A Labour council that cancelled its local election to cut costs spent tens of thousands of pounds on an “asylum seeker mental health and trauma project”.
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 Mr 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.
Rowena Hay, leader of Cheltenham borough council, said a drain on resources had led her to postpone its election
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.
These non-disclosure agreements, signed by the council, were reportedly linked to commercial information associated with the authority’s major development projects in the town, according to Gloucestershire Live.
A freedom of information response obtained by the news site last year revealed that £782,468 had been paid in association with 25 non-disclosure agreements signed by the council.
Elsewhere, Labour-controlled Crawley borough council spent £961,176 on a “solar carport project”, £250,000 of which came from the council’s own funds and not central government grants.
The sum was awarded for work to “design and build a solar carport scheme” – shelters over cars with solar panels installed – in an existing leisure centre car park.
A press release published shortly after their installation last year confirmed that £250,000 had been invested in the project by the council itself.
A report on election delays by the council, which is aiming to achieve net zero emissions by 2030, estimated that holding a poll would cost “in the region of £120,000”.
“The postponement of the borough elections would create savings, but given that preparations are already well under way, the savings achieved would be far less than this,” it added.
However, the report stated that those elected in 2026 would serve only a two-year term, saying: “It could therefore be argued that the elections in 2026 would offer less value for money than in previous years.”
Conservative-led West Sussex county council also confirmed in a statement that there were “several reasons” it had presented to the Government when asking for a delay, including the “cost of holding elections now planned in 2026, 2027 and in 2028 – the latter year being for the mayoral elections”.
The council claimed this would leave taxpayers “across the whole of Sussex” with a £9m bill.
However, last year it confirmed plans to spend more than twice that sum – in excess of £24m – on converting 64,000 street lights to LED lanterns.
The council hopes the lights will cut carbon emissions by 1,633 tonnes per year by 2028 and save more than £117m in maintenance and energy costs.
Richard Tice, the deputy leader of Reform UK, says millions of British taxpayers are being stripped of their democratic right – Alishia Abodunde/Getty Images
However, critics argue that such expenses are not as crucial as allowing residents to exercise their democratic rights.
Mr Tice added: “Elections aren’t being cancelled because councils are broken, they’re being cancelled because Reform would win.
“To the millions of British taxpayers stripped of their democratic right, Reform is on your side. We said we’d fight Labour at every step and we are.”
Benjamin Elks, of the campaign group TaxPayers’ Alliance, said: “It is outrageous that democracy-dodging councils are pleading poverty while splurging cash on everything from LED lamps to asylum seeker mental health projects.
“Local residents are struggling to make ends meet and face rising council tax bills, but town halls seem happy to spend money on everything but local elections.
“Councils need to focus on providing core services, starting with the elections that give them their mandate.”
A Crawley council spokesman said: “The cost of elections was not a criterion of the government decision; it asked about the capacity of delivering elections at the same time as carrying out local government reorganisation.
“The council wrote to the minister with a number of reasons why it believed elections should be postponed, only one of which included delivering value for money.”
The other local authorities were approached for comment.