The Government is ‘taking decisive action to prevent councillors from being subjected to intimidation and harassment by removing the requirement for members’ home addresses to be published’, Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner said in a speech to the Local Government Association (LGA) annual conference, in Harrogate. The LGA welcomed this.
As background; the LGA released a survey from August that got 1734 responses, about a tenth of councillors in England and Wales, that suggested that over a fifth of councillors have received a death threat or a threat of violence (22 per cent) due to their role, while 23 per cent of councillors suffered abuse serious enough to report it to the police. Some 43 per cent had requested to withhold their home address from the public due to safety concerns. One in ten councillors had someone attend their home in a way that they considered intimidating or inappropriate.
Marianne Overton, an independent on Lincolnshire County Council, chairs the LGA’s Civility in Public Life Steering Group. She said: “These results are troubling – not only do they highlight the concerns for the safety and wellbeing of councillors, but show how violence and intimidation can be corrosive to our democracy as they discourage people from taking up public office and from speaking fairly on vital issues.
“People must be able to represent their communities safely and without fear. We need cohesive communities that can debate differences in peace. Poor behaviour doesn’t just impact the individual, it hurts everyone in communities, reducing the opportunity for open debate on important local issues. This has got to stop.
“We need Government to act decisively to ensure high levels of abuse do not become an accepted part of public life and that councillors are safe and confident as they carry out their vital elected role – working to represent their communities.”
In more detail, the results suggested a correlation between length of service and likelihood to feel personally at risk, as the longer a respondent had been serving as a councillor, the more likely they are to feel some level of personal risk.
More generally, online abuse has been particularly directed at women including members of Parliament; as acknowledged in a speech to the Security Expo at London Olympia in September, by Jon Savell, Deputy Assistant Commissioner, Counter Terrorism Policing. More in the December edition of Professional Security Magazine.
