Town council to obtain legal advice on councillor liability for £200k costs bill

Ledbury Town Council is investigating whether it can take legal action against those it believes landed it with a £200,000 bill after losing a judicial review.

It said it had passed papers dating from the previous administration for a legal opinion on the case.

Chair Nina Shields said: “Let us be absolutely clear on this issue. Over the last few years certain advisory bodies, ex-councillors and councillors mismanaged affairs badly, incurring bills in excess of £200,000 in the process. This has blown a major hole in the public purse.”

She added that the town council had asked for an opinion as to whether there was a liability on the part of the individuals or organisations concerned and if so, what were the realistic chances of the council of recovering any of this money.

The case involved sanctions imposed by the council in 2016-17 on Cllr Elizabeth Harvey following a complaint by the clerk and deputy clerk.

Cllr Harvey was barred from sitting on committees or representing the council on outside bodies.

She challenged this successfully by judicial review, with a High Court judge ruling that the council was not able to sanction her other than going through the procedural safeguards of a code of conduct process.

Mrs Justice Cockerill also found unlawful the restrictions on Cllr Harvey, which continued after she was found not to have been in breach of the code of conduct.

The National Association of Local Councils and the Society of Local Councils Clerks then wrote to the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government, the Committee on Standards in Public Life and the Local Government Association to highlight concerns that the judgment would make it more difficult for local councils to resolve disputes between councillors and employees.

Cllr Shields said: “There has been a lot of noise about the council's transparency on this issue, mainly from the people that created the mess in the first place. To set the record straight, the council voted recently to make public all of the costs related to the judicial review.”

She said she would propose to the council’s 8 December meeting that all minutes of meetings where the case was discussed should be made public, including those originally held in private.

“This will enable the public to see for themselves just how this debacle came about,” Cllr Shields said.