Local Councillors: Recruitment, Retention and Well-being

Lord Forbes of Newcastle Excerpts

Thursday 4th June 2026 Grand Committee

Asked by

[Lord Forbes of Newcastle]

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.

[Lord Forbes of Newcastle (Lab)]

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.

I also wish to talk about two absolutely shocking incidents in the recent local election campaign in my home city of Newcastle upon Tyne. One late evening, a couple of weeks before polling day, Councillor Stephen Barry-Stanners had eggs thrown at his house. This was logged with the police, but it was only when he left the house the next day that he spotted, daubed in huge letters in red paint, the words “Peedos”—spelt wrongly—“live here”. Stephen said at the time that he was devastated by the incident, adding that

“the abuse has been escalating since this local election campaign started. It was initially just trolling and nasty comments, and soon I couldn’t post anything without getting the vile stuff under it, no matter what it was”.

On the Sunday, after losing her seat by just 22 votes, former cabinet member Juna Sathian’s home was pelted with eggs. She was not at home at the time, but her husband and two young sons were, and they were terrified by the experience.

Is it any wonder that a quarter of councillors tell LGC that they do not plan to re-stand, while many more are unsure? Women, younger people, minority ethnic, LGBT candidates and those with caring responsibilities are disproportionately deterred, especially when abuse mixes with deepfakes and pile-ons that never quite cross a criminal threshold but corrode well-being and mental resilience all the same.

The Government have tools to address this but, so far, consistency and pace are missing. Operation Ford created force elected-official advisers as single points of contact, yet support is patchy. The Elections Act 2022 created an offence of intimidation, but the bar is often too high to deter persistent harassment. The Online Safety Act is moving towards implementation, but risks overlooking activities that are “legal but harmful” at scale: doxing, synthetic sexualised images, targeted misinformation and co-ordinated trolling.

There are a number of steps that I would urge the Government to consider taking. The first is to make support consistent and accountable. They should establish a national councillor safety co-ordination unit, with real-time intelligence sharing and standards for forces, ending postcode lotteries in response. They should require every police force to provide a named, trained adviser for elected members, with service levels, escalation routes and Home Office oversight. They should also issue CPS and policing guidance to lower the practical threshold for action against intimidation around elections, so that swift and early intervention can prevent escalation.

The second step is to put teeth into online protections. Ofcom should be instructed, in its implementation of the Online Safety Act, to recognise elected local politicians as at-risk users and give them priority pathways for the rapid takedown of doxing, synthetic or sexualised deepfakes and impersonation. It should impose sanctions for repeat abusers and publish turnaround targets and league tables of how online and social media companies perform. It should develop a no-cost “trusted flagger” route for councils to escalate malicious content and impersonation accounts affecting members. It should also work with local government to establish proportionate mechanisms that address persistent, targeted harassment that stays just below criminal thresholds but drives people away.

The third is to protect meetings and democratic spaces. The Government should update the guidance to enable councils to provide proportionate security at meetings and give them powers to expel and bar those who demonstrate violent or persistently abusive behaviour. They should fund basic security measures for high-risk venues and members, including incident-logging tools, training and rapid liaison when threats spike.

The fourth is to support victims and prevent burnout. The Government should commission confidential mental health and trauma support for councillors, including post-incident care and 24/7 advice helplines. They should ensure that councils have the resources and training at induction to help people to take down offensive material.

The fifth step is to track this problem and our progress. The Government should publish an annual report to Parliament on councillor safety, recruitment and retention, disaggregated by gender, ethnicity, sexual orientation, disability and age, with force-by-force performance of the police against service standards. That would go a long way towards tackling this problem.

We need to act now to make policing consistent, online platforms accountable, public meetings safe and support for those affected accessible. Local democracy should be a calling, not a hazard. Let us make it safe to serve.

Grenfell Tower Memorial (Expenditure) Bill

Lord Forbes of Newcastle Excerpts

2nd reading & Report stage & 3rd reading & Committee negatived
Tuesday 14th April 2026 Lords Chamber

[Lord Forbes of Newcastle (Lab)]

My Lords, first, I declare an interest and draw noble Lords’ attention to my role as a non-executive director at MHCLG, the lead department for this Bill. The Bill, as presented very ably by my noble friend the Minister, is short, tightly drawn and constitutionally straightforward. It is a money Bill and, as such, as many speakers have already said, our role today is limited. However, its significance is anything but limited. This Bill asks Parliament to do something solemn, to authorise public expenditure so that this country can create, maintain and steward a permanent memorial to the 72 people who lost their lives on the night of 14 June 2017.

My noble friend the Minister has explained eloquently what this Bill seeks to do. What it does not do is equally important. It does not determine the design, governance or planning decisions associated with memorial. Those remain rightly with the bereaved, the survivors and the local community, through the Grenfell Tower Memorial Commission. This is a deliberate choice on the behalf of the Government. Ministers in the Commons were clear that the narrowness of the Bill is intended to preserve community leadership, which is a profound shift in our British tradition of memorialisation. For most of the last century, national memorials from the Cenotaph to the Commonwealth war grave cemeteries were designed, commissioned and governed by state or national bodies. Grenfell is different; it is community led, because the community has borne the greatest loss and because the state must demonstrate again that it must not impose decisions on people whose voices were ignored for far too long.

We also must be honest about why this memorial is needed. The Grenfell Tower fire was not a natural disaster or an unforeseeable accident. The public inquiry has documented in painful detail what the Government themselves have described as failure after failure, year after year—failures of regulation, of oversight, of enforcement and of listening. Many Members in the Commons debate said plainly that Grenfell was an avoidable tragedy rooted in systemic regulatory failure. The memorial, therefore, is not only a place of remembrance but a form of institutional accountability. It is a public acknowledgement that the state failed in its most important basic duty: to keep people safe in their own homes.

At the time of the fire, I was the leader of Newcastle City Council, and the four weeks that followed were the worst of my time holding that office, because I was not able to give a categorical assurance to residents in my city that every tall building around them was safe. Those buildings in public ownership, where we had clear records of design, building control sign-off, construction materials and usage, were manageable, even when remediation work was needed. But several tall residential buildings were a mystery. We did not know who owned them. We did not know how they had been constructed. We did not know what materials had been used—and there was no mechanism to find this out quickly. That was the direct consequence of a deregulatory zeal that removed safeguards without understanding what those safeguards were there to prevent. It was a failure with profound consequences for public confidence and public safety.

The Grenfell Tower fire has been described by commentators as one of the gravest failures of the British state in modern times. Personally, I would go further and call it the greatest crime committed in this country this century. What is beyond dispute is that the cladding that turned a small kitchen fire into an inferno was not installed for thermal efficiency or structural protection, or for any purpose that served the residents inside the building. It was installed for cosmetic reasons—for those who looked at Grenfell, not for those who lived within it. This was a deliberate attempt to hide a community that some considered inconvenient or unsightly, or somehow less deserving of dignity. At the heart of this tragedy lies a toxic mix of elitism, class prejudice and a disregard for people living in poverty. A memorial cannot put that right, but it can ensure that we do not look away. It can ensure that the lessons of Grenfell are not confined to inquiry reports or regulatory guidance but are embedded in our national memory, and that future Governments, of whatever political persuasion, remain accountable for the long-term stewardship of that memory.

That is why this Bill legislates for expenditure not only today but for the decades ahead. It mirrors the long-term commitments we have made to the maintenance of our war memorials, recognising that remembrance is not a one-off act but a continuing and collective intergenerational responsibility. The Bill may well set a precedent; other tragedies linked to state or institutional failure—Hillsborough, the contaminated blood scandal and the Post Office Horizon scandal—have prompted calls for memorialisation that acknowledges harm and honours those affected. The approach taken here, with community leadership and statutory funding, may shape how Parliament responds in future.

I end on a point raised by many survivors and bereaved families. Community leadership does not mean community responsibility alone. The state cannot outsource remembrance. It cannot say: “This is for you alone to decide and therefore for you alone to carry”. The responsibility for learning, reform and ensuring that nothing like Grenfell ever happens again rests with public bodies, regulators and those of us in positions of authority. A memorial is not a substitute for action. It is a reminder of the cost of inaction. So while I support this Bill and the funding it provides, the true national memorial to Grenfell must be a housing system that is safe, a regulatory system that is robust, a culture that listens to tenants and a state that never again allows people to be treated as though their lives matter less. This Bill enables a physical memorial. It is our duty to ensure that it also builds a moral one.

Local Government Reorganisation

Lord Forbes of Newcastle Excerpts

Wednesday 25th February 2026 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Taylor of Stevenage (Lab)]

It is a shame that the noble Lord has not had a chance to look at the proposals as I have. They set out very clearly the anticipated savings. More importantly, they provide a much more cohesive form of local government for those who will be on the receiving end of these services. Taking out layers of chief executive and finance director salaries all helps to push money back to the front line, where it is needed to deal with much-needed services such as filling in potholes, looking after vulnerable adults and children, and making sure that our environment is taken care of. All the things that local councils do so well will be done more effectively and the public will understand where to go to, instead of having two councils responsible for their area.

[Lord Forbes of Newcastle (Lab)]

My Lords, I declare an interest as a non-executive director of MHCLG. Can my noble friend the Minister remind the House of the original purpose of local government reorganisation? It is surely not just for the sake of it but for a wider purpose. Does she think it is a coincidence that, with the exception of Cambridgeshire and Peterborough, all other areas of England that have pioneered regional devolution arrangements have been in areas with only one tier of local government? Does she agree that two-tier areas can struggle to align strategic combined authority-wide ambitions with fragmented delivery arrangements, and often lack the bandwidth and staffing capabilities to deliver ambitious combined authority-wide programmes at pace and at scale? Furthermore, does she share my concern that a failure to address the inefficiencies of the two-tier system in this context creates unnecessary complexity and delays in delivering this Government’s ambitious devolution agenda?

[Baroness Taylor of Stevenage (Lab)]

I agree with my noble friend—of course I do—that driving forward the strategic ambitions of our country and our Government, to ensure not only that we see the economy grow in the way we all want and get the housebuilding that we need to deal with the housing crisis but that the key public services that are so needed by vulnerable adults and children are taken forward efficiently and effectively, required us not just to tinker at the edges but to do the most radical reorganisation of local government for at least half a century, which is what we are doing. This has been kicked into the long grass nearly all the time that I have been in local government. I think there have been some four attempts to do this and they always stopped short of doing what is needed, which is to create local government that will drive the economy of our local areas and support the public services that people deserve.