Eighteen complaints have been logged against Brighton and Hove councillors so far this year, with 11 of them still under investigation.
The latest Brighton and Hove City Council standards report also said that there was still a complaint open from last year.
The report to the council’s Audit, Standards and General Purposes Committee, which is due to meet next Tuesday (23 June), said that a complaint received on Thursday 16 October about an unnamed councillor’s alleged inappropriate conduct has been referred for formal investigation.
Two complaints from 2025 have been closed since the committee last met in April. Again, none of the councillors have been named.
One of them was received on Sunday 5 October, complaining about misinformation from a councillor in a newsletter.
The matter was closed after the councillor apologised for the inaccuracy and agreed to send a correct statement for the next edition.
On Friday 17 October, four days after a heated meeting of the full council, a complaint was made about the conduct of two councillors from the same political party during another councillor’s speech.
No further action was taken after one of the councillors apologised and said that they would not act in the same way in the future.
Since the committee last met, a complaint received on Wednesday 7 January about a councillor’s conduct at full council was closed with no further action being taken. This was because there was “insufficient evidence” of a breach of the code of conduct.
And since the last meeting, a complaint made on Tuesday 2 June about a councillor’s conduct during a public demonstration has been resolved after insufficient evidence was provided that the individual was a current councillor.
More complaints have been logged since the last meeting, with the behaviour of three councillors at a public meeting under scrutiny as well as social media comments made by a member of the council.
Other complaints concern the lack of response from two members when asked about parking permit issues and an allegation that a councillor’s conduct had breached the Nolan principles of public life.
The council’s Audit, Standards and General Purposes Committee is due to meet at 4pm next Tuesday (23 June) at Hove Town Hall. The meeting is scheduled to be webcast.
Name names or it’s not a story!
Only 18? A few noughts must be missing. Meaningless too unless you are going to name and shame, which BH News had no hesitation in doing when Robert Nemeth was a Tory Councillor. Not that Councillor complaints have any chance of going anywhere when the Head of the Legal Department is also the Monitoring Officer in a stinking conflict of interests meaning a closed complaint loop, internally strangled before it sees the light of day outside of the council. Does this individual also get paid two salaries at public expense for doing this public dis-service?
That has been tested many times before across the country, and each time is has been found not to be a conflict. MO is an independent person to the councillors, and you’d expect the councillors themselves to be the first ones to complain if there was an issue like that.
As always though, if you have evidence to the contrary, take it to the ombudsman.
But not independent of the officers she should monitor.
The MO’s independence is not defined by their place in the organisational chart, but by their legal and professional obligations. It’s similar to how an internal auditor isn’t independent of the organisation they work for, yet must remain impartial and objective in their reviews.
This whole article may as well be REDACTED ,,transparency where the hell is that ,,stuck in a dictionary no doubt.
It’s to protect both the person who complained, and the person being complained about if unsubstantiated, and to ensure an investigation isn’t prejudiced by public opinion.
Claiming authority without ever naming your qualifications is like wearing a fake badge and expecting applause. The more you avoid simple questions about who you are and what you know, the more obvious it becomes that the authority exists only in your imagination.
Genetic fallacy. Avoids engaging with the point.
What’s striking isn’t the number of complaints, but what happens to them.
Over the past 18 months, very different groups of Brighton & Hove residents have raised concerns about council decision-making: gender-critical women, Jewish residents, campaigners concerned about safeguarding, and others. Yet a recurring pattern appears.
Issues that are fundamentally about governance, fairness, procedure or the exercise of discretionary power are directed to the standards complaints process, thus framing it as a complaint against an individual councillor. Those complaints are then dismissed at preliminary assessment stage, without investigation. The original issue receives no scrutiny, no findings and no meaningful examination.
The complaint disappears into a procedural loop.
Residents are then told that the matter has already been considered through the standards process, while scrutiny committees say they have no role, and public question to Full Council can be cynically responded to by leaders with a reference to rejections from the MO and later the Ombudsman.
The result is an accountability gap: complaints are rejected without investigation and no part of the system accepts responsibility for examining the underlying concern. Brighton & Hove City Council has created a process that allows difficult issues to be disposed of without ever being scrutinised.
The Council does seem to have an issue with transparency and accountability. Particularly since they moved to the Cabinet system (which was not mentioned in their local election manifesto).
It meets the minimum legal standards – but the Cabinet makes all key decisions and all three scrutiny committees are chaired by Labour – and, from the discussions I’ve seen, involve very little scrutiny on some key issues. The Council Leader and her Deputy dismiss anyone who disagrees with them and accusing them of ‘misinformation’ or ‘conspiracy theories’. When in most cases I’ve seen it is just local people who what accurate factual information, and many of those they treat as political opponents are actually Labour supporters – or were.
I find the whole approach very concerning.
Again, from last time, you’ve generated the same pattern of a fundamentally flawed argument which boils down to “I didn’t like the outcome of this process, therefore the process is wrong” then proceed to strawman that argument. I’m reminded how you lied about a councillor’s conduct last time we spoke to shape a false narrative too in a similar vein.
Complaints aren’t rejected without investigation. There’s just no case to answer. You logically can’t reach that conclusion without investigating the complaint to find out if there’s a case to answer. You’re not silly, you do know this.
And once again, and I’ve been charitable with this interpretation several times now, complaining about an outcome isn’t the mechanism to change a process you don’t like, so of course Scrutiny aren’t going to be involved in any of your complaints – that’s not their purpose. If you’re not sure how, there’s plenty of support in Community Base.
I think there are masses more complaints not reported, still outstanding, covered up etc.
In my opinion, this council is seriously not fit for purpose.
some of them Written by Adrian…. 20,000 words…. nobody can read them!
We’ve never had less accountability or transparency from those meant to be serving us. Or fewer consequences for wrongoing in public office. No wonder they are so scared of people entering Hove Town Hall, they have virtually closed it off. When it was refurbished for £11m ten years ago with the Great Hall unlawfully hived off for private hire without public consent, there remained a clear intention of the public being able to book meetings in the council chamber and other rooms for their own club and community meetings. That never happened and we are now scarcely allowed into a public building which belongs to us and used to host events, festivals and concerts within it’s walls. It even kicked the Older People’s Council out!
Community meetings happen in Hove Town Hall on a regular basis.
Benjamin is right that the confidentiality arrangements exist for good reasons, and right that the Monitoring Officer’s independence has been tested and upheld. But legal defensibility and genuine accountability are not the same thing.
The anonymised reporting means it is impossible for the public to see whether complaints are clustering around particular individuals, particular wards, or particular types of conduct. A councillor could be the subject of five separate complaints about failing to respond to constituents and the published data would not reveal that. The council itself acknowledged in a previous standards report that seven councillors were the subject of more than one complaint, but the current format makes it impossible to track whether that pattern is continuing.
On outcomes, of the 16 complaints concluded since mid-2025, 15 were dismissed without formal action. Only one has proceeded to formal investigation. Six complaints specifically concerned councillors failing to respond to constituents, a basic ward duty. All were dismissed or remain unresolved.
There are 12 complaints are currently open. Of those, at least 7 have been open longer than the 28 working days the council’s own procedure allows for initial assessment, including several received as long ago as late March. The irony of a complaints process about councillor responsiveness itself failing to respond within its own timescales should not be lost.
Other councils publish more granular data, including trends over time and outcomes by complaint category, which allows proper public scrutiny. Brighton and Hove does not.
The question is not whether the current arrangements meet the minimum legal standards. It is whether they are adequate.
Anonymity protects both councillors and complainants from prejudice – would you want your child’s school disciplinary issues made public? Unsubstantiated complaints could damage reputations unfairly.
The raw data is available for anyone wanting to analyse trends. With today’s tools, identifying patterns in complaint types or outcomes is straightforward if someone wants to do that work.
Thanks for suggesting looking at the raw data. Having a look back over the reporting from the Audit and standards Committee – and its predecessors was genuinely interesting.
Annual complaint figures have not changed that much over the last few years. In 2022 there were 20 complaints, rising to around 27 in 2023, with 18 in 2024 and a similar rate so far in 2025/26. The volume does not suggest a dramatic improvement in councillor conduct that might explain why formal investigations have effectively ceased since September 2024 (when the Cabinet system was also introduced).
What did change in September 2024 was the procedure itself. New criteria were added to the threshold for investigation, including whether a complaint is sufficiently serious, whether it is of ongoing relevance to the public interest, and whether investigation would be proportionate bearing in mind the resource involved. Each of these is a value judgement that can be applied to dismiss a complaint without investigation. Before that change, formal investigations did occur. Since then, none have.
Up to January 2024 BHCC also published a detailed annual review of complaints, with statistical tables, trend data and benchmarking against other councils. That format was discontinued.
Whether these changes represent an improvement in how the council handles complaints about its members, or a reduction in scrutiny, is a reasonable question for the public to ask. Personally, I’m not sure it represents the ‘strengthening in public engagement and accountability’ that was promised when the Cabinet system was introduced.
One further point. The old annual report format showed not just total complaint volumes but how many individual councillors were complained about and whether complaints came from residents or other members. In 2022, for example, 26 complaints were made against just 11 councillors, a concentration that would be invisible in the current format. That kind of analysis used to be published routinely. It no longer is. It also can’t be worked out from the information that is published.
That’s an interesting bit of data. What do you think a concentration of complaints says? I think it’s very difficult to come to any conclusion from that, because you could say that’s because of the nature of their roles makes them more visible than others, for example. It’d be interesting to see the complaint source as well; a single person who makes multiple complaints to various departments on a regular basis, tells a different narrative to someone who has only ever complained once. And that’s also subject to nuance, someone who advocates, for example, would likely be a regular.
I always think a review on process, especially around scrutiny has merit, and providing insights can be very useful for pattern recognition, training needs, etc. Even when I had that long discussion with Adrian the other week, I agreed that’s a very reasonable thing to ask for. I agree there more to do on strengthening in public engagement and accountability, and maybe some of that comes from more accessible information.
Good luck having a complaint dealt. Totally corrupt system