Councillor Home Addresses: Why the New Privacy Law Matters

Cllr Jackie Meade (pictured) brought the issue up to date at Folkestone & Hythe’s 24 June meeting. She said: “I’m one of the people that has received that abuse that we’re all talking about.” During the last Kent County Council election, she said, the abuse came “not just on Facebook, but also in the street”. Then she added the plainest line in the whole debate: “I was spat on.”

That’s not scrutiny.

It’s not democratic challenge.

It’s a councillor saying she was spat on in the street.

Cllr Meade said some Facebook posts were “so serious” they were reported “not just to Facebook but reported to the police”. She described them as “Serious, serious” and said they included “allegations but actually threats”. It reached the point where, in her words, she told her husband: “that’s it, enough. I’m not standing again”.

Then came the family point, which often gets lost when politics turns into sport. Cllr Meade said: “my family don’t deserve the amount of abuse that they can see on social media against me.” Councillors stand for election. Their families don’t.

She also put responsibility back on councillors themselves. If members backed the motion, she said, she was holding them “personally responsible” for calling out insults and abuse against other members “on Facebook, on Instagram, on TikTok”. That is a harder test than condemning abuse in general. It asks councillors to challenge it when it comes from their own side, their own audience, their own supporters, or their own political friends.

Cllr Jenny Hollingsbee (pictured) gave an older example.

In her 32 years as a district councillor, she said the only time she had really been concerned was during a march in Hythe when her head and another councillor’s head were on banners going down Hythe High Street. Her grandchildren were at school. “It was horrendous,” she said. “That sticks with me.”

But Cllr Hollingsbee also took a different view on address redaction. She said she’d never had her address redacted and didn’t intend to now. Her reason was practical: she sits on planning, and people often turn up at her house “just to put something through the door” for her to look at. “I don’t want to stop that,” she said.

That’s a fair point.

It should also be a choice.

Cllr Tony Hills made the old-school case more bluntly. He said he’d been a councillor “for about 30 years” and added: “I hate the idea of my address being redacted.” He called it “ducking the issue”, said he’d had people put letters through his letterbox, and argued: “we have to be braver.”

That argument shouldn’t be caricatured. Public office does need nerve. Councillors can’t hide from residents. But being contactable is not the same as having a home address published by default when council emails, telephone numbers, surgeries, postal routes, ward meetings and civic offices already exist.

Cllr Rich Holgate (pictured) saw it differently. He said he had “two young children” and was “honestly relieved” that he didn’t have to put his address on his register any more. He said he supported being accessible and held to the “highest scrutiny level”, but was grateful that address privacy was now part of his public life.

That’s the distinction.

Accessible doesn’t mean available at home.

Cllr Holgate also said “vitriol” had contributed to him being “totally off social media” and probably to his time as a councillor being “shorter term” than he expected. He described an “attention economy” where “rage bait and click bait drives too much of the conversation”. If abuse helps push people out of public life early, residents lose candidates as well as councillors.

Cllr Anita Jones welcomed the address change. She said: “I welcome the addresses being redacted.” She spoke about family, said it’d be nice to “feel that we’re a little bit protected”, and then made the point some people will understand immediately and others may have to think about: “I’m a small female,” she said, adding that she’d welcome “more protection” because “intimidation feels very different when you’re a small female.”

That isn’t a soft point. It’s a risk point.

A big man and a small woman can hold the same office, sit in the same chamber and vote on the same motion. They may not experience a doorstep confrontation in the same way. That’s not abandoning facts for feelings. It’s accepting that the effect of intimidation is part of the evidence.

Cllr Jones then made the local printed-media point directly: “It’s local printed media as well can be a problem.” She said Cllr Holgate had already alluded “to one publication” and added that people needed to think kindly about how they talk about people. She also said it was “equally horrible” if personal targeting was happening in local printed media “being delivered to people’s houses” or put in public places.

That needs care.

Local media matters. It can hold councils to account, expose waste, test claims, challenge officers and councillors, and give residents information they’d otherwise never see. Proper local journalism can be uncomfortable, sharp and forensic. It should be.

But printed claims can do damage when they’re wrong. They land on doormats. They sit on shop counters. They get read in cafés, takeaways, waiting rooms and pubs. A printed claim can feel weightier than a Facebook post because it has ink, paper and a masthead. And if it’s wrong, the correction often limps along behind it.

Cllr Holgate sharpened that point when he spoke about councillors’ obligations to the audiences they curate and work with “on a day-to-day basis”. He then said: “And through our publications, Councillor Wimble,” before saying councillors had obligations they should take on as a result of the motion.

There’s a local example in black and white. On 10 April 2025, Shepway Green Party published “The Looker/Hurricane: A Correction”. It said the party had been trying for more than a month to get the editor of The Looker and The Hurricane to publish a correction, adding: “He won’t, so we will publish it here.”

The correction said: “In our edition of 5th March, we wrongly claimed that Cllr Stephen Scoffham, Cabinet member for Climate, Environment and Biodiversity, had suggested that Romney Marsh should be allowed to flood so that it could be ‘rewilded’.” It continued: “We accept that neither Cllr Scoffham nor any of his Green Party colleagues on Folkestone & Hythe District Council have ever made any such suggestion. We apologise for suggesting otherwise.”

That isn’t a tiny typo.

It’s a correction accepting that a claim about a named councillor and his colleagues was wrong.

The Green Party page went further. It said it had “long chosen to ignore The Looker’s inaccuracies, misrepresentations and personal attacks”, but tried to set the record straight on that occasion. It also said the editor had admitted the claim was based only on something a Conservative councillor who had since stood down had told him, and described the claim as “based on nothing more than hearsay”.

That is where balance matters.

Councillors shouldn’t be able to hide behind the word “abuse” when what they’re really facing is fair criticism. But a printed personal claim, poorly evidenced and corrected only after the damage is done, belongs in the same public-life conversation as online abuse, doorstep intimidation and the question of how much private information should be handed out by public bodies.

Cllr Jeremy Speakman (pictured) backed the pushback. He said councillors had for a while treated “the slings and arrows of outraged social media” as “par for the course”, then added: “Well, actually, no it’s not.” He said he agreed with Cllr Meade and called for “civilised discourse”.

Cllr Nicola Keen raised the uncomfortable internal question. She asked for assurance that if derogatory things were said about councillors, including town, district and county councillors, and if it came from a councillor in the room, it’d be “dealt with efficiently and not brushed under the carpet”. She also said it was “no good doing a motion as good as this” without consequences for what was “being put in print”.

She was right to ask given past experiences of the former monitoring officer.

A council can’t preach civility to the public while ducking councillor-on-councillor behaviour. The standard can’t be “protect us from outsiders” while insiders keep throwing stones.

So, yes, today’s address change is imperfect. It may even look absurd where a councillor’s home address is already visible through business filings or old documents. But imperfect doesn’t mean useless. A council register of interests has a purpose: showing interests, testing conflicts and helping residents understand whether a councillor should’ve declared, spoken, voted or withdrawn. It was never meant to be a map to somebody’s home.

The proper test isn’t whether every address can be scrubbed from every corner of the internet.

It can’t.

The test is whether councils should carry on publishing home addresses as a matter of routine when the risk is known, when abuse is documented, and when there are other ways to keep councillors contactable and accountable. From today, Parliament’s answer is no.

Mrs Thatcher said: first find the facts. The facts here aren’t hard to find. Abuse has been reported. Threats have been reported. A councillor said she was spat on. A dead bird was left at a councillor’s home with a note saying “we know who you are”. Another councillor said intimidation feels different when you’re a small woman. Others warned about social media, printed local media, banners and councillors’ own conduct.

The conclusion is not that councillors should be shielded from scrutiny.

They shouldn’t.

Their votes remain public. Their interests remain public where the law requires it. Their decisions can still be checked. Their conduct can still be challenged. Their claims can still be tested. Their words can still be quoted back at them.

Their front doors don’t need to be part of the file.

The Shepway Vox Team

Dissent is NOT a Crime