Local Councillors: Recruitment, Retention and Well-being

Baroness Shah Excerpts

Thursday 4th June 2026 Grand Committee

[Baroness Shah (Lab)]

My Lords, I am grateful for the opportunity to speak in this debate, and I thank the noble Lord, Lord Forbes, for bringing it forward. I declare that I am the head of the Labour office at the Local Government Association and I have been a councillor for 12 years. I have literally just come from the LGA this morning where we were discussing this very topic.

I am making my remarks with immense personal sadness that we are having to have this debate at all. I will not lie: following the recent elections, there have been moments when I have shed tears about the abuse that people who I call friends have had to face in these local elections. That in 2026 we must stand here and discuss the abuse, harassment and intimidation of elected councillors is a damning indictment of where our public discourse has arrived.

Councillors are not distant figures in Whitehall. They are neighbours; they run food banks; they sit on planning committees and housing panels. They are the most accessible tier of our democracy, and that accessibility is now being weaponised against them. I have examples from councillors and candidates I know personally: cars set alight, sustained stalking campaigns, a candidate punched and knocked out recently on the doorstep. Just an hour ago I heard of a 74 year-old councillor in Plymouth being attacked in a stairwell. These are not abstractions; these are the lived realities of people who put their names forward to serve their communities.

I come here today with some solutions. Three things must change. First, our institutions must do consistently better. Operation Ford was a welcome step, but it cannot be a one-off. Returning officers and monitoring officers at local authorities must be properly equipped, trained and empowered to act when elected members face threats. The Electoral Commission must play a more active role in setting and enforcing standards of conduct around elections. The Home Office must develop a far deeper understanding of the specific nature of this threat. Without that, enforcement will always lag behind the harm. I welcome the recent government proposals and action on councillors’ addresses being public on websites.

Secondly, we cannot have this conversation without confronting social media. Misinformation spreads at scale and abuse is industrialised. Co-ordinated campaigns of harassment can be mounted in minutes or hours, targeting individuals with a ferocity that would have been unimaginable a decade ago. This is not only a safety issue but a democratic one. It puts people off standing for public office, and the evidence is clear that women are disproportionately targeted. We need robust, enforceable regulation of platforms, and the Online Safety Act was a start.

Thirdly, perhaps most uncomfortably, we must look in the mirror. Culture flows from the top. When politicians at the highest level trade in contempt, when opponents are not just wrong but become enemies and when inflammatory language is rewarded with column inches, we should not be surprised that it filters down. We have a responsibility—every one of us—to model the public discourse that we want to see. Just because we have the right to say something, it does not mean that we should. Local democracy depends on ordinary people being willing to put their names on a ballot. We are making that harder and more dangerous. We can and we must do better.