By-election triggered by the resignation of a Reform UK councillor after two weeks will cost taxpayers around £27,000
A by-election triggered by the resignation of a Reform UK councillor after just two weeks will cost taxpayers around £27,000. Former Eccleshall & Gnosall councillor Wayne Titley was one of 49 Reform candidates to be elected onto Staffordshire County Council as the party secured a landslide victory on May 1.
But just a fortnight later he resigned after coming under intense online criticism of social media posts attributed to him, including one which called for the Royal Navy to shoot at small boats in the English Channel.
The county council said that Mr Titley had stood down for ‘personal reasons’, while Reform claimed he had his family had been subject to abuse.
Reform group leader Ian Cooper, who was formally appointed council leader earlier in the meeting, revealed the forecasted cost of the Eccleshall and Gnosall by-election in response to written question from Conservative opposition leader Philip White. In a follow-up question during Thursday’s full council meeting, Cllr White asked whether Cllr Cooper would be apologising to taxpayers and the voters of Eccleshall and Gnosall.
Cllr White described the social media post referring to the Royal Navy as ‘really quite obscene’. He said: “That was prior to the election, so Reform UK had the opportunity to remove Mr Titley as a candidate. As they chose not to do so, and the consequence of that is inevitably that we now have a by-election, with the astonishing cost of £27,000 – I had no idea it would be quite that much – would the leader of the council like to take the opportunity to apologise to the people of Eccleshall and Gnosall for forcing them to go through this by-election and the waste of money to the Staffordshire taxpayer?”
Cllr Cooper said: “Mr Titley never signed in as a councillor as far as I’m aware, and he decided to resign for personal reasons. That’s what I’ve been told by the council.
“In terms of cost, I find it very hypocritical of the Conservatives to stand there and complain about costs to the public purse. In the last parliament alone we had many, many Conservative MPs quit, resign, get thrown out, at public cost. We had one in Tamworth – Chris Pincher – his by-election cost nearly a quarter of a million pounds. We had Owen Patterson just across the border.”
Members of the Conservative group, which lost control of the county council after 16 years following the May 1 elections, submitted various other written questions to the authority’s new Reform leadership on their approach to issues such as climate policy, finance and libraries. In his written response to a question on DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion) – an issue which Reform have raised concerns over – Cllr Cooper confirmed that the county council’s current recruitment policy is ‘completely based on merit’.
In response to follow-up questions from the Tory councillors, Reform cabinet members mostly gave stock answers, saying they would get back to the councillors once they had had time to ‘mark the homework of the previous administration’.
