Local Government: Nolan Principles

Alberto Costa Excerpts

Tuesday 11th March 2025 Westminster Hall

[Sir Desmond Swayne (in the Chair)]

I will call Alberto Costa to move the motion, and I will then call the Minister to respond. As is the convention for 30-minute debates, there will not be an opportunity for the Member in charge to wind up,.

[Alberto Costa (South Leicestershire) (Con)]

I beg to move,

That this House has considered the effectiveness of the Nolan Principles in local government.

It is a great pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Sir Desmond. This year marks the 30-year anniversary of the Nolan principles, which are selflessness, integrity, objectivity, accountability, openness, honesty and leadership. Those seven principles embody everything that we, as elected representatives, should strive for on behalf of our constituents. They are the guiding principles for anyone in elected office.

MPs and elected representatives at all levels of local government are overwhelmingly public-spirited and dedicated people who always embody the Nolan principles in their work. Having served on the Privileges and Standards Committees for the last five years, which I am honoured to now chair, I have seen at first hand that elected representatives do, at times, sadly fall short of the principles.

[Jim Shannon (Strangford) (DUP)]

I commend the hon. Gentleman for raising this issue. Does he agree that for most honourable people, the desire to live up to the highest standards of the Nolan principles is inherent? For people who do not live by those principles, however, there must be more than a suggestion—indeed, there must be a requirement—to stand by them.

[Alberto Costa]

I thank the hon. Gentleman for his welcome intervention, with which I entirely agree. Not only should publicly elected councillors—at parish, town, local authority, district and county level—be obliged to follow those principles but, importantly, a code of conduct developed and underpinned by those principles should have teeth. What he is ultimately saying is that there must be appropriate sanctions, as there are for us as Members of this House.

For some of those Members who fall short, sometimes those are cases of minor lapses—moments of frustration or poor judgment—while other times they are severe errors, with devastating consequences for colleagues, staff and the reputation of elected office. Such errors are not unique to elected representatives; to err is human, and no human being is without flaws. That said, it is right that elected representatives, while undertaking their public duties, are held to a higher bar. That is not about their private lives, but about the work that we, and local authority councillors, do in the course of our public duties.

[Dan Aldridge (Weston-super-Mare) (Lab)]

I thank the hon. Member for securing this debate on the Nolan principles, which I have been very interested in for a long time, working in public service. In a digital-first world, with so much of our lives documented and undertaken online, does he agree that there is a greater necessity for a reimagination of the Nolan principles?

--- Later in debate ---

[Alberto Costa]

That is an interesting point. I must confess that I have not considered it, so I would welcome any further information or a further briefing from the hon. Member on what he means by that, particularly in my role as Chair of the Standards Committee.

The Nolan principles must ensure that elected representatives are held to account properly, at every level of local government. In Labour’s plan for local government reorganisation and a new structure, the way that standards are dealt with must not be neglected. I hope that the Minister will say a few words on local government reorganisation, and how he thinks the Nolan principles and any code of conduct might underpin that.

I think we can all agree that the current regime is failing. Issues of misconduct, bullying and harassment in local government—parish, town, county and district—have become worse. I know of parish councillors in my constituency whose lives have been made a misery through months and, in many cases, years of verbal abuse, intimidation and harassment from fellow councillors.

In Leicestershire, one instance of constant harassment and relentless, vexatious complaints resulted in a parish council officer dramatically resigning during a parish council meeting. I have no doubt that hon. Members have witnessed or heard similar stories in their constituencies. Those bad apples make up only a small minority of councillors but even so, according to a 2017 report by the Society of Local Council Clerks,

“15% of parish councils experience serious behaviour issues… 5% are effectively dysfunctional as a result of them.”

So where does the current regime fall short? First, there is no clear definition of bullying or harassment in the Localism Act 2011, which leaves it to monitoring officers to interpret vague codes of conduct inconsistently. What is serious in one district area is dismissed in another. Town and parish councils have no internal mechanism to investigate breaches of conduct. At the same time, principal authorities are also powerless to enforce meaningful sanctions, except in cases serious enough for criminal referral.

The 2018 Ledbury town council case exposed a major flaw in the system. The council was forced to pay more than £200,000 in legal fees for trying to sanction a councillor through an internal grievance process. That highlighted a fundamental problem: parish councils lack the power to act independently, while principal authorities have no real enforcement mechanisms. Accountability falls into limbo unless there is clear criminal conduct. My speech is not about criminal conduct; it is about the issues that we as Members of this House are familiar with—bullying, sexual misconduct, harassment and the like.

If the public were able to hold rogue councillors—the minority—to account properly at the ballot box, I would be less concerned, but the gaps in legislation are made worse by the democratic deficit, certainly at the parish level, where elections often lack enough willing candidates to ensure true accountability. In the May 2015 elections, for example, only 20% of eligible parishes contested their vacancies. The ballot box rarely holds councillors to account, and even if it does, it can often be too late.

We know that accountability problems will be more pronounced in areas that have a unitary authority, which is the direction of travel under this Government, as parishes may be given even greater powers due to the abolition of district councils. I hope that the Minister can comment on what consideration the Government are giving to that specific point or, if he is unaware, that he will write to me after the debate.

For now, I encourage the Government to consider the following steps to strengthen accountability, and to protect town and parish councillors and those who work for town and parish councils. First, I suggest amending section 27(3) of the Localism Act 2011 to give a clear definition of bullying that explicitly covers persistent verbal abuse, intimidation or behaviour that causes significant distress to other parish or town councillors or those who work for parish or town councils. That would give monitoring officers of principal authorities a firmer basis on which to act, and would set a threshold for escalation, distinguishing heated debate from harassment.

The next step would be to mandate standards committees in all principal authorities, which would be tasked with impartial investigations, deciding on allegations and imposing sanctions. Those committees, supported by truly independent persons, would bring consistency, credibility and impartiality into an appropriate disciplinary system. Here in the House of Commons, as part of the Committee that I chair, we have seven lay members alongside seven Members of Parliament, and as the Chair, I do not have a vote other than in the event of a tie. That means that the seven lay members provide the impartiality that the House wants when disciplining its own Members.

[Dan Norris (North East Somerset and Hanham) (Lab)]

The Nolan principles also apply to officers working in the public sector. I am a regional mayor, as well as a Member. I am aware that a regional mayor in the east of England is currently talking with a chief constable about officers under the previous mayor making decisions that should have been made by politicians—in other words, the normal rules and policies seemingly being circumvented.

It troubles me that the interim officers who work for local authorities or regional authorities move on quite quickly. They do not stay very long, and if something questionable is subsequently found, they are not bound to take part in any inquiry. That means that the Nolan principles can be completely circumvented; it drives a coach and horses through the good principles. I agree with everything that the hon. Member has said so far, but does he think there should there be a special circumstance or a modification to the rules to allow those officers, who keep moving around and carry on working in local government, to be held to account?

I also ask the Minister what the Government will do to make sure, where questionable things have happened, that the local authorities to which those interim officers go are alerted about that. Those local authorities should know that irregularities have taken place.

[Sir Desmond Swayne (in the Chair)]

Order. Can we have shorter interventions in future?

[Alberto Costa]

I thank the hon. Member for his welcome intervention, which highlights another issue that I am not entirely familiar with. Although this debate is concerned with elected officials, he rightly asks about what happens if people charged with the oversight of the Nolan principles as independent officers move on to other jurisdictions. There is, of course, the contract of employment that underpins the individual’s duties, but there may well be a lacuna in that area. Again, I would welcome the hon. Member writing to me with a further briefing so that I can ascertain whether there is a link to ensure that that would not damage the mechanism that I am proposing to the Minister, which is for independent officers to have more appropriate oversight.

As I have indicated, mandating in all principal authorities standards committees, tasked with impartial investigations and deciding on allegations, would bring consistency. Thirdly, I suggest amending legislation to make parish councils formally accountable to their principal authority, which currently is not the case. That could include annual governance reports, direct intervention powers for serious breaches, and the provision of training to prevent issues from arising.

Those are basic, bread-and-butter issues in which we as Members of Parliament are encouraged to take a more active part, particularly when it comes to training. Parishes should retain autonomy, but the principal authority should act as a backstop for serious failures, reinforcing local governance without reverting to a centralised control such as the standards board.

Finally, we must address the absence of robust sanctions. There is a total lack of sanctions when councillors at parish, town and local authority level have been found wanting, with the exception of criminal conduct, which is dealt with separately. The power to suspend councillors —say, for up to six months—for proven bullying or harassment is essential. Currently, a counsellor can shrug off the consequences and return to the next meeting unchecked. Instead of facing the consequences, effectively nothing is done. That has an impact not just on the proper functioning of the parish or town council, but on the staff working for that parish or town council, who may themselves be the victims of the bullying or harassment. Worse still, I have heard of cases where entire councils have resigned in despair, powerless against a single disruptive individual. Suspension would offer immediate relief to victims and signal that misconduct has a cost, as it does here in the House of Commons, and as we have proven over the past few years.

Much of what I am saying echoes the 2019 review by the Committee on Standards in Public Life, which called for councils to suspend councillors without allowances for up to six months. The Government rejected those proposals in 2022, citing risks to free speech, and I sympathise with that, but the new Government’s 2024 consultation on sanctions suggests a welcome shift. Perhaps the Minister can say a few words about that.

We must not return to a time of bureaucratic excess and politically motivated complaints threatening freedom of expression. That is not what I am arguing for, and that is not what we see in the House of Commons. But with reports of bullying rife at parish levels and changes to local government structure in the pipeline, it is time to reconsider the recommendations of the 2019 Committee on Standards in Public Life report. I encourage the Government to take the opportunity they now have with local government reorganisation to make a positive impact by ensuring that what we see applied to all of us here in the House of Commons is mirrored in some form to other valued elected public officials.