The Mayor of Middlewich is confident the town council will be able to function properly even though it only has seven councillors at the moment instead of 12.

Cllr Colin Coules believes some residents will agree to be co-opted on to the council now the elections are over.

Middlewich Town Council didn't have elections last week because of the lack of candidates. All seven councillors are Independent.

Cllr Coules told the Local Democracy Reporting Service: "I think we're going to be quite successful on the co-opting.

"Now we've got an understanding of the skill base that we've got, we're doing a bit of a re-structure on who does what and then we can go out and co-opt the skills that we need to get the other places."

When asked why people should come forward now to join the council if they weren't interested enough to put themselves forwards as candidates initially, Cllr Coules said: "A couple of people I've talked to, I tried to get them involved in the election process and they were very nervous about it and they didn't in the end.

"But now that they don't have to go through that process and they can get co-opted I think it's easier to convince people. The whole election process and going through it and having to go out campaigning, I think that can put people off a bit."

He said the new town council had active councillors 'and we're optimistic about co-opting the right skills'.

Middlewich Town Council has a troubled history as seven councillors quit in the past 18 months in the run-up to the election.

Neither Labour nor the Conservatives put up any candidates to stand this year for the town council.

Cllr Coules is confident the council can function properly despite its numbers at present and its recent reported financial position.

In September last year the council reported it was facing a £100,000 deficit.

Cllr Coules said: "We're in a much stronger position now than we were six months ago.

"We came out of the year with a surplus, it was a tiny, tiny, tiny surplus but it was a surplus nonetheless so we've entered phase two of the three year plan in good shape."

He said there was no longer a need to hold full council meetings every two weeks, as has been done recently, because the financial situation was now improving.

"We'll have one monthly council meeting and the second meeting a month will be a finance committee meeting," he said.