Candidates in the upcoming Alsager Town Council East Ward election and a local politician disagree over why there has been three by-elections in the area since October last year.
A new councillor will be elected to Alsager Town Council on Thursday, as voters head to Alsager Civic to cast their votes for the second time this year.
The most recent election took place in March, after Labour Councillor Joe Davies resigned due to work commitments. June Buckley of the Liberal Democrats was elected, defeating Reform candidate Andy Large by 34 votes.
Alsager Town Council announced less than a month later there would be another election, as Councillor Brian Drake had been disqualified for failing to attend a council meeting for six months. The Labour Party member was allowed to remain on Cheshire East Council.
Philip Williams, who is standing as the Liberal Democrats candidate in Thursday’s election, said the repeated by-elections were taking place due to councillors resigning.
He said: “The East Ward’s always been the ward where they lose councillors. There’s a turnover of councillors, often for very good reasons. People have got jobs, they move on to other things.
“But I tend to feel that the East Ward hasn’t always been as well represented as it might have been, or certainly as much as it deserves.”
While councillors moving on left vacancies on the Town Council, Philips suggested Reform was the party responsible for calling elections.
He said: “Reform are very keen to get on and they’re the ones pushing for by-elections and I can understand why they’re doing that. If I was coming from their angle, I would probably be doing exactly the same.
“So not pointing the finger at them, but what tends to happen is co-option. I think they’ve tried that, it hasn’t worked out for them, so they’re pushing for the elections.
“I think there’s an irony in that Reform are saying they want to save money, and they feel the Council has been wasteful in what it’s spending its money on.
“I think there’s an irony that they’re pushing for saving costs, and really incurring costs by having repeated by-elections, but saying that, if I was in their shoes, I would probably be doing the same.”
Reform candidate Wendy Whittaker-Large did not agree Reform was causing by-elections, but instead deemed councillors who failed to fulfil their responsibilities to be at fault.
She said: “The reason why these by-elections came about was because the councillors did not fulfill their duties. They did not attend meetings, they did not fulfill their obligations in the role. And I believe that if you are going to be an elected representative, you are signing up to a commitment.
“And if you’re not turning up to the meeting, not only are you not representing the people who’ve elected you in good faith, it’s a derogation of your duties.”
Labour Councillor Michael Unett, however, felt Reform was the reason another by-election had been called.
He said: “Reform has recently attempted to get a candidate onto Alsager Town Council, who didn’t live in the town itself, who was then unsuccessful at being co-opted.
“They then challenged for the last vacancy with the last by-election being in March. They were unsuccessful, but in their previous candidate Andy Large’s post-election video, they stated that it was close and that they would try again.
“Then only a few days into the notice of the vacancy, of which there is a period of 14 working days to call an election or leave it to co-option, a small flyer was delivered to all households within the Alsager East Ward with a link to a survey on local issues just for Alsager East residents. This was just before an election was announced.
“Usually when a party is this prepared before an actual election is announced, they have been behind calling that said election. Otherwise, why would their survey be just for Alsager East Ward residents?”
Cllr Unett acknowledged he had no problem with a political party encouraging people to call for an election. However, he agreed with Cllr Williams that Reform cost the council money, despite campaigning for reduced spending and preventing rises in council tax.
He said: “The key point is Reform UK and their local candidates have stood on a platform of lecturing Alsager Town Council on finances and about saving resident’s money.
“So it is hypocritical of them to do so when they, through their actions of calling two by-elections, will have cost the Town Council and taxpayers money that would not have necessarily needed to be spent if one or both of those vacancies had been dealt with by co-option instead.”
Whittaker-Large described an election to measure the democratic voice of the people as ‘inevitable’. Rather than accepting Reform was failing to stay true to its policies, by increasing the Town Council’s expenses, she questioned why by-elections were so expensive to run in the first place, as each election costed the Council £12,000.
She said: “There is a cost to democracy. I would actually be very interested to see the breakdown of those costs. I would expect the majority of it is administrative costs that Cheshire East levies to be able to run the election and send out postal voting cards to people and so on and so forth.
“I think there is an inevitability that if you’re going to run a democratic process, there are going to be costs incurred by that. I’m not sure it’s run as efficiently as it could be. I would suspect that there’ll be ways in which we could probably reduce the cost of that.”
The Alsager Town Council East Ward by-election will take place on Thursday, June 5. Residents in the electoral area can cast their vote at Alsager Civic between 7am and 10pm. The candidates standing are Philip Williams (Liberal Democrats), Wendy Whittaker-Large (Reform), Margaret Wakelin (Labour) and Charlotte Laura Harding (Green).
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