Campbell right over community fund.

HULL & EAST RIDING – When Mayor Luke Campbell launched a £1 million community fund earlier this year, it was designed to do something straightforward: let local people suggest and shape small-scale projects to improve their towns and villages. Yet it quickly became the subject of a row when a local councillor claimed the fund did not exist.

The BBC reported that the claim went further, suggesting that the online portal used to gather ideas was less a civic tool than a party device, and that the spending had never been formally authorised. Such claims, made with confidence, carried quickly into headlines and social media.

Yet an internal review has now drawn a different conclusion. As the Yorkshire Post noted this month, Campbell was cleared of breaking any rules: the fund exists, the £1 million allocation has been made, and the necessary executive decision was published. The branding slip on the consultation site was ruled an administrative error rather than evidence of anything untoward.

The episode matters less for what it revealed about the fund — which is already in operation — than for what it says about the tone of local politics. False or exaggerated claims may be effective in the moment, but they linger long after they have been disproved. For local people, this erodes confidence in the very institutions that are supposed to deliver, in this case a new authority, with new money that has a chance of improving their lives.

The Hull and East Yorkshire Combined Authority was created precisely to rise above this kind of partisan skirmish. With Liberal Democrat leadership in Hull, Conservatives in the East Riding and a Reform UK mayor, its success depends on collaboration. Its remit — transport, housing, skills and economic growth — is too important to be undermined by point-scoring. Endless political point-scoring by local politicians risks halting the progress that ordinary people expect. Will there be a retraction? Probably not.

Scrutiny of a new mayor is natural and necessary. But scrutiny has to be rooted in fact. The suggestion that a £1m fund was a fiction has now been tested and found wanting. What remains is the damage such rhetoric can do to public trust.

If devolution is to mean anything in practice, it must mean delivery. And delivery only happens when those elected to serve speak with accuracy, resist easy soundbites, and remember that their first responsibility is to the local people who put them there.