Three Liverpool councillors have rejected calls to resign over not attending Town Hall meetings.
Long-serving Liberal Democrats councillor Richard Kemp challenged Sarah Doyle, Tom Logan and Elizabeth Hayden if they continue to refuse to turn up to sessions.
The Labour trio as well as Collette Goulding, currently suspended from the party, are said to have only attended between three and five meetings in the last 18 months.
Under the Local Government Act, councillors that fail to attend any meeting in six consecutive months from the date of their last appearance ceases to be a member of the local authority.
The only exception to that rule is if the council accepts a reason for their failure to attend before the six-month period expires.
Cllr Kemp argues that all four should either turn down their annual allowance of nearly £14,000 or resign from their wards in order to trigger local by-elections.
“We all get tarred with the same brush ‘you’re all in it for yourselves, you do it for the money’. Well that’s not true,” he told the BBC.
“I have a responsibility to look at standards and probity and try and get the Labour Party to do something about this situation.
He added: “Councillors should attend planning meetings, committee meetings and other meetings which affect the people in their communities.”
However Liverpool Labour dismissed the concerns raised by Cllr Kemp, who is the city’s longest-serving councillor after first being elected to pubic office in 1973.
A spokesperson said “Cllr Kemp has been a councillor long enough to know that councillors carry out a wide range of responsibilities on behalf of their communities, much of which takes place outside formal committee meetings.
“Whilst the Lib Dems look through the council’s website, Labour in Liverpool remains focused on delivering for local people, not engaging in political point-scoring over attendance statistics taken out of context.”
Separately, its three councillors insisted to the BBC that they will not be standing down with Logan accusing the Liberal Democrats of ‘playing games as usual’.
He said: “This is typical of the nonsense theatre that plays out in the town hall, which is part of the reason why local politics in Liverpool feels so disparate to local communities and residents.”
Both Doyle and Hayden affirmed they ‘will not be resigning’ and maintain they are still active in their respective local communities independent of Town Hall meetings.
Speaking on BBC Radio Merseyside, council leader Liam Robinson refused to address individual cases but insisted potential issues were ‘being addressed’.