Hello and welcome to The Lancashire Lead.
Reform UK’s councillors at County Hall celebrated - with some justification - when they voted to freeze allowances 12 months ago, saying the public expects them to be frugal in financially challenging times.
This year, an increase has been approved without debate and left some opposition councillors baffled.
Lancashire County Council is adamant that the process has been done by the book - but unsurprisingly not everyone agrees on that.
We look at how all of that has come about in today’s edition.
Lancashire briefing
A landlord has been convicted after doing nothing about a flat with a hole in its front door and black mould.
Wajid Mahmood, aged 41, ignored ‘repeated requests’ to carry out improvements to the Clitheroe flat, according to Ribble Valley Borough Council.
The council says Mahmood, who is of Holden Street in the town, joint-owned the property with another man, but only Mahmood was convicted for the offence.
He appeared at Blackburn Magistrates Court on July 15 this year, charged with failing to comply with a housing improvement notice.
Court records show that on December 23, 2024, he ‘failed to comply’ with the improvement notice relating to a ‘category one hazard’ under Section 11 of the Housing Act 2004.
Mahmood pleaded guilty to the offence and was fined £2,025, ordered to pay an £810 victim surcharge and a £2,756.54 collection order, totalling £5,591.54.
Councillor Malcolm Peplow of East Whalley, Read and Simonstone, Green, thanked officers for their action at a health and housing meeting on October 29, saying: “Let’s make no mistake, damp and mould growth can cause serious health issues, and in some cases can be killers.
“I think that landlords really do deserve all that comes to them if they allow these kinds of conditions to prevail.
“Anybody renting housing has to have a reasonable expectation that that property is going to be fit and healthy to live in.”
🏠 An estate made up entirely of homes classed as ‘affordable’ is to be built in Lostock Hall.
The 76-dwelling development – on land at the junction of Lostock Lane and Stanifield Lane – has been given the go-ahead by South Ribble Borough Council’s planning committee.
The Places for People scheme will see 40 of the homes offered for shared ownership – intended for those who would otherwise be unable to afford a deposit and mortgage payments in full. The arrangement means they will instead be able to purchase a portion of the property and pay rent to the landlord for the share they do not own.
The remaining 36 homes will be offered for social rent, which usually equates to around half the cost of local market rates.
🚧 Preston City Council says it will seek the views of the public and property owners before deciding how to spend the £1.55m it has been given to help deal with dilapidated and disused buildings.
The authority was announced last week as one of 60 to be allocated a share of the government’s new £125m Derelict Buildings Fund (DBF). It will now consider which of the premises on its “priority list” would be best placed to benefit from a cash injection.
However, the Preserving Preston’s Heritage (PPH) group described the sum as “a drop in the ocean” – and suggested some of the money might be better invested in ensuring that bids for other, more substantial, sources of funding had the best chance of success.
Allowances at Lancashire County Council increased without debate 12 months after point made of freezing them
By Luke Beardsworth
Opposition councillors were surprised to hear they would get no chance to debate the increase to their allowances - just 12 months after the leading Reform group made a political point of freezing them.
The 3.3 per cent rise to councillor allowances has been applied without the need for debate or discussion at a meeting of full council - something one opposition councillor says he can’t remember happening in his decade-plus at County Hall.
In October 2025, the ruling Reform UK group led the decision to freeze allowances despite an independent body ruling that they should be increasing, saying that it would be wrong to accept a rise when the county council was searching for savings of more than £100m.
That move was backed by most opposition groups and was hailed as saving around £115,000 for ‘the benefit of Lancashire residents’.
But that restraint was not shown this year, with the uplift accepted by the authority and its leader, and now one opposition leader believes the lack of full council debate is a face-saving exercise designed to excuse Reform councillors from having to vote through their own pay rise 12 months after making such a point of doing the opposite.
Lancashire County Council, and its leader Stephen Atkinson, are both adamant that no further debate is required. Both pointed to a full council meeting in March as being evidence of the uplift being approved.
But reports and minutes from that meeting show zero discussion of any 3.3 per cent uplift with much of the debate instead focusing on changes to how the opposition receives allowances - a reflection of how there is not one large opposition group on the council as there has traditionally been.
Lancashire County Council said that a separate full council decision is only needed where there isn’t a standard percentage award to staff - allowances typically increase in line with staffing increases - or when a different approach to the automatic increase is proposed as happened last year.
But the matter of the uplift was submitted to full council in every year since 2020/21. Lancashire County Council said this happened in March, but opposition councillors say the first they were made aware that the uplift had been accepted on their behalf was when they received an email last week.
County councillor Aidy Riggott, leader of the Conservatives, said: “I was surprised as anyone when the Reform led County Council announced that a 3.3 per cent increase in Councillor pay was happening automatically this year, without Councillors having a chance to debate and choose whether to accept the recommended increase - which is what has happened every time at Full Council for as long as I and other long-standing members can remember.”