Is being a councillor the worst job in England? The New Statesman suggests it is. They’re right—even if they’re also technically wrong, because being a councillor isn’t a job at all.
Councillors are not employees. We have no employment rights, no annual leave. It’s difficult to get a mortgage because providers don’t like the uncertainty, and when the electorate decides your time is up, you don’t get a severance package like MPs do. We are expected to be always on, but never too present. What does a day in the life of a councillor look like? Being on call 24/7 amid regular accusations of not being accessible enough.
When I explain to local residents that most councillors have day jobs because we need to pay the bills, they are often stunned. Not because they don’t believe it, but because they assume I should serve them full-time. If for any reason I am not available to a local resident, maybe because I am in fact doing my day job, the assumption is that I must be incompetent or worse.
Men—and it is always men—have told me on more occasions than I can count that my colleagues and I are corrupt, that we are getting rich off back-handers or brown envelopes. Such is the level of trust in politicians.
The AI revolution is supposed to transform everything, for better or worse. In my world, it mostly means being unable to get through to a council officer until I’ve got through an AI chatbot first. It also means something more corrosive: residents outsourcing their disagreement. However carefully I might broker a compromise with the council on behalf of a local resident, the ease with which people can use ChatGPT to question, dispute or cast doubt on a council decision or factual claim is, in my direct experience, generating fresh outrage and creating spurious claims.
My inbox is mostly a receptacle for two things: abuse and spam. The abuse is from residents understandably frustrated by the area’s fly-tipping epidemic, our ailing high streets and neglected green spaces. The spam comes from organisations that have scraped my public email address to sell conferences or campaigns that I have neither interest in nor money for.
For the hours I serve as a councillor, I earn the minimum wage. I work unsociable hours on evenings and weekends. After knocking on countless doors selling the good work of the local authority, I am told to “fuck off” often enough for it to feel routine. During local elections, it gets worse. When campaigning for the locals was in full swing here, a colleague was recently accused, for instance—loudly, in the middle of the street—of being a paedophile.
In the town hall, we are expected to make crucial decisions for the local community—often on the basis of hundreds of pages of reports sent to us just a day or two in advance of a meeting. Earlier this year I was given 800 pages with 48 hours’ notice. Even without a day job, I don’t read quite that fast.
We are expected to be caseworkers, policymakers, community leaders, communicators—and to complete a steady stream of mandatory training, much of it mind-numbing. Meanwhile, the relationships that councillors have with council officers are complicated. The best councils run on genuine partnership and goodwill. But too often there is mutual distrust between staffers and elected representatives, much like the tensions between Whitehall and Westminster. Councillors can be dismissive of officers, and offensively so. Officers, for their part, have their own repertoire: deflection, feigned ignorance, foot-dragging. Many reading this will recognise it.
All the while, private companies circle. They see councillors as access points to a local authority, sometimes trying to bypass council officials with the aid of glossy pitches and vague promises. Occasionally there is the lure of a free dinner. On a councillor’s allowance, even that can feel tempting—though sadly I am too inconsequential to be offered one. (And, for the record, of course I would never accept such an offer).
Expectations shift and grow. Under Awaab’s Law (2025), for instance, councils are required to investigate serious damp and mould complaints in social housing within 24 hours. The long-overdue legislation was introduced following the tragic death of Awaab Ishak, a two-year-old who had been exposed to mould in his home. Given what’s at stake, councillors worry that they will be legally or personally liable for not responding to their emails in time.
And councillors often lack the power to resolve an issue themselves. They rely on council officers who may not respond to calls, texts or emails. Do residents understand how little formal authority councillors actually have? We advocate, chase and escalate, but we do not control most of the systems we are held accountable for.
At the same time, my colleagues and I like to joke about how councillors-turned-MPs develop amnesia when it comes to what local authorities can and cannot do, placing expectations on us that they know we cannot deliver. We sympathise when it comes to the workload of MPs, but we do bristle at the fact that they have a cadre of enthusiastic officials to support them, not to mention a generous salary.
At local level, public discourse is becoming more toxic—not just on doorsteps, but in the surgeries set up to help residents with casework, and during public committees. Residents are most vocal at planning committees. Last December in Kent, masked assailants threw eggs at councillors. In another example, one councillor returned home to find a swastika sprayed on their house after a debate about immigration.
Meanwhile, the government has chosen to malign councillors—boasting that there will be fewer of us once local government reorganisation is complete in 2028. We are an efficiency to be realised. But the government has conceded it did not carry out its own cost-benefit analysis of the plans to combine various councils into single authorities. Shall we do away with some of our MPs while we’re at it?
Forgive me, a beleaguered councillor who is now standing down after years of public service, for not being more graceful, but the role can weigh heavy. I will, however, finish this ode to local government with a fond memory. There is nothing more satisfying than when you are able to support the constituents you serve. An elderly woman once visited my surgery and explained that her council-owned flat was in disrepair. The council was “decanting” the properties on her estate to make way for new homes, meaning that it wasn’t investing in maintaining properties that would soon be knocked down. In the meantime, however, the woman’s windows had been screwed shut—literally—by council officers, for reasons that remained unclear to her, but which resulted in a safety risk, and of course the inability to let in fresh air. Seeing the pleasure on her face after I chased the council to get this fixed was exactly the kind of thing that has made being a councillor worth the unsociable hours, low pay and periodic abuse. All the difficulties aside, I will miss it.
