Two councillors said that they were gagged when they tried to raise alleged breaches of election rules by Brighton and Hove City Council.
The two Conservatives have called for an investigation, saying that the council promised action after the first breach earlier this year before doing the same thing again before another by-election last month.
Councillors Alistair McNair and Anne Meadows cited the statutory code covering council publicity in which it says: “Local authorities should pay particular regard to the legislation governing publicity during the period of heightened sensitivity before elections.”
The pair said that the Labour-run council published a press release about its plans for a new £65 million swimming pool and leisure centre at the King Alfred site in Hove.
They said that the announcement was made just days before the Queen’s Park by-election on Thursday 18 September.
They added that Labour councillors actively promoted the project on social media in the run up to polling day and called it a “deliberate attempt to influence voters on a key city-wide issue”.
The incident last month followed an announcement as voters went to the polls for the Westbourne and Poets Corner by-election on Thursday 1 May.
The two Tories said that leading Labour councillor Tim Rowkins was featured in a story on the council’s website announcing a free one-month extension for garden waste collections.
They said that after the May incident, there was an agreement for remedial action to be undertaken by the council’s monitoring officer and director for governance and law.
Councillors McNair and Meadows wanted to propose a motion asking for a report to a scrutiny committee and an apology from the leader of the council, Labour councillor Bella Sankey, for the breaches.
They submitted a “notice of motion” to be discussed by the full council but their notice was rejected, preventing them from raising the matter at the meeting in the way that they had planned.
When the council refused to include the motion in the agenda, it said: “This issue would be appropriate to raise as a standards complaint against a member and as such needs to be raised and investigated through the standards procedure.
“It is not appropriate to seek to circumnavigate that process and use a (motion) to launch an investigation. That would also be a substantive decision which again is not appropriate for a notice of motion.”
Councillor McNair said that the King Alfred press release could have waited for a few days to miss the pre-election period of heightened sensitivity when councils are expected to take particular care.
The Conservative leader said: “We did mention a request for an apology from Bella Sankey (in the draft motion) and I said we’d get rid of that. We just want an investigation into it. That’s all that matters.
“But we were told allegations need to be investigated through our standards or disciplinary process and not via debate at full council – but without any names. There were councillors who were named in the press and whose call is that?”
Councillor Meadows said: “There was a lot of talk about (how the motion) could identify people and we can’t have that. But we’re not there to identify which officer has done what.
“It’s happened. The first the council acknowledged. The second happened and the council has done nothing in between.
“It feels like the Labour administration tried very hard to sway the election.”
The council said that it did not wish to comment further on the issue.
That’s disingenuous, and they absolutely know it. Breaches are run through the Monitoring Officer as a independent process, and not through council motions. This is not alien.to them.
Saying they are gagged is pure theatre, and their wards deserve better representation. No wonder the Cons are continuing to become more irrelevant day by day.
I’m with the councillors on this and think it’s right for them to draw attention to it, albeit I also think the councillors should contact the Electoral Commission who I think can investigate and advise on this kind of breach.
I also know several councillors in the administration (Bella Sankey, Jacob Taylor, Trevor Muten, Julie Cattell, and Tristram Burden confirmed in an FOI) use Labour branding on their email footers during the pre-election period. This is something that some local authorities advise against as it could be interpreted as a breach of Section 2 of the Local Government Act 1986 (which is around local authorities being forbidden from publishing any material that appears to be designed to affect public support for a political party and the use of logos and party branding on emails sent from an @brighton-hove.gov.uk email address could in theory fall within this).
Although these opposition councillors may not be going about raising the issue in the most direct way (via the Electoral Commission to investigate a breach) I think they are doing the right thing by highlighting the problem. I’ve seen multiple examples during purdah periods before a local election where the council seem to being ignoring the spirit of party neutrality by the way they present information in press releases. Officers should do more to enforce political neutrality in ALL communications it puts out during the pre-election period, and I’ve regularly been surprised about their seemingly slack attitude in this regard!
Ellie, that’s precisely why councils have a Monitoring Officer. If their goal was genuinely to uphold neutrality, they’d refer it properly, not grandstand through a full-council motion. Turning due process into a headline is the very definition of performative politics.
Personally, I think you’d have a hard time persuading a MO that a footer on an email was substantive; and very unlikely to constitute a breach. I’ve been witness to far more overt behaviours from, ironically, sitting Conservative councillors, on this website which did not progress due to a lack of evidence.
Yes, the email footer is a small example, but lots of small issues where the legislation isn’t properly adhered to around fair and neutral communications during an election period do still matter, and they add up. The issues with 1,500 postal votes being too late to be counted was most definitely not a small matter, yet the council didn’t properly investigate what went wrong, they just asked Royal Mail, who concluded they didn’t know what happened.
Yes the council’s monitoring officer has responsibility to try to ensure that the council is adhering to its legal obligations, but their employer is the council, so they are not independent. The council frequently fails to adhere to its legal duties, and external scrutiny and people drawing attention to concerns where legislation and rules may have been breached and broken, is important. I don’t agree with your view that it’s OK for the council to mark its own homework and to not bother with anybody expressing concerns about potential breaches and issues.
That’s not really in question; the Monitoring Officer *is* independent in function, even if employed by the council. Their duties are statutory and can’t be directed politically. It’s the proper route for complaints, and not “marking their own homework.”
What was improper here was using a council motion to raise it. As experienced Conservatives, they know exactly how to complain, and the proper routes, and have failed to do so on this occasion.
On the postal votes, I completely agree, that was concerning, even if immaterial to the outcome, and something Royal Mail absolutely needs to ensure isn’t repeated.
The Queen’s Park by election was won by the Marina Lademach from the Green Party. No amount of press would sway a Conservative win in this area or now Labour as it stands
Agree it didn’t affect the outcome, but it is still important for councillors to adhere to pre-election rules about what’s allowed during this period, and that the council properly adopts a neutral tone in it’s external communications, as per the legislation. Fair elections are a v basis principle, and anything which may undermine that and raise questions about fairness, should be looked at extremely seriously by the council so they can review processes and comms output, and remove question marks in the future.
It was only a few years ago the council were very lackadaisical about more than 1,000 postal votes being delivered late by Royal Mail and the postal votes couldn’t be counted because ballots had closed. Again, the votes were unlikely to have changed the citywide election outcome, but the fact council didn’t challenge RM about the lost votes was alarming, their follow up on it was abysmal!
I have lot of respect for cllr Alistair McNair as a local representative for his ward.
But as a Tory leader he is way out of his depth here.
You won’t find Torys winning in Queen’s Park (where I lived for 35 years) , and it’s ridiculous to suggest the current Labour party administrative spin lost you an election there.
If their spin was so powerful, then the Green candidate wouldn’t have won.
Pick your battles a bit more wisely?
Whether or not it affected the outcome of the election because Greens won by such a stonking amount is irrelevant, if councillors and the council do not follow pre-election guidance about the need for neutral comms during that period, it’s not OK. There is a risk that council comms could be manipulated to reflect one party more favourably than another, and officers should take action to prevent against it.
For me it’s not about outcome of any individual election, it’s more about the council, and councillors, observing important rules and protections to try and ensure democratic processes are as fair as possible and to prevent abuse of power and party political manipulation of publicly paid for council communication channels. I don’t think Brighton and Hove City Council does this well and officers seem to lack any will or interest in addressing concerns being raised about potential breaches. I think that’s worrying tbh.
Ellie, I don’t think anyone disagrees with the principle of neutrality, but in this case, Billy’s right. Context matters. The outcome wasn’t affected, and what’s being described here likely doesn’t meet thresholds.
Councils operate under tight statutory guidance, and the Monitoring Officer’s job is precisely to keep political influence out of official comms. Suggesting officers “lack will” to enforce neutrality unfortunately misunderstands how that independence works, they act within law, not party instruction. Oversight is vital, rooted in evidence, not suspicion.
Wow – so you think it’s OK for council officers to turn a blind eye to potential breaches of rules and legislation that’s in place to protect democratic processes. That says a lot Benjamin!
My view is that council officers should act against legislative breaches and council standard matters irrespective of whether the breach or rule break resulted in a different outcome at an election. Sounds like you’re suggesting they allow breaches to go unchecked until a point where an election result ends up with a candidate being unfairly elected because they benefitted from unfair advantage that has gone unchecked and unchallenged. Quite incredible you don’t think it’s worth addressing breaches of election law to prevent from future elections being open to manipulation.
Ellie, that’s a blatant deflection and a misrepresentation of what I said.
Accusing officers of “turning a blind eye” without evidence isn’t holding power to account; it’s undermining trust in the very systems that keep politics honest. Oversight matters, but so does integrity in how it’s applied.
Integrity is precisely what’s missing in comments like that one.
Not a deflection Benjamin, you said “the outcome wasn’t affected” and you talk about a threshold. The threshold for whether legislation has been breached or not is not whether the outcome of an election has been affected, so it remains unclear what exactly you are implying, or what threshold you are talking about.
Officers would be turning a blind eye if they chose to only investigate potential legislative breaches made by councillors and their comms team which meet a certain threshold and let others go unchecked. Even if sanctions are not appropriate for some breaches (eg if the breach is minor) they should be prepared to highlight a breach has occurred and the council should take action to ensure even minor breaches don’t get repeated. .
You just seemed to imply that because some of these issues didn’t change the result of a local election outcome it didn’t really matter that rules / legislation may have been broken around electoral law. I don’t think that’s OK. There’s still lessons and learning the council should do to ensure more minor breaches don’t go unchecked and get repeated.
Perhaps I didn’t articulate myself clearly before, and for that I apologise if I led to you believe I was conflating the two distinctions. I wasn’t suggesting breaches don’t matter, only that proportion and evidence matter when deciding how to act on them. The threshold I mentioned refers to evidential grounds.
Simply calling something a breach doesn’t make it one. Your email-footer example is a good case in point. To my knowledge (and from a quick search), it’s never met the threshold of a breach anywhere in the UK. It’s good practice to avoid, certainly, but that still doesn’t make the Cons approach here correct or good practice either, and comes across as purely performative to spark outrage in people like yourself.
These, as I am sure you should agree, should go through the proper channel, namely the Monitoring Officer; and with a strong evidence-base for the claims, otherwise we might as well rename Brighton: Salem.
A reminder that this is coming from the party that evicted people from their homes in Westminster to gerrymander whole districts
BTW B&H News…the pop-up ads on your site are beyond a joke. Writing and posting a comment has become an obstacle course.
You need a good adblocker. https://ublockorigin.com/ is one that I used to use, until I switched to Brave which has one built in.
Sorry Andy. We’re keen to keep the news free for everyone to read but the compromise is that we need the ads to pay for the work we do to bring you the news. And the pop ups pay better than the static ads. I appreciate that they can present their own barriers to reading what’s on the site but I hope that you and others understand the dilemma and stick with us as we try to optimise the way it all works. Thanks, Frank
ONE Monitoring Officer employed by the council seems wholly inadequate. And open to question about neutrality, particularly in the face of a majority council potentially leaning on him/her should that Monitoring Officer find anything which looks bad for Labour.
That’s a more reasoned thought. It’s rare to see more than one in a council, however it’s not just one person in practice, BHCC has one MO supported by a team of deputy legal officers. They answer to the law, not the administration of the day, and are legally protected by various aspects to prevent pressure as you are describing. Another thing to note is that they are personally liable for failing to act appropriately.
After doing a quick search of Westlaw, because it seemed like an interesting legal question, shows nothing regarding breaching neutrality or acting under political pressure, so there’s not even a historical factual basis for your assertion.
It’s a good question to ask, but it seems like there’s a pretty comprehensive answer.