Blackburn with Darwen Borough Council is one of 29 local authorities granted Government permission to halt its local election this year.
The cancellations have resulted in Sir Keir Starmer being accused of “running scared” of the electorate at a time when polls show a collapse in support for Labour.
Defending Blackburn’s decision to ask the Government for a postponement, Phil Riley, the council’s Labour leader, previously said the council would “rather the money went on delivering services people want than on an election which would have to be repeated just a year later and on different ward boundaries”.
“It costs around £200,000 to hold an election,” he added.
However, the same local authority spent £30,000 on commissioning a project that focused on the mental health of asylum seekers, the Telegraph can reveal.
A contract awarded in January 2024, when Riley and his party were in control, granted the sum to a university, noting that the council had “been a supporter of asylum and refugee communities for many years”.
Setting out the purpose of the project, the document read: “The aim of this commission is to develop a project focusing on trauma within the asylum community in Blackburn with Darwen.”
Richard Tice, Deputy Leader of Reform UK, claimed: “Local elections are being cancelled while council staff are funding mental-health projects for illegal migrants who have invaded our country. The British people are rightly furious.”
The Telegraph has launched a Campaign for Democracy, calling for elections to go ahead and for the scrapping of an obscure clause in the Local Government Act 2000, which allows polls to be delayed without a full vote in Parliament.
Yet while many council leaders have cited the costs associated with holding elections in their calls to postpone them, the Telegraph has found the same local authorities have spent far more on other services, schemes and projects.
Cheltenham Borough Council, another local authority where councillors will not face the polls this year, also blamed costs for its cancelled election.
While stressing that running the election would always be the Liberal Democrat-led council’s “preference”, leader Rowena Hay said the drain on resources because of “major under-funding of local government” had led her to the decision.
“We have to take a balanced and pragmatic view as to how we can continue to prioritise our residents and deliver the high-quality services they rightly expect,” she said in a statement earlier this month.
A spokesman for Cheltenham Borough Council said the decision to postpone its election was “the right one”.
However, just a few months ago, it was revealed that the local authority had spent hundreds of thousands of pounds in taxpayer cash on gagging orders over two years, up to and including 2024-25....<<<Read More>>>...
