Councillors have questioned whether social media has contributed to an increase in verbal abuse and threats aimed at council staff.

The issue was raised by councillors in Chichester during a corporate governance meeting on Monday (July 13), where it was revealed that 25 such incidents had been reported in 2025/26. This compared to seven the previous year and five in 2023/24.

Councillor Timothy Johnson, who teaches computing, asked if officers felt there had been a societal change, making people less concerned about what they say face-to-face – simply because they can say whatever they like online and stay relatively anonymous.

It was a view shared by Councillor Richard Bates who referenced the song ‘Class’, from the musical Chicago, which ponders the loss of “nice manners”.

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Warren Townsend, the council’s safety and resilience manager, thought Cllr Johnson was “probably right”, adding: “A lot of these cases are face-to-face. I think the filter has kind of gone, and we’ve certainly seen an increase since Covid times.

“I don’t know if that’s people being frustrated as a result of that but that’s when we started to see this kind of increase.

“People are happy to get quite aggressive and animated right in front of the officers and in reception. People also get quite aggressive on the telephone. I don’t know the exact reasons but, certainly in the last five years, I would say, it’s been slowly getting worse.”

Mr Townsend also felt that staff were reporting incidents more than they had done previously.