WHEN Midsomer Norton Town Council was created in May 2011, it felt like a genuine moment of civic renewal, writes Ian Nockolds on the 15th anniversary of the town council.

Born from a community-led campaign launched in January 2009, when Paul Myers and Chris Watt delivered letters to 8,500 households calling for a Community Governance Review, it was a deliberate rejection of the dysfunction that had come to define Norton Radstock Town Council - an authority plagued by infighting, party-political paralysis, Standards Committee investigations and four councillor resignations in a single six-month period.

The review, formally commenced by Bath and North East Somerset Council in March 2009, concluded with a vote of 48 to 4 to dissolve the old authority in July 2010. On May 5, 2011, Midsomer Norton elected its first independent council.

For much of its first decade that council appeared to justify the optimism. Under strong, consistent leadership, the new authority built its work around three core aims: building community, restoring civic pride, and operating as a well-run council. The achievements were concrete. Street marshals delivered a 55 percent reduction in anti-social behaviour within two years. The council secured the freeholds of the Town Hall, the Somer Centre, and Silver Street Nature Reserve and created the Town Park. In 2019, the Town Clerk was named Clerk of the Year by the National Association of Local Councils and two years later, the council achieved Quality Gold status under the Local Council Award Scheme.

So was the community governance review a success? For its first decade, the answer was clearly yes, but today that argument is much harder to make.

The warning signs were visible before the collapse. In 2022, the funding of a concrete outdoor table tennis table became a symbol of a council whose priorities had drifted. The 2023/24 budget process saw the axing of the street marshals, once a celebrated community safety success story. In January 2023, the Town Clerk and her Deputy, both resigned, with the then Mayor acknowledging publicly that events in recent months had had a "detrimental effect upon the Clerk and all the staff.”

Just over 13 years after its creation, an independent investigation described the Town Council as "toxic, aggressive, and confrontational". It cycled through five Town Clerks in under two years. The Town Hall refurbishment, a project hailed as a symbol of renewal, became a source of financial strain and public distrust. Norton Radstock Town Council was abolished after being judged beyond reform. The authority created to avoid repeating that history finds itself facing strikingly similar criticisms 15 years later.

What Midsomer Norton ultimately illustrates is that structure alone cannot compensate for the absence of leadership, professional capacity, and a culture of mutual respect. Across England, town and parish councils are being asked to take on more assets and services, often without a corresponding increase in support or training. The community governance review gave Midsomer Norton a fresh start. What happened next was determined by the people entrusted to make it work and that is a lesson every community considering such a change would do well to heed.