The North Somerset Conservative Association has been put into special measures, after a year which saw it lose the constituency to Labour and end up in financial conflicts within the Conservative Party.
The local party of Liam Fox’s former constituency was left “without having the resources to effectively run any future election campaigns,” the chair of the association Nigel Ashton said in an email to local party members informing them of the situation on December 30. The organisation is now in “supported status” and will be partly run directly by the central Conservative Party for a period. Mr Ashton wrote: “I realise that some will not be happy with the outcome but we can no longer be in constant conflict with the party we all chose to join.”
The news came as a shock to many in the local party, with one party member describing it as a “bolt from the blue.” Conservative councillor for Portishead South on North Somerset Council, Peter Burden, said: “As upstanding members we really want to know what is happening? And if there has been a problem, we want to know what it is.”
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Despite two requests to Mr Ashton to hold a meeting of the council’s executive in the months before the news, local party members said they had received no response and no meeting had happened. Mr Ashton told the Local Democracy Reporting Service that he had no information until the party made a decision on putting the association in supported status on December 23, which had been delayed due to the Conservative Party leadership election.
He said: “Going into supported status is going to help us financially. […] What we are actually going through is a positive.”
North Somerset and the constituencies which preceded it had been held by the Conservatives for 100 years. For the last 32 of those years, the MP had been Dr Fox. But in the 2024 general election — which Mr Ashton called “pretty traumatic” — he lost the seat to Labour’s Sadik Al-Hassan by 639 votes.
The election was the first fought with the new constituency boundaries, which saw Yatton moved out of North Somerset and into the new Wells and Mendip Hills constituency. These boundary changes mean that there are now eleven constituencies in Somerset, instead of nine — and consequently two new constituency Conservative associations.
Party vesting rules mean that the assets of each association need to be redistributed according to the changes to each constituency, meaning the North Somerset Conservative Association has to give just under 9% of its assets to the new Wells and Mendip Hills Conservative Association — but North Somerset’s assets are not cash, but its headquarters on Nailsea High Street.
Nigel Ashton
(Image: North Somerset Council)
Mr Ashton said: “If —as in North Somerset’s case — you own a building, how do we pay 8.974% to our neighbouring association who now owns that, when we don’t have any cash? […] It was felt we needed to take out a mortgage on the building or take out a loan on the building so that we can settle our bills, rather than sharing a building which is nowhere near Wells.”
He added that the building was held in trust and the trustees were planning a number of repairs, and so there was only very limited cash available. Mr Ashton said there were no plans to sell the building, stating: “There’s no plan to do anything. We are trying to see what our options are.”
The need to settle the vesting arrangements happened at the same time as the association pulled out of a “grouping” of pooled resources with the other Conservative associations in Somerset, which Mr Ashton — in his email to local party members — warned left it without the resources to run campaigns “nor to realistically fund its ongoing commitments to the group”
The Conservative Party has now given the North Somerset Conservative Association an interest-free loan to settle its debts, alongside putting it in supported status. Existing members of its executive council, who were elected to their positions last year, have now been “stood down” by the party— except for Mr Ashton, Felicity Baker, and Andrew Farnden. They have been retained as part of a new executive council along with regional party figures to run the association while it is in supported status.
Responding to concern from some in the local association that their elected executive had been removed, Mr Ashton told the Local Democracy Reporting Service: “You could see it like that but actually the party has been suspended so there aren’t any positions to be removed from and when we come out of supported status we will go back to having elections to putting people back in place.”
He said: “In my view we are part of the Conservative Party so if the party says “you have to do this,” then really that’s the best thing to do.”
He added: “It’s just really bad timing with the general election and the boundary changes and all that sort of stuff going on at the same time.”
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