They have a reputation for being somewhat sleepy organisations, whose remits rarely veer further than subjects like litter on the streets and dog's muck on the playing fields. However, in recent weeks there have been several examples within our parish and town councils of arguments, threats and fall-outs. Noah Vickers finds out why.
Passions running high at parish council meetings came to the fore during the pandemic when Jackie Weaver shot to national fame for her handling of a virtual council meeting in Handforth, Cheshire.
The 30 seconds of footage, which went viral, from that Zoom call was enough to show the country just how heated arguments at the lowest tier of local government can become.
Meanwhile, in Norfolk last month alone we reported on police called to one town council meeting, and a chairperson likened to “a little Hitler” at another.
So is there a problem with abusive behaviour and misconduct in Norfolk's parish councils?
“I think it’s a real problem in our sector, and I think it's something that is on the increase, sadly,” said Julie King, a partner at Norfolk Parish Training & Support - a private business working with clerks and councillors.
“Often, it's just a matter of people understanding the rules and the regulations - you’ll remember from Handforth, the ‘standing orders’, which is what we call them in this sector,” she added.
“Certainly from the clerk’s point of view, quite often with a lot of the smaller parishes, the clerk works in isolation, so a lot of the support required is just somebody else to talk to.”
Comparing parish meetings to those at the district and county level, Ms King said: “Sometimes it’s quite personal, because it’s very local, so you can quite often get people in a room who live next door to each other.”
Russell Reeve, former county officer at the Norfolk Association of Local Councils, believes that tensions are running higher due to the pandemic.
He said: “Around the middle of this year, there was a sort of collective exhaustion if you like, amongst councillors, clerks and even members of the public, coming out of the pandemic, the stresses that had caused, then having to go back to hold meetings face-to-face and people having to rethink what they did with their lives.
“And also, in the background, people had probably too much time to spend on Facebook saying things which they probably should have thought twice about posting."
Complaints at the parish council level are dealt with by monitoring officers who work in the district councils, but Ms King said they have limited sanctions available to them, and Mr Reeve said they are often overworked.
Both said the current regime was not ideal and needed reform.
Like much of the country, there are several examples of Norfolk's parish councils descending into chaos.
Three weeks ago, police had to be called to Downham Market Town Council after members of the public began accusing the council of ruining the town's market.
Mayor Jenny Groom and deputy mayor Jackie Westrop put out a statement afterwards saying there had been a "deliberate attempt" to destabilise the meeting.
And just this week, a Thetford town councillor stormed out of a meeting after saying the meeting's chairperson was "like a Little Hitler" - to which the chair responded: "Jawohl, mein Führer."
Councillor Mark Taylor had left the meeting after an angry exchange with deputy mayor Jane James.
The pair had been arguing over whether reports from district and county councillors could be heard at the meeting after the clerk had forgotten to put the item for those reports on the meeting's agenda.
At Attleborough Town Council in 2020, police were called after a large group of protestors refused to leave a private meeting, with a union representative saying it was "like a scene from The Godfather".
The protestors were angry about attempts to remove two councillors who had been accused of bullying council staff.
The pair denied the claims and received a full public apology from the council in May of this year.
The Local Democracy Reporting Service spoke to parish clerks across Norfolk on the condition that they not be named.
One clerk said that they were forced to lodge a complaint against their chairperson at a previous council they worked for, after a “lack of respect” shown to them.
“The monitoring officer said ‘It’s just a personality clash’ but I’d got to a state where I wasn’t prepared to put up with it, and I just quit, because I don’t do it for the money, I do it because I like the job.
“My personal view is that if somebody has a problem there is no point [in] them trying to go through the procedure that you’re meant to go through, because it won’t be [of] any use.”
Another clerk was more sanguine, saying: “I personally don’t think it’s got any worse over the course of time.”
“There’s always been, within councils, frictions between different councillors.
“I think that’s quite normal, and unfortunately perhaps in those instances [Handforth, Downham Market, Thetford etc] it’s perhaps gone a little bit too far, but I think a lot of parish councils run completely normally.”
And they didn’t think the issue was particular to the parish level either.
“I think district and county councils have the same problems, they have councillors who disagree with each other.
“I suppose perhaps if you are more of a professional politician, then perhaps you’re a little bit more thick-skinned and don’t react in the same way, whereas if you’re at the parish council level, you’re not a professional politician and therefore you’re perhaps a little bit more sensitive.”
A third clerk said councillors disagreeing with one another at the parish level actually showed the strength of those councils as democracies - “as long as people are polite”, they added.
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