What is a Councillor?
Councillors are people who are elected to represent local people in the council’s decision making process. In the county council, they represent particular local areas, called Electoral Divisions. County Durham has 63 electoral divisions, with 2 councillors representing each Division, so the County Council has 126 councillors (sometimes known as members).
In the main, councillors tend to belong to political parties, such as the Labour, Conservative or the Liberal Democrat parties. For many years the county council has had a very large Labour majority. In other words, most of its councillors belong to the Labour Party. However, you do not have to be a member of a political party to stand and be elected as a councillor. In fact, the county council also has a small number of independent members who are not aligned to any particular political party.
