Opinion: Attendance Is Only One Measure of Councillor Performance

Published on: 26 Jan, 2026
Updated on: 27 Jan, 2026

Councillor attendance figures are published on the GBC website.

By Catherine Houston

Lib Dem borough councillor for Shalford

See: Borough Council Attendance Rates Decline

Measuring councillor “performance” purely by attendance at statutory committee meetings is a blunt instrument and fails to give a full picture of whether an elected member is pulling their weight.

For some councillors it is easy to achieve 100 per cent attendance: they simply do not volunteer for committees and only need to attend full council meetings on six or seven evenings a year to earn a virtual shiny gold star on the GBC website.

Those who do step up to serve on committees take on the workload those particular colleagues leave behind. This means giving up far more evenings, often spending several nights a month in the council chamber between 7 and 9pm.

Councillors are local residents with families, jobs and caring responsibilities. People get ill, responsibilities clash, and sometimes one can get stuck on the A3 coming back from a work meeting. The more you commit to, the harder it becomes to maintain a high attendance percentage.

Cllr Catherine Houston

Before I was elected in 2023, I did not realise how much work was involved when volunteering for council committees, boards and panels. Agenda packs are often 200–300 pages long and need to be read and understood in advance so that councillors can properly question portfolio holders and senior officers.

It is demanding work, but also rewarding and interesting. Registered attendance records also fail to reflect time spent on other boards and panels, such as the Climate Change Board, Local Plan Panel or Housing Operations Board, so these are not counted in the stats.

The option of remote attendance, as has been suggested, would certainly improve attendance levels. At the end of 2024, the Local Government Association (LGA) ran online workshops with councillors nationwide as part of a wider government consultation on remote attendance and proxy voting.

I attended one such workshop and contributed to the discussion. I was also one of the 5,844 people who responded to the government consultation. Following that consultation, the government announced the following in June 2025:

“We have carefully considered arguments for and against remote attendance and proxy voting, and we plan to legislate to support permanent provision in relation to both policies, when parliamentary time allows.

On remote attendance, we plan to permit local authorities to develop their own locally appropriate policies, if they decide to hold remote meetings.”

The background can be read here: Remote attendance and proxy voting in local authorities: consultation results and government response – GOV.UK

Personally, I support limited remote attendance, with a set number of annual “passes” to be used when genuinely needed. In-person voting should remain the norm, not become the exception. However, I am not in favour of proxy voting, but it is a subject that should be debated openly and in public.

It would benefit the new West Surrey Council to decide early whether it supports remote attendance and proxy voting in order to respond quickly to the legislation if and when passed. Allowing limited remote attendance as a fallback, when in-person attendance is challenging, would encourage stronger engagement from busy councillors and encourage people to stand for election from communities and backgrounds who might otherwise rule themselves out.

What the public really cares about, though, is whether their councillor is there for them when they need help or support. A councillor may have a “poor” attendance record according to the council website, yet be highly responsive to residents and effective at resolving local problems.

For me, keeping on top of casework is one of the most important parts of the role. Apart from the leader, councillors do not have assistants and must personally manage the constant flow of emails and issues that arrive daily. No-one knows which councillors are doing casework or not, apart from residents.

The public rightly expect their elected representatives to answer their queries while also carrying out the business of local government. But that is a lot to take on for £8,579 per year (GBC allowance for a back bencher).

To me, that shouts “part time”, whilst many residents have an expectation of “full-time”. If we want engaged and hard-working councillors from all walks of life then councils and the public need to support incentives that will make that much easier to deliver than currently.