the council’s Audit, Standards and General Purposes Committee, which is due to meet next Tuesday (24 September), said that just one complaint remained at the preliminary assessment stage.
It relates to a statement about a council project made by a councillor to the media and reported on Sunday 21 July.
There were five separate complaints on or around Friday 28 June after Labour councillor Joy Robinson tweeted about the council’s new cabinet.
The previous day (Thursday 27 June), during the first cabinet meeting, Councillor Robinson said in a tweet that has since been deleted: “The Green opposition in Brighton and Hove have no voice here, just as Siân Berry will have no voice in Parliament.
“Pavilion people vote for Labours (sic) Tom Gray for your voices to be heard.”
The comment was in response to a post by Green councillor Sue Shanks who tweeted: “First cabinet meeting. @BHGreenCllrs have no voice apart from questions with no supplementary and two representations for 11 cabinet items.”
First Cabinet meeting. @BHGreenCllrs have no voice apart from questions with no supplementary and two representations for 11 cabinet items pic.twitter.com/6xGFsEKBH0
— sue shanks (@ShanksSue) June 27, 2024
But we do have voices which should be heard even if you dont agree with us https://t.co/IWBJ1ehYEi
— sue shanks (@ShanksSue) June 28, 2024
Conservative councillor Ivan Lyons was the subject of complaints after he posted comments under stories on Brighton and Hove News on Monday 1 July.
Under a story about hustings for people with learning disabilities, he wrote: “Where’s Tom Gray – Labour? Once again can’t be bothered to attend to a husting. Clearly given up.”
Under a story about head teachers walking out of a meeting with council education chiefs, he said: “Labours (sic) policies are driving families out of the city to the suburbs at best or to other towns, exacerbating the falling numbers of children at our schools.”
Councillor Lyons confirmed that the complaints were about his comments. The complaints were dismissed because there was insufficient evidence of a breach of the code of conduct for councillors.
Among the resolved complaints, a councillor was accused of registering a neighbourhood forum at Companies House. This was not deemed to breach the code and a formal investigation was not considered “proportionate”.
Two complaints were made about councillors in their role chairing committees arising from the rules on public involvement. These complaints were also dismissed because there was insufficient evidence that they broke the rules.
Complaints dating from April covered a councillor’s comment on social media about another political group’s petition and an allegation of misconduct at a full council meeting in relation to child safeguarding concerns. These were also dismissed at the preliminary stage.
The Audit, Standards and General Purposes committee is due to meet at Hove Town Hall at 4pm next Tuesday (24 September).
Some people spend all their time complaining
What a waste of tax payers money investigating these
Should let them get on with it and vote for someone else if you don’t like it
Stifling the opposition is now unfortunately the norm, and is antidemocratic.
Not turning up however can be construed as not doing your job.
Guess we should not be surprised about Councillor Joy Robinson’s tweet – we all know that the Cabinet system has been introduced by this Labour bunch for a reason, and it’s not openness and transparency!
It’s like de ja vu because they did the same thing decades ago. A quote from Jan 2001 notes that the then the Labour Leader of the Council, Councillor Lynette Gwyn-Jones’ “recent actions must surely highlight a deeply flawed system. Although the decision to keep the autistic children’s centre open can only be applauded (January 13), the fact that only two councillors can make a decision on £500,000 of taxpayers’ money just proves our worst fears over the new cabinet system. Too much power is vested in the self-selected few.”
Exactly the same now – except the council just ploughs on and closes things – schools, a nursery and reduced funding from various services, like Rise… Democracy in action!
The problem is that only a handful of councillors are credible professionals with good careers. We really need more of those. I live in a ward in the city centre ish, and one of my Cllr is a proper, credible professional who can get a high-level decision-making job the others, dear me!
We need to look at why those groups of people don’t want to be councillors. But equally we need councillors from all walks of life.
Even a back bench councillor spends multiple hours a week on casework for their constituents. It’s not just attending a council meeting or a scrutiny panel every couple of months. If you are on the planning or licensing committees you are talking about at least one multi hour long meeting a month and often more. And then getting shouted at from the public gallery like at the meeting that included the new post office depot application.
All sorts of community groups want you to attend their meetings and so on and so on. And that affects your family and professional life.
The allowance for a back bench coucillor is £14k a year And despite what some people think there isn’t a massive pool of ‘allowances’ they can claim from for anything else. They get a phone and a laptop / ipad in addition to the allowance. There isn’t a bank of admin staff at the Town Hall to take those calls or answer those emails for you.
And that time committment is a barrier to many before you even start to look at the abuse councillors face.
And it’s not just verbal. It’s threats of physical violence not only against you but your family. Just look at the low level abuse often directed at councillors in the comments on B&H news. It seems virtually every article about a planning application gets a ‘brown envelopes’ comment.
It’s a very important point about the allowance, when you work out how much time goes into their work into an hourly rate, it generally would be well bellowing minimum wage. Many of our councillors have to have second jobs to balance their own finances.
But being a councillor isn’t a full time job.
Even the Leader isn’t supposed to be a full time job so the allowance is a top up not a primary source of income.
In some parts of the world their councillors are often full time jobs commanding high salaries but there are also fewer of them taking decsions.
I’m not sure we would want fewer but better paid councillors – we really would be in the realm of creating even more fulltime politicians.
I remember whan my dad was a councillor in he 80’s (not here). There wasn’t an annual allowance but a attendance allowance for an approved duty (attending a committee meeting for example). He could only claim for a maximum of 3 a week – and there weren’t meetings every week of the year. It was something like £10 – £15 per meeting and set nationally. He was the vice chair of a committee and there was no extra payment for doing that work.
But it’s a debate to have
And an interesting debate to have too.
There’s a discussion to be made that finance should not be a barrier for a person considering representing as a ward councillor, but the reality is that it may very well be preventing excellent candidates from being able to stand because it’s not financially viable for them to live on.
There’s also the balance I think that if it’s very lucrative, you may go the other way, and you get people wanting to take on the role for their own financial self interests, rather than to represent.
I seem to see a common criticism around about the presence and availablity of ward councillors, and I think this is directly driven by the allowance.
Still, I respect ward councillors for standing up and representing, even if I don’t always agree with them.
Every comment from Joy,Sue and Lyons are true? Why should anyone be punished for voicing an opinion? Free Speech is essential to democracy and this is very questionable and a waste of our cities limited funds. None of these were personal insults and even if they were they should be allowed but called out. The UK needs codified free speech for all.
They aren’t being punished for voicing an opinion.
They have signed up to a code of conduct ac councillors so surely you agree they should be held to that code?
If you read the article it clearly states the complaints againt Lyons were dismissed so he wasn’t punished at all.
And we do have restriction son free speech in the UK – hate speech is a crime for example.
Shouldn’t be illegal to hate I am hugely against most restrictions on freedom of speech, I should be able to hate who I wish freely and those should be free to criticize my bigotry without the police knocking on my door for putting out an offensive tweet and wasting time when people are being butchered to death in areas of London.
Of course councillors are allowed to have an opinion. The issue with what Joy said is that she appeared to confirm what the Labour administration have denied, that under the new cabinet system they brought in, opposition councillors have no real say in decision making- it makes the council more like a dictatorship rather than a democracy.
In a further tweet that Joy deleted, in an exchange with B&H News journalist Jo Wadsworth, when it was put that Labour backbenchers also have no voice (because they don’t have any say or role in cabinet meetings and decisions made there), Joy responded that “That is incorrect Jo, our decisions are discussed at Labour Group”. Jo Wadsworth then replied: “So the real debate is happening behind closed doors then?”. After that Joy’s tweet about decisions seemingly being discussed by the Labour group in their closed door meetings appears to have swiftly been deleted.
That’s what the problem is – Joy was mocking opposition councillors for having no voice, whilst inadvertently kind of confirming that Cabinet meetings are a formality and just for show, as her tweet suggested that the discussion about the decisions Labour would publicly make had already happened and been discussed at their closed door group meetings (without public scrutiny or involvement). Perhaps Joy simply got it wrong and that’s not what happens at all. Or perhaps she confirmed what the rumours are already about how decisions are made. If it is the latter, given that councillors are supposed to work for us, it’s not OK for councillors to be making decisions behind closed doors – they need to be open to scrutiny.