Devon County Council year-end financial records have confirmed that Labour councillor Danny Barnes received a full £15,000 county councillor allowance in 2024-25 despite attending only two of the fifteen public meetings at which he was expected during the year.
Neither of the two meetings of the county council public rights of way committee that he did attend conducted any business related to Exeter.
The timing of these meetings, held in July and November, meant that he remained a county councillor until the local elections this May without his absences triggering a by-election under the Local Government Act.
This requires councillors who do not attend a meeting of the local authority of which they are a member at least once every six months to vacate their office.
Danny Barnes. Photo: Devon Labour.
Community groups in Heavitree & Whipton Barton – the Exeter electoral division Danny Barnes was elected to represent – missed out on £14,600 in grants after he failed to sign their funding agreements before the financial year-end deadline.
Around ten local voluntary organisations in the division did not receive funding which had been approved in principle under the county council locality budgets community grants scheme.
All the affected community groups submitted their funding applications before the February deadline and had their applications approved in principle.
But, after county council officers were unable to contact Danny Barnes despite making numerous attempts to do so, the final sign-off required under the terms of scheme did not take place.
2024-25 Devon County Council locality budget community grants allocations by Exeter councillor.
Source: Devon County Council.
Danny Barnes was conspicuous among all sixty Devon county councillors in spending none of his 2024-25 locality community grants budget. No other councillor came close, with most spending all or almost all of their budgets last year.
He also persistently underspent his locality community budget in each of the preceding three years following his 2021 election.
In 2021-22 he failed to spend £7,450 of a £10,000 budget, in 2022-23 he failed to spend £5,230 of an £11,725 budget and in 2023-24 he failed to spend £6,600 of a £10,230 budget.
Once budget variations and carry-forwards are accounted for, this means that a total of £18,325 that could have been given in grants to voluntary and community groups in Heavitree & Whipton Barton was lost when the locality budget reset took place before May’s elections.
The last time Danny Barnes attended a full meeting of Devon County Council was in December 2023.
According to his register of interests he was then employed as a Labour Party regional organiser, a role which he apparently held until May.
However when we contacted him in February via his county council email address we received an automatic reply: “This mailbox is not monitored”. We tried again, asking questions about his attendance record and why he had not resigned to allow a by-election in his seat, to no avail.
We were then told in April that he had long been employed by Scottish Labour MP Imogen Walker, spouse of Downing Street chief of staff Morgan McSweeney and parliamentary private secretary to chancellor Rachel Reeves.
We wrote to ask whether he worked in either or both of her constituency or parliamentary offices.
We did not receive a reply. But we did notice a pair of recruitment advertisements, one placed shortly after Imogen Walker was elected in July 2024 for a caseworker in her new Hamilton and Clyde Valley constituency office, the other placed in January this year for a researcher in her Westminster office.
Applicants for both were invited to apply to danny.barnes@parliament.uk.
His presence in Imogen Walker’s office is also recorded in all eight MP’s staff registers of interests that have been published since the general elections were held.
