Bournemouth, Christchurch and Poole Council

Most councillors were elected as part of a political party, with eleven elected as independents alongside several localist parties; subsequently parties were able to form political groups, which may be made up of several political parties; the allocation of seats on committees is based on the proportion of these groups. There are currently six groups, with seven unaligned councillors, and two vacant seats. Whilst the Conservatives, Liberal Democrats, and Labour Party sit by themselves, some parties and independents joined together in groups;[26] the Christchurch Independents was formed as a grouping of independents within the Christchurch area of the district, who ran for BCP Council after several were suspended from the Conservative Party for opposing the plans that lead to the creation of the new authority;[27][28] Poole People joined together win the one ALL Councillor, Felicity Rice, to form a group; the two Green councillors joined with two independents in Bournemouth to form the Bournemouth Independents and Green group (originally the Bournemouth Group),[29] The remaining independents and UKIP councillor are unaligned and thus sit by themselves, with the two other seats remaining vacant. Note that the current composition differs from the groups composition after the 2019 election, with such developments outlined above.

In 2021, after the by-elections for the Canford Heath and Commons wards, the Poole People and ALL Group was renamed to Poole Independents, composed of the remaining Poole People and ALL Councillors, alongside independent former Poole People councillor Pete Miles.[30]

The Poole Local Group was formed in June 2022.[31] On 3 October 2022 Redhill and Northbourne councillor Jackie Edwards left the Conservatives to sit as an Independent.[32] Three days later the Christchurch Independents held Highcliffe and Walkford in a by-election.[33]

Having obtained power in 2020, Mellor's administration announced a "Big Plan" to "harness the potential of our coastline of opportunity"[34] - although the plan also included some more specific pledges, such as rejuvenating Poole and investing in the Bournemouth International Centre. To facilitate this work, the Council set up a wholly-owned urban regeneration company, BCP FuturePlaces Limited, with Mellor and his deputy Philip Broadhead initially on the board, albeit unpaid. The company attracted controversy from the outset, with concerns about the six-figure salaries paid to its senior management[35] and its reliance on large infusions of public money, including £3.404 million allocated to it in November 2021[36] and an £8 million working capital loan advanced in July 2022.[37] As of October 2022, the company still hadn't produced an outline business case for any of its regeneration projects, these plans being pushed back first until the end of the year,[38] then until 2023.[39]

Another aim of the "Big Plan" was to "invest in an iconic cityscape",[40] and in November 2021 BCP Council voted for Bournemouth to enter the Platinum Jubilee Civic Honours competition in an effort to acquire city status. Broadhead had intimated earlier in the year that residents would be consulted prior to any such application,[41] but in the event they were not consulted, and nor was the Bournemouth Civic Society (whose members strongly opposed city status[42]) or the Throop and Holdenhurst Village Council.[43] It later transpired that the application, though for Bournemouth only, contained photographs of multiple sites in Poole and Christchurch.[44] The application proved unsuccessful in any case, Bournemouth losing out to Doncaster and Milton Keynes.[45]

The Mellor administration featured seven times in Private Eye during 2022, initially following its decision to abolish the Council's overview and scrutiny board (OSB), which held Mellor's monthly Cabinets to account. The debate on abolishing the OSB began at full Council on 26 April 2022, and due to a large number of absences on the Conservative side the Opposition won an amendment that would have retained the OSB while introducing extra scrutiny. Two Conservative councillors with COVID were then telephoned during an interval and turned up to the debate shortly afterwards, despite having sent apologies hours previously on COVID-related grounds.[46] The meeting was then abandoned due to health and safety concerns,[47] and at the reconvened meeting on 10 May there were enough Conservatives present to win a successive amendment which abolished the OSB and replaced it with four smaller committees which would meet less frequently. Members of the Conservative group were elected to the chairs and vice-chairs of these new committees (giving Mellor's party the casting votes) - despite the convention, evident on Dorset Council and elsewhere, that scrutiny committees are chaired by Opposition members.[48] Cabinet assistants, too, were installed as members of the new committees, effectively scrutinising their Cabinet colleagues' handiwork, though they were removed from all scrutiny committees following a vote at full Council on 5 December 2022.

Mellor's most controversial policy was his proposal to sell the Council's 3,605 beach huts to a Council-owned company for twenty years, to cancel out a £54 million transformation overspend.[49] A report on commercialising Council assets was commissioned from KPMG in 2021 and this, the first in a series of reports from KPMG, was completed on 22 September 2021.[50] The report warned that if a Council-owned company could only acquire Council assets because the Council had loaned it the money to do so, then "it is probable that the original borrowing undertaken by the Council ... would be deemed to be for an improper purpose";[51] similarly, if the Council were to provide a guarantee to the company to enable it to borrow the requisite funds, this too could "be deemed ... for an improper purpose".[52] A second report, specifically on beach hut sales, was then commissioned from KPMG and completed on 22 November 2021.[53] At the Council's budget meeting on 22 February 2022, Mellor denied that a completed report from KPMG existed, instead stating that he had "received comfort" from KPMG about the soundness of his policy following "a series of workshops".[54] The beach hut scheme was voted through, therefore, without Council having had sight of the foregoing warnings.

After several delays, the beach hut scheme came before the Council's corporate and community overview and scrutiny committee on 20 July 2022. Mellor did not turn up to the meeting, no reports were produced, while a Democratic Services officer was left to answer heated questions from residents and beach-hut tenants.[55] The Conservatives' chief whip then proposed that the meeting be adjourned prior to any debate - despite Procedure Rule 17 of the Council's Constitution, which forbids the use of the whip on scrutiny committees.[56] Nine days later, Greg Clark, the Secretary of State for Levelling-Up, announced that he was stepping in to outlaw the beach-hut scheme. It transpired that Kemi Badenoch, a minister in the Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities, had written to Mellor on 16 June expressing "concerns" that the regulations surrounding asset disposals were "not being used appropriately, as the assets ultimately remain within the Council's group structure".[57] Greg Clark went on the record to denounce councils that make "dodgy deals",[58] and on 1 August he wrote to Mellor stating that he was tightening up the guidance on local authority asset disposals, adding: "I will not hesitate to act where the spirit of the law is ignored or flouted".[59] BCP Council meanwhile set about applying for a £76 million "capitalisation direction", essentially a loan from Government, to balance its books.

The KPMG reports were finally published at the end of August 2022, by which time the beach hut policy had already been outlawed.[60] At back-to-back scrutiny meetings on 2 September, Mellor denied several times that he had played any part in suppressing the KPMG reports at the time of the February budget. The following week, at Cabinet, he stated that he had, in fact, suggested that the reports be held back.[61]

A petition from local residents to remove Mellor from office - along with his deputy, Philip Broadhead - was debated at BCP Council on 8 November 2022, having attracted 2,066 valid signatures.[62] A Conservative backbencher, Duane Farr, attacked the petition organiser Ian Lawrence during the debate, attributing the petition's authorship to "politically motivated trolls", "creepy, sad little people with nothing better to do", who "need calling out and exposing".[63] The Council voted to take no action over the petition.

The Council sold off assets, including three industrial estates, at the beginning of 2023 in an attempt to balance its books; this was dubbed a "fire sale" by opposition groups. The Council's external auditor, Grant Thornton LLP, nevertheless commended the administration for returning to more orthodox ways of raising capital. In January 2023, Drew Mellor suggested a less orthodox proposal for the forthcoming budget, which would have involved deliberately overborrowing for a capital scheme, and then applying the surplus to the Council's revenue account so as to obviate council tax rises. The Council's chief executive, Graham Farrant, and chief finance officer were so concerned about this proposal that they contacted Grant Thornton, who urged them to use their "statutory powers" to intervene if the scheme went ahead. Mellor by this time was also facing two complaints from members of the public about his dishonesty in withholding the KPMG reports and other information from the 2022 budget, and these complaints were upheld by the Council's standards committee on 16 January 2023.

It was around this time too that Cllr Mark Anderson, who held the Environment portfolio in Mellor's administration, devised what came to be known as "cleaning for votes" - a street-cleaning scheme aimed at benefiting Conservative wards in the run-up to the May 2023 local elections. The whole of Mellor's Cabinet were notified of this scheme in an e-mail sent by Anderson on 13 January 2023; five days later, all Conservative members of BCP Council were e-mailed, again by Anderson, with a request for sites that would benefit them electorally from deep cleaning. None of the Cabinet or indeed the Conservative group appear to have raised concerns about this initiative. A complaint against Anderson was raised by an Independent member on 26 January on numerous grounds (including misuse of public resources for political ends) and Dorset Police were called in, but decided to take no action as no funds for the scheme had yet been committed. The Council's standards committee subsequently found, however, that Anderson had breached the Council's code of conduct on six counts.

Mellor resigned as council leader on 13 February 2023, and announced he would not stand for re-election in May 2023.[64] The resignation took place while an investigation into Mark Anderson's conduct was ongoing, and three days before an audit and governance committee meeting, where Mellor's proposals for the 2023 budget were due to be censured as "irresponsible" by the external auditors, Grant Thornton.