Local Councillors: Recruitment, Retention and Well-being

Lord Jamieson Excerpts

Thursday 4th June 2026 Grand Committee

[Lord Jamieson (Con)]

I declare my interest as a councillor in Central Bedfordshire. This is an issue that I have spoken about many times with many people in this Room, particularly at the LGA. The terrible thing is that I cannot say it has got any better; it has actually got worse. I will not repeat all the terrible things that people have already mentioned, because I think we have all faced them. The one that has not been mentioned is the abuse of family members, particularly children. It is not just abuse of the councillor themselves; it goes beyond that. This is entirely and totally unacceptable.

When I first became a councillor—not 53 years ago but in 2009—most councillors were just good local people who wanted to help serve their communities. They wanted to get the bins emptied, fix the potholes, maybe build a new leisure centre and improve their town centre. They were not particularly political or politically motivated. They were motivated by their locale. I think we can all agree that most of those things are the sorts of things we should be doing. They are not very political issues; they are just desirable.

What has changed is that the whole firmament has become much more political with the advent of social media. It is a snowball effect. It is an echo chamber where anonymous or pseudonymous comment can spiral out of control. We are seeing national and even international issues being brought into local politics. This should not happen. The world has changed. Twenty-odd years ago, someone had to write a vitriolic letter. No one else would see it. You would get slightly upset, and you would throw it in the bin. Now, it is on social media, it is viral and it goes everywhere. A well-meaning councillor who is just trying to do the right thing will often, because of spurious or false information, be subject to huge abuse, which then spirals into the real world with physical threats, firebombing of cars and so forth. It is just not right.

Why would you become a councillor? You need real strength of character and motivation, and people are going off to do something else—very meritorious stuff. We need good councillors and we need to keep good councillors, so we need to protect them. The LGA did a lot of good work and I think the previous Government moved quite a long way, but it is not enough. My key question today for the Government is: what will we do to go further? What will we do to make it safe to be a councillor so that it becomes an attractive job where you feel safe, can serve your community and do those things—fixing the town centre, getting a new school built or whatever—without feeling that you and your family will be intimidated?