Richard Price dives deep into the world of councillor misconduct.

The principle of genuinely local representation in local government is an important one. For much of the electorate, councillors are the public face of the Party in their community. In order to be effective, they need to know the community they represent, its diverse components, its community organisations, the issues that unite and sometimes divide it, and much more. They need to be on hand in times of celebration, crisis and confrontation. So is it a problem if Labour councillors flout the Party’s rules – and in some cases the legal framework – governing eligibility?

First there is the question of public accessibility. To give an example, a few years ago in a small part of one London ward there were several serious stabbings in a short period of time, including a high profile murder. Two of the three Labour councillors for the ward were living miles away, well outside the electoral area that according to Labour’s rules they should be living in.

Second, there is the sheer duplicity of seeking selection from Party members as their local candidate – no doubt proclaiming how passionate they are about your area – when they’re living somewhere else entirely.

And thirdly, there is the significant amount of public money involved. The average London borough, with a population of around 300,000, currently spends about £1.5 million annually on councillors’ allowances, which also benefit from a generous pension scheme, for those elected before 2014.

One former councillor told me that they couldn’t understand why there is far more competition now to become a Labour councillor – admittedly among a shrinking pool of leadership-approved candidates – than there was 20 years ago. I think there are two primary reasons. Firstly, becoming a councillor has become an increasingly important stepping stone on the path to a career in Westminster, or in some cases a lucrative role in the private sector. And secondly, the financial rewards for senior councillors – cabinet members, leaders and deputy leaders – have grown significantly in recent years.

Incentivising the system

“Follow the money”, Deep Throat advised the Watergate investigators in All The President’s Men, and it’s not a bad starting point in local government. Many of the first Labour councillors more than a century ago were industrial trade unionists working long hours. Allowances for councillors weren’t introduced until 1974. Like the first salaries for MPs in 1911, they addressed the imbalance that allowed the leisured and the wealthy to dominate politics.

Let’s be clear: any hardworking backbench councillor who properly represents their local community is certainly worth the £12,000 or so that they currently receive. If, however, we examine the structure of allowances within councils, what we see – accurately mirroring rising inequality in capitalist society – is that the money has been percolating upwards.

In 2017, after years of pay freezes and 1% pay awards, the public sector pay cap was finally lifted, resulting in rises of 2% or a bit more. Between 2017/18 and 2019/20, Claire Coghill, the then Leader of the Council in my own borough of Waltham Forest, received an uplift to her allowance of 26.8%. (Shortly afterwards, she quit her role to take up a senior post with the developer she had just signed off a major contract with for a large-scale development in the Lea Valley, but that’s another story.) Over the same period, Cabinet members got a more modest 13.7%, while backbenchers got 8%.

For all that allowances are benchmarked against the recommendations of an independent panel, these are not mandatory. It is councils (and in practice the ruling party of each council) that set their rates – surely the only example across the public sector of determining your own pay rise. It is very difficult to get an accurate picture across the UK’s 360-odd electoral units since they all have different scales, and it should be noted that it appears that councillors in Scotland and Wales on average receive significantly more than their counterparts in England.

In themselves, the sums councillors receive don’t seem to be life-changing. Being a council leader, particularly in a big urban area, is for most people a full time job. But consider this – if you combine a cabinet post with an upper-middle management job you could have a pre-tax income of around £100,000, which puts you in the top 4% of earners.

Gaming the system

Seasoned observers of the local government scene have noted the growing proportion of Labour councillors drawn from two groups – Labour To Win’s gilded youth who have graduated from Labour’s shrunken student membership; and (mainly white) middle-ranking executive types. The working class councillor who grew up in the area they represent – and particularly the active trade unionist – is becoming an endangered species.

But how to make room for the aspirational middle classes? It’s in the nature of local government, and particularly in safe Labour areas, that many councillors serve for long periods, meaning there are few vacancies when it comes to selection time. One angle that has been increasingly deployed is to bypass the messy business of democratic selection by the Party membership entirely by failing sitting councillors at the pre-selection interview stage.

But maybe, because of the composition or the dynamics of the Labour group in your area, that isn’t possible. What about getting selected in an electoral area other than the one you live in?

The eligibility criteria

There are two sets of eligibility criteria for Labour local government candidates. The 1972 Local Government Act requires candidates to be registered to vote in the electoral area they are standing in, or to have lived, worked (in their main occupation), or owned property there for at least 12 months before an election.

In addition, Labour Party rules require that candidates “must have paid the Party membership contribution at the appropriate rate and have at least 12 months’ continuous national individual membership of the Party in the relevant electoral area (defined as the local authority area in which the nominee is seeking selection) at the date of nomination. This 12-month continuous membership and residency qualification may be waived in exceptional circumstances to be decided by the Local Government Committee and agreed by the relevant Regional Director on behalf of the National Executive Committee or its relevant sub-committee as laid out in Chapter 2 Clause II of the Labour Party Rule Book”. (Labour Party Rule Book 2025, Appendix 4, D, ii).

This phrase “exceptional circumstances” seems designed to do some heavy lifting. There are a number of personal circumstances that the average member would consider perfectly reasonable grounds for moving out of the relevant electoral area – relationship breakdown, caring for a sick or elderly relative or being evicted, for example. When a councillor from another party defects to Labour in mid-term they would obviously not fulfil the 12 months’ membership rule.

But these exceptions should only apply within one term of office, and should certainly not entitle someone to a free pass to live where they like permanently. What’s more, exceptions should be transparent and accountable, and not used to authorise ‘mates’ rates’ to factional allies.

Bending – and breaking – the rules

How often these eligibility rules are bent out of shape or broken is impossible to establish, but anecdotally a good deal more than is generally known. Many activists will tell you of cases they have come across. One ex-councillor told me that in the borough he worked in one of the councillors turned up for only a handful of meetings a year, while living 60 miles away. A former Labour mayor in my borough in the 1990s (now deceased) who defected to the Lib Dems moved six miles away to Ilford but remained a councillor by owning or renting a lock-up garage.

The case of Sam Gould, the Redbridge councillor who doubled as Wes Streeting’s chief case worker, and is name-checked in Streeting’s 2023 memoir One Boy, Two Bills and a Fry Up as part of his “brilliant team”, made national headlines in March this year. He was convicted of two counts of indecent exposure, one of them to a 13-year old girl. Reports of the court case refer to him living in Hornchurch, which is in the borough of Havering. Was the Redbridge flasher a beneficiary of the “exceptional circumstances” clause? Chaudhary Mohammed Iqbal, another former Redbridge Labour councillor, was jailed for 68 weeks in 2021 for lying about his address when he was living in Barking and Dagenham. By happy coincidence, the Leader of Redbridge Council at the time was Jas Athwal – the biggest landlord in the Commons, who was accused by a BBC investigation last year of slum landlordism.

Then there was the case of the two-term Waltham Forest cabinet member who abruptly withdrew from standing shortly before the 2022 elections when it was found that he had been on the electoral register in – you guessed it – Redbridge since 2015. Not only that. He had been waived through the selection procedure twice, despite submitting nomination papers with a Redbridge address in 2018 that were signed by three Waltham Forest councillors.

Rapidly rising rents have created an additional temptation, and there are plenty of rumours circulating about councillors who have moved and rented out their properties without declaring this on their register of interests. The Localism Act 2011 made it a criminal offence for councillors to deliberately withhold or misrepresent a financial interest, but prosecutions seem to be rarer than hens’ teeth.

So what’s the redress?

Anyone who has concerns in relation to any of the issues raised here will rapidly find that there are a whole set of obstacles in their way. Another thing the Localism Act did was abolish independent Standards Boards that oversaw complaints in relation to councillor conduct. This is now dealt with in-house by a Monitoring Officer who is typically also the council’s Head of Legal, and these posts are clearly political as well as professional appointments.

Councillors are now able to withhold their home address from being viewed in their register of interests, and while this addresses security concerns, it makes investigating potential fraud more difficult. Like members of the general public, councillors can choose to be on the closed electoral register. This can only be viewed by supervised appointment, and seems to be restricted to viewing one year only, which makes establishing a time line impossible.

As for the internal bodies, even the woeful Local Campaign Forums, which in many cases didn’t meet for years, are being abolished in favour of small appointed “Interim Local Government Committees” with inbuilt pro-Starmer majorities .that are entirely unaccountable to constituency parties. You can, of course, submit a complaint. One member who put in a very detailed complaint evidencing fraud was told that they could not be told the outcome of their complaint, or whether any disciplinary sanction had been imposed. Nothing short of root and branch reform and the re-establishment of local Party democracy is going to change this Kafkaesque state of affairs.

Richard Price is a member of Leyton & Wanstead CLP.

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