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Can a Husband, wife, daughter, son in law, neighbour and 2 best friends all sit on the same Parish Council
by (140 points)

2 Answers

+1 vote
If eligible by the required criteria, none of the attributes or associations you mention are a barrier, of themselves, to any of them.
There could be issues of disclosable and non disclosable interests if close friends or family are candidates for co-option though.
You could have an entire family enter papers for an election and, if elected, could entirely form a council.
Surprised it doesn’t happen more often given the apparent lack of interest in becoming a Cllr.
You could have an entire council comprised of close political, religious or social groupings… Already happening in some areas.
by (19.3k points)
0 votes
Let’s face it with the level of apathy it doesn’t take much for any group to hijack a Council without elections taking place
As we know from questions raised on this site once in control there’s very little that can be done to keep them in check
by (11.5k points)
Our council is about to be overrun by members of a local company. The Parish Council is their only customer. The company's members also run the local Facebook group, the parish magazine, and are prominent members of other groups around the village. Several of the existing councillors have put up a resistance, just to be mocked or called trouble makers. The CiLCA qualified clerk has tried to put up resistance against the company and now their members are calling for her removal (she's a locum, so easily got rid of). The lay-person will naturally assume the group with 100+ members shouting loudest on all the right platforms is on the "right" side of things, while the handful of councillors who barely get to voice their side of things (largely out of fear of being reported to the monitoring officer because this is then used to show how "bad" they are) are in the wrong.
What sort of “company” has a single PC as their sole customer?

Doesn’t sound entirely feasible to me.
I doubt the revenue from a single PC would cover the admin costs of maintain a proper company structure.
It's a community interest company. The directors are all volunteers. The workforce are all volunteers (although volunteering can come with benefits). Of course, a number of these people have their fingers in all sorts of local pies - the treasurer of the village hall may be the vice chair of the allotment association, while the chair of that may be the secretary of something else and so on. Through (a very bad) agreement, the CIC retains all the money made on a particular piece of land the Council owns.
However (and this is why the agreement is very bad), all the costs are bourn by the PC, including the company's admin costs. If the CIC want to put a tearoom in the middle of one of the fields, the PC is expected to pay for the planning permission. If it refuses, the PC and individual councillors are publicly rubbished by members of the company. If a councillor tries to answer the criticisms, they're reported to the monitoring officer, because typically it requires "revealing sensitive information" to do so. The last time this happened, the LA spent £10k investigating what a Councillor put online about the situation and he's been beaten round the head with that £10k figure ever since.

The only purpose for the CIC was to carry out activities the Council couldn't do without power of competence. The Council will be eligible to request power of competence after the election, but this company won't be going anywhere if its people win the vote today. What will happen instead is that the company will be granted more public money to spend on what it wants to make itself money, with all it's decisions being made behind closed doors, while the Council's reserves are bled dry to do all the building/maintenance work (estimated at around £10k/year)
At the end of the day it’s the residents choice who they have as Councillors so if people oppose the takeover then they should select candidates and fight back
Totally agree Jules. Well, the results are in and the company won 9 of 9 seats. It'll be interesting to see where this goes!

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