Concern over 'very, very high' number of complaints against South Tyneside councillors

As part of an update to South Tyneside Council’s Standards Committee it was revealed that complaints under the Elected Members Code of Conduct are still being received.

Since the committee’s last meeting in September 2022, a total of four new complaints have been submitted, while none have been resolved – taking the overall number of complaints to 202 since recording started in January 2020.

Council officers said South Tyneside does see a “very, very high” number of complaints, noting in contrast neighbouring Durham County Council, which features 126 councillors, has had nine complaints since 2017.

A total of 149 complaints have been closed in South Tyneside due to either being withdrawn by the complainant, rejected by the monitoring officer, closed after hearings or concluded through ‘informal resolutions.’

Over the past two years, more than half (55%) of complaints about councillors have come from members of the public, while 40% involved councillors making complaints against other councillors.

Monday’s meeting heard there are 53 ongoing complaints under the code of conduct, which is a “huge amount of work” for officers.

The Standards Committee meeting took place at South Shields Town Hall on Monday, December 5

At the meeting, Councillor Alexander Donaldson raised concerns about individuals potentially making “malicious” complaints about other councillors, warning it places time and resource pressures on local authority officers.

He said: “Genuine complaints are welcome in a way because we learn from them, but non-genuine complaints take up a lot of council officers’ time, and can lead to a lot of money wasted really if it’s non-genuine.

“There must be complaints surely that have been malicious, that have been thought to be malicious.

“I would criticise the people who make non-genuine complaints, I say that very sincerely. “

Professor Grahame Wright, independent chair of the Standards Committee, stressed officers need to investigate the complaints to determine whether they are indeed genuine.

He said: “Professionals have a duty to make a judgement as to whether or not something appears to be vexatious, tit for tat or politically motivated.

“Part of the real problem is after the event it may be easy to look back, but we have to look at the evidence in front of us at the time we’ve got it, not a couple of years later when you start to see patterns emerging.”

He added since he took office as independent chair of standards in 2018 there have been four hearings held over complaints.

Nicola Robason, council director of governance and corporate affairs, noted they continue to work extremely hard to investigate complaints.

She said: “I think overall the trend is there is still a slight levelling off of complaints, albeit to a very, very high number of complaints that are on the system.

“Unfortunately for us we do have an unprecedented number of complaints made against members of South Tyneside Council.”