Durham County Council

Heritage · drafted 2026-07-02 · accepted · 2 finding(s)

← council-level findings on this theme

9 Oct 2025No evidence in the published corpus that Durham County Council itself has adopted, proposed, or moved to adopt a flag-flying protocol restricting its flagpoles, nor a council decision to remove or decline to fly the Pride flag. The only related material found is a comment by the Durham Police and Crime Commissioner, Joy Allen, at a joint Durham Police and Crime Panel meeting (attended by Durham County Council and Darlington Borough Council members) on 9 October 2025: she referenced 'a recent decision to lower pride flags' that had made people in the city feel unsafe, while discussing a High Court judgment on police impartiality at Pride events. The minutes do not identify which body made that decision, so it cannot be attributed to Durham County Council on the documentary record. [1]

26 Nov 2025Separately, at Durham County Council's Safer and Stronger Communities Overview and Scrutiny Committee (30 October 2025), a police hate-crime briefing noted a spike in hate crime following the 'Raise the Colours' campaign (unofficial flags placed on lampposts, including St George's cross graffiti on doors), and at Audit Committee (26 November 2025) a member said the erection of flags on lampposts across the county had at times felt intimidatory. Neither item describes a council decision about flags flown from council buildings/flagpoles; both concern third-party flags on public lampposts and community/hate-crime impact. [2][3]

References (3)
  1. Minutes, 9 October 2025 “a recent decision to lower pride flags had made many in the city feel unsafe and that people had ‘turned their back on’ those people.”
  2. Minutes “There had been a spike in hate crime following the ‘Raise the Colours’ campaign.”
  3. Minutes, 26 November 2025 “he had found to be the case with the erection of flags on lampposts through his community and elsewhere across the county”