Residents walked out of a Thornbury and Yate general election debate in protest of Luke Hall's absence.

One member of the public, who was due to ask the candidates a question, instead said the Conservative had “treated us with contempt” and urged others to follow him out.

He was joined by at least three other people, but the vast majority decided to stay.

Mr Hall was on the panel of a national housing hustings in London on the same evening and could not attend.

A spokesman for Luke Hall's office said the MP sought alternative dates and times for the hustings but was unable to come to an agreement with the other candidates. 

Panel chairman Richard Crabtree announced to a mix of cheers and groans: “Unfortunately Luke Hall from the Conservative Party is unavailable and it’s a shame he didn’t have anyone else who could stand in for him.”

It left the only two other candidates for the ward, Labour’s Rob Logan and Lib Dem Claire Young to go head-to-head over a range of topics during the 90-minute hustings.

Here’s what they had to say:

Brexit

Claire said: “Three-and-a-half-years on from the referendum, what is being offered now is not what was promised before people voted.

“Everything else, all the important issues that really matter like tackling climate change, getting proper funding for our schools and health services, tackling crime and inequality have been sidelined.

“Pretty much everyone thinks we are in a mess and we need to find a way out of that.

“Don’t believe the idea that you can get it ‘done’.

“This is something that will take many, many years, so the only way to get it ‘done’ is to abandon the idea.

“Boris Johnson’s withdrawal agreement is the start of years of wrangling.

“If we let it, this issue will continue to suck the life out of our politics, leaving us without the time and money to tackle things that really matter.

“That’s why my party wants to give you a chance to stay, based on what we know now.

“I prefer the phrase Brexit gone, not Brexit done.”

Rob said: “Vote Leave, or the Conservative Party as they’re now called, are addicted to three-word lies.

“They liked to say ‘taking back control’ and they now say ‘get brexit done’ because there isn’t anything else they can say.

“They stopped talking about the benefits of Brexit because there aren’t any.

“‘Getting Brexit done’ certainly doesn’t mean a withdrawal agreement because that will open the door to another decade of endless renegotiation.

“Brexit was a terrible idea in 2016, it’s a worse idea now.

“I voted remain and I would do that again but the only people who can make that decision are the British people.

“Labour wants to give you the final say within six months.”

Why then did the country vote to leave the EU?

Rob said: “Brexit wasn’t invented in 2016, it’s been a right-wing dream for a long time.

“The referendum was lost because it’s impossible in a six-week campaign to counteract all the lies that have been told over 20 years.

“Brexit isn’t just a bad idea, it’s organised misrepresentation.

“People standing up for the truth matters more than anything else.”

Claire said: “Over the years we didn’t articulate our case in the face of all these untruths about the EU.

“For too many years it was too easy for politicians, when they did something the public didn’t like, to blame the EU and say they were forced to do it rather than being upfront about why they thought what they were doing was the right thing.

“We’ve had a drip-feed of lies and misrepresentation over 20 years or more, but we haven’t done enough to counteract that.

“Our politics isn’t working for people, they don’t feel represented, and that was exploited in the referendum with this idea of ‘taking back control’.

“The failure to modernise our system of politics in this country also played its part in this.”

Environment

Rob said: “Labour wants to lead the transition to carbon neutral by 2030 and that is really hard.

“That’s why leadership on this issue matters so much.

“The transition is not just recycling and use of renewable energy, it’s changing the way we heat our houses, the way we fly, the things we eat.

“One of the things we are offering is green apprenticeships so young people will develop the skills we need to make that transition to a carbon neutral economy.”

Claire said: “The Lib Dems have a clear plan for tackling climate change – not just what we do but how we do it and how we pay for it.

“We need to develop the skills so we can expand in things like renewable energy.

“We want to expand the market for green products and services by using public sector procurement because if the public sector is buying these, the market will expand.

“We will invest in carbon capture and storage.

“We can responsibly invest £130billion in capital projects, of which £5billion will be for a green investment fund to leverage more funding from the private sector.

“There is a role for regulation in all this because you have to have a mixture of carrots and sticks.”

Nuclear energy

Rob said: “Hinkley C is the world’s most expensive building.

“That is because our investment scheme is broken.

“The government doesn’t know what to do, therefore there is a problem and therefore it thinks we must do this solution.

“Nuclear is part of the mix but it needs to become a declining part of the mix.

“What is much more important is not only that we have clean generation but clean storage.

“The area that needs the most investment and has had the least investment is battery technology and developing a battery storage infrastructure.

“We don’t have the scale so we depend on nuclear.”

Claire said: “What we’ve seen is the cost of renewables coming down.

“Given the timescales of bringing on nuclear now, we may be better off investing that money in bringing on the battery storage technology.

“Hinkley C is under way, it’s a huge project, we should continue with that, but we’re at the point where perhaps we would be better switching our investment elsewhere from nuclear.”

Benefits system

Claire said: “We want to invest £6billion to improve the benefits system.

“We want to reduce the time you get the first payment from five weeks to five days. We want to get rid of the bedroom tax and move to a system of positive incentives.

“We need to build more social housing. We want 100,000 homes a year to be social housing, which provides so many benefits like stability of tenancy.”

Rob said: “Social injustice is why the Labour Party exists, to provide that safety net.

“The first thing we want to do is abolish Universal Credit because that transition has been managed so appallingly and the decisions about it have been so harsh.

“Universal Credit is a failure. People have had to decide whether to heat or eat.

“It has been such a disaster because it was combined with a benefits cut.

“We need a model of compassion and incentive.”

Employment

Claire said: “With the rise of zero-hours contracts we have seen people don’t know how many hours they’ve been working.

“We want to see a premium of 20 per cent on wages for people who are on zero-hours contracts to reflect that uncertainty, and if they do it for a period of time, they then have the right to a fixed contract.

“We want to build a fair economy that works for everyone by providing free childcare for nine months and giving every adult a ‘skills wallet’ to spend on skills and training throughout their lives.”

Rob said: “Labour will introduce a minimum wage of £10 an hour for all workers including young workers.

“The sheer price of housing means so much income or benefits is absorbed by rents.

“For many people in many lines of work, rent is just too high and it’s too easy for rent to increase.

“One of the problems with people working on zero-hours contracts is they don’t know how much money they’ve got, so it’s quite easy to fall into debt.

“One reason people have so little money for food is that they have to pay their debt as well as their rent which are both too high.

“The impact of debt for very poor people is catastrophic.

“It’s too easy to fall into and it’s too hard to get out of, and that needs to be stopped.”

Rise of populism, hate and social media

Rob said: “One of the things that’s most shocking about British public life at the moment is not just the tolerance of lying, it’s the tolerance of hate – the number of MPs who are standing down, particularly women MPs from all parties, because they decided they just cannot take the level of animosity.

“There are professional politicians who get a death threat a week.

“So much is to do with social media.

“It’s easier to hurl abuse at someone through a phone rather than in practice.

“We have accepted that is something that is a natural part of political debate, for there to be horrendous hate speech all the time.

“The technology companies have some level of  fault in that.

“Twitter and Facebook have not done as well as they could have done, but it should not be up to American companies to set the rules for that.

“We wouldn’t accept that anywhere else.

“We should be intolerant of hate speech and abuse on our own side.

“We have not done that well enough in either party.”

Claire said: “There has been an astonishing increase in abuse in politics.

“Having stood for MP two years ago and comparing this campaign to the last one, we have had more serious problems this time.

“There has been a distrust because politicians almost inevitably end up not delivering everything they’ve promised.

“But what’s different now is that it’s not promising something and then failing to deliver it because circumstances have changed, it’s saying things that you know are not true at the time you say them, and that seems to be tolerated.

“I am suspicious of over-regulating means by which people express their views but we do need some regulation of the various social media platforms.

“We obviously want to protect free speech.

“We also need to promote critical thinking skills in our schools and develop our resilience as a population to not be susceptible to believe in these things.

“Even if we are facing abuse in the campaign, we should retain our integrity when standing for election at any level.”

The final hustings are taking place at St Nicholas Family Centre, Chargove, Yate on Tuesday evening. All three candidates are expected to attend.