A York councillor accused another of being a ‘bigot’ and ‘racist’, it emerged today.
Now their behaviour is to be investigated at a hearing of City of York Council joint standards sub-committee next Tuesday (8 March).
Ahead of that meeting, a complete list of allegations have been made public.
They all concern members of a single York parish council. A report says: “Two separate code of conduct complaints were brought by two Parish Councillors against two other Parish Councillors. All are involved with the same Parish Council.”
Next week’s hearing will consider two reports into these complaints. The reports are secret, but the broad allegations have been made public.
The allegations detailed in the first report are:
- a parish councillor acted in a ‘bullying and intimidating’ way towards another councillor at a meeting in November 2020
- this councillor accused the other one of being ‘a racist’, ‘a bigot’ and ‘a negative impact to the village’
- the chairman of the parish council ‘improperly conferred a disadvantage on a person through age discrimination’ in October 2020
- that a councillor held a secret meeting that ‘improperly conferred a disadvantage on a person’.
The allegations detailed in the second report are:
- the parish councillor acted in a disrespectful, bullying and intimidating manner towards the parish council clerk in his emails of 28 November 2020
- the councillor allegedly acted unlawfully by preventing a person’s co-option to the council without sufficient reason
- that the councillor wrongly stopped an individual taking part in a meeting due to an incorrect suggestion that they had a financial interest in the subject being discussed.
According to the report, the investigation officer has found some of these accusations do breach the code, and others are unfounded.
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But the ultimate decision will be in the hands of the committee.
YorkMix reported last month that complaints of bullying had been levelled against another as-yet unnamed councillor – and that an independent investigator believes they broke the official council code of conduct. That is a separate case.
City of York Council has promised to identify a councillor facing allegations before the next meeting.
Correction: Originally this story said that these allegations were connected to the case detailed in our report on 16 February about an unnamed councillor being investigated for bullying. In fact they are separate investigations. We apologise for the error