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BBC News
03-06-2025
- General
- BBC News
Who can lead Dumfries and Galloway Council?
A special meeting of Dumfries and Galloway Council (DGC) is to be held after a number of councillors quit the Conservative group which leads the local left them with just nine members of the 43-strong council in the south-west of a request has been received to hold a special full council meeting within the next 14 it leads to a change of control it would be the third administration to try running the authority in the space of three years. The Conservatives previously formed the biggest single political group on the council with 16 of them have now left - four to form a group called Novantae and three to create the Dumfries and Galloway Independent means their numbers have now fallen behind those of the SNP, which has confirmed it had received a call for a special meeting on Tuesday which will have to be held within a could see the current administration replaced after a little more than two years in charge. What is the political make up of the council? Following the decision by a number of Conservative councillors to leave the group there are now nine different groupings or individuals on the SNP has 11 councillors followed by the Conservatives with nine and Labour on Novantae has four, the Democratic Alliance three, Dumfries and Galloway Independents three, Independents three and one each for the Lib Dems and "not-specified".It means that no coalition of just two groups could achieve an outright majority. How did we get here? After elections in May 2022, an alliance was formed between the SNP, Labour, Lib Dems and independents to run the said they hoped to serve the region while working together in the name of "mutual trust and understanding".However, that coalition fell apart after less than a year and the Conservatives took over to lead an administration without an overall this year they were unable to take forward their own budget plans but remained in a block of councillors has quit the group - some of them citing concerns about how the west of the region was being has swiftly been followed by the submission of the request for a special meeting of the council which could pave the way for another change. However, the other two biggest political groups on the council have already been involved in an administration which folded after less than 12 months in would take at least three groups - and potentially as many as seven - to form an outright will also be some time before the composition of the council is likely to change next local authority elections are not scheduled until May 2027.
The Sun
22-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Sun
Sarah Beeney's ‘illegal Downton Abbey' farmhouse she built on TV show in new council row as she faces demolishing it
SARAH Beeny is said to be having a showdown meeting with council enforcement officials. The 53-year-old television star is facing a new investigation and row as officials are poised to visit the site. 5 5 5 5 This comes after she was ordered to demolish a major part of her 'mini Downtown Abbey', which featured in her hit telly show New Life in the Country. The presenter agreed with Somerset Council to knock down a 1970s farmhouse, but - without planning permission - went ahead with extending the building instead. When she applied for retrospective permission, she was refused and also lost her appeal in March. There is currently a live enforcement notice for the farmhouse to be razed to the ground, but it could yet be saved by an unlikely source… roosting bats. They've been found in the dwelling and now there's set to be a meeting at the property between Sarah, husband Graham Swift and the council's enforcement and ecology teams. A Somerset Council spokesperson said: "We are due to arrange a joint site meeting with Enforcement and Ecology Teams and the owners of the property to confirm the route forward following the recent appeal decision. "We are also working with an ecologist with the appropriate licences to assist us as a result of a bat roost being found in the original dwelling to ensure we can be clear in terms of what mitigation would be required and acceptable." The Sun reached out to Sarah's representative for comment, but they did not immediately respond. Sarah has been in a bitter six-year fight with local residents and the council to completely overhaul her rural estate in Stoney Stoke, Somerset, which she bought for £3M in 2018. She put in a raft of planning applications and in one local compared her to Captain Tom's daughter. Hannah Ingram-Moore built an illegal spa complex at her house in Marston Moretaine, Bedfordshire, claiming it was partly being used by her late father's charity, but the council ordered her to tear it down. Neighbour Kevin Flint said: 'It's created a lot of bad feeling in the village. 'She was given permission to build the new house on condition she knocked down the old one which she extended and refurbished, it's just not on. 'She thinks she can move down here and ride roughshod over everybody but it's not going to happen. 'I think the fair thing would be for anything unauthorised on the site to be demolished like Captain Tom's daughter. Sarah's New Life in the Country Channel 4 series has been charting her extensive renovations. She had previously asked to build a completely new home - this was granted as long as the old home and its outbuildings were completely demolished. She went ahead and built the new dwelling, yet didn't get rid of the old farmhouse, and extended it, adding new French doors and a first floor balcony. Earlier this year, she scrapped plans to turn two barns into four new homes after a furious row with locals. Half a dozen locals objected to the proposed development and said she had "blatantly ignored" an enforcement notice ordering her to remove earth banks built without planning permission. 5
Telegraph
16-05-2025
- Politics
- Telegraph
The Liberal Democrats are a protest group masquerading as a party
I looked at my watch, and realised we had all been sat in the council chamber for over an hour. I glanced at the agenda. What next? A petition for the council to divest from companies with connections to Israel, and to stand with Gaza 'on the right side of history'. Will this make a jot of difference to the lives of people in Dorset? Such a question seems not to have crossed the mind of those who sat alongside me in our most recent council meeting. Local Government is often mocked for obsessing about bin collections and potholes, bus timetables and library hours. But that, understandably, is what local people care about. Councils are given a defined set of responsibilities; voters expect their local representatives to deliver on them effectively. Over the last two years, voters have taken a punt on the Liberal Democrats governing in some fifteen councils across the country. The motivation for this can be traced back to events in Westminster: people in rural areas wanted to send a message to the Conservative Party that their support cannot be taken for granted. A smaller number perhaps thought that a change in local government could bring a change in the quality of their neighbourhood services. The truth, however, is that Liberal Democrats in local government seem to be mimicking the farcical TikTok-friendly persona of party leader Ed Davey: they love performance, petition, pontification. What they hate is actually governing. I'm a Conservative councillor in the beautiful county of Dorset, the place where I grew up, and I know that I have an opportunity to make a difference to local people. Getting involved here with the minutiae of community life – from raising money for village halls to getting developers to meet their planning obligations – is a source of great satisfaction. We lost overall control to the Liberal Democrats last year, so I sit on the opposition benches amongst Conservatives with years and years of experience in local government. It has been quite remarkable to observe how divorced the interests of some Liberal Democrats are from those of the people they are meant to represent. Every week, I speak to people who want to see potholes filled, residents who are worried that there's no real plan for the development coming Dorset's way, businesses owners who are buckling thanks to the scourge of rural crime, and locals who just want their verges to be properly maintained. These are the vital concerns of local government. But they are the ordinary concerns of locals – and probably too boring for the Liberal Democrats who would rather spend their time and council taxpayers money on saving the world. A typical council meeting involves an evening spent discussing hedgehogs, planting trees in solidarity with the United Nations (to whom I was told we owe all our most inviolable rights), and applauding each other for our self-righteousness. We were required to sit in silence while a wholly partisan and substantially erroneous petition on Israel-Palestine was read. And when we finally got to the moment to discuss something that genuinely matters to Dorset people – how we can best support local businesses suffering from the Government's tax changes – the Liberal Democrats simply amended the motion in order to congratulate themselves on the work already being undertaken. This is symptomatic of a general shift in local government business under the party's watch towards a version of activism that uncomfortably smacks of student politics. I'm told by a colleague that he still receives reminders to complete his online DEI training modules. Meanwhile, the Labour government has whacked up council tax and increased borrowing at the same time budgets for libraries, highway maintenance and communities and public protection have all been cut in real terms. We know the pressures that local government is under. We know that well over half our budget is consumed by statutory services over which we have little control. We know that the current funding formula for local authorities is intensely unfair for rural councils like Dorset. But with control over just a third of the budget, a good council could greatly improve the lives of the residents it represents. Soon, Liberal Democrats will be up for election in councils they control, and they will have to defend their record. Voters, who just want better maintained roads, regular bin collections, and sensible use of their tax contributions, might well feel just a little bit of buyers remorse. James Vitali is a Conservative councillor in Dorset and a senior fellow at Policy Exchange
