Icklesham Parish Council meeting 12 November 2012

A bumper turnout:  10 members of the public. However, several were there to ask the council to write in protest to East Sussex against the proposed downgrading of the Ridge Fire Station. Two others came on behalf of the Rye Harbour Nature Reserve about the Rye Harbour car park. There was also County Councillor Keith Glazier (‘see no evil’), District Councillor Nick Ramus (‘hear no evil’) and District Council Paul Osborn (‘speak no evil’) plus Malcolm Johnson from the District Council trying to offload the Rye Harbour car park and public toilets onto the parish council.
Rother has cut the grant it was making to Icklesham PC for a traffic gateway at Rye Harbour from £737 to £370. Cllr Osbourn claimed the credit for getting even this grant but Cllr Bronsdon was keen to award the credit to the Deputy Clerk (now that reminds me of an interesting story).
The council has secured its first serious grants, £23,000 and £5,000, toward the new £55,000 Icklesham playground. The council had previously been contemplating borrowing up to £100,000 to fund this and other playground projects. The first grant was the work of the departing clerk and the second was down to Cllr Warren.

The resignation of the Parish Clerk

This was the elephant in the room. Steve Foreman, clerk since 2011 has resigned. Nothing at all was said at the meeting but there was a certain tension in the room, as though certain councillors were anxious that someone would raise the issue.
Steve is the fourth clerk lost by Icklesham PC in six years. The reasons for Steve’s resignation will be the subject of a forthcomng blog. Suffice it to say for the moment that Steve, who retired from the Audit Commission before becoming clerk, proved himself to be exceptionally energetic and efficient. He has also been very conscious of proper procedure and the need for impartiality. This has not endeared him to certain councillors and he has been subject to unfair and improper criticism. His position has also been undermined by the inevitable failure of the chairman, Jim Horsman, to do his duty.
Cllr Stanford could not resist an opportunity to take a pointless pop at Steve over his report on discussions about the Rye Harbour car park and toilets, where he had referred to representatives of the residents. Cllr Stanford was keen to stress that the persons concerned had not attended at representatives. Thus a molehill became a mountain.

Parish bus service

This expensive and ill-conceived experiment has been canned, not by the council, but by Rye Community Transport, who became depressed at the low rate of use. The highest number of users was 42, in June. In October, just two people made use of the service. Of the 100 under-16s projected to use the service in the first five months, only four did so.
The last two passengers cost their fellow council tax-payers £311 each! But what is even startling is the fact that even if usage had hit the parish council’s target of 60 per month, it would still have cost council tax-payers £9.42 per person. It would have been cheaper to hire separate taxis for each person!
The report by Rye Community Transport makes for sober reading. It accuses Icklesham Parish Council of not properly researching the demand for a bus service and queries the value of the survey carried out by the Rother Voluntary Association. A sharp contrast was drawn with the way that RCT develops new services. Unfortunately, lack of solid research underlies virtually all Icklesham projects. The vast expenditure on new playgrounds has gone forward despite a complete lack of knowledge of the number and age of children in the parish.

Parish Office

The council is still determined to inflate its overheads by opening an office and appears to have approved the idea in principal. The latest suggestion is the sports pavilion at Icklesham, which the Icklesham Trust wishes to rebuild. This is rather more salubrious that the previous suggestion, which was the public toilets in Winchelsea, should they be rebuilt. Some councillors also see the pavilion at Icklesham as a way for the parish council to inject some money into that project but there may be some reluctance in the Icklesham Trust to have the council so intimately involved. However, the council’s proposal may anyway be derailed if Cllr (Peter) Turner persists in his suggestion that, if there is a parish office in the pavilion, the toilets should be open to the public. Cllr Warren doubted that Icklesham Trust would be happy with the idea. What is it about the parish office and toilets?
One cannot help but get the impression that this is just another chance for Icklesham Parish Council to waste more tax-payers’ money. Very few parishes have parish offices: why Icklesham? No good reasons have been put forward. Indeed, the idea has never been properly discussed. A parish office in Icklesham would simply serve Icklesham. How many residents are likely to travel the three miles from Rye Harbour, or even bother to come up from Winchelsea Beach or travel from Winchelsea? Most people will continue to phone or e-mail, if they need to contact the clerk (and few bother to even do that).
Something to watch if a parish office is opened: will the clerk(s) continue to receive the unusual perk of being paid to travel to work?

Rye Harbour car park
Rother want to shift financial responsibility for the car park at Rye Harbour (and possibly the public toilets) to the parish council. There is of course a basic economic flaw in the whole proposition. Offering the car park to the parish suggests that, either Rother is admitting that it is so incompetent that even Icklesham PC could do better (remember, this parish council felt that locking of the gates to the Pear Tree Marsh allotments was beyond it) or is Rother just trying to shift the cost from their budget to that of the parish because the latter is not subject to capping.
Parish councillors recognised that, if the council took over the car park, they would have to charge for parking, but no one raised the associated cost of ticket machines and employing staff to service the machines and enforce parking charges or also installing barriers. As Rother would also have to start charging if they were to retain control of the car park, why should Icklesham Parish Council get involved? All they will get is the flak.
Then, there are the public toilets. These cost about £20,000 a year to run and, sometime during the 99-year lease, will have to be rebuilt.
Rother have floated the idea of covering losses for the first few years on a sliding scale (eg 100% of year 1 reducing to 0% by year 5 or 10), but no mention has been made of the capital costs of installing parking infrastructure. Nevertheless, the Council agreed to the idea in principle.
A Rye Harbour resident in attendance expressed her concern about car park charges leading to parking congestion along the streets of the village. She asked for residents to be involved in any discussions, which does not suggest much faith in the representation provided by Rye Harbour councillors. But then Cllr Bronsdon of Rye Harbour believes he does not need to consult, on the grounds that, if voters don’t like what he decides, they can vote him out at the next election. There would be some logic in that, except that Rye Harbour rarely has contested elections in Rye Harbour, in part, because no resident can be bothered to stand (Cllr Bronsdon lives in Rye and Cllr Stanford in Winchelsea Beach).

Parish post boxes

Readers will recall that, during the debate over turning off the footlights in Winchelsea, a resident and member of the former corporation in Winchelsea, Mr John Spencer, questioned the integrity of Winchelsea ward councillors by implying that they would tamper with survey questionnaires (the first of the three ballots) given to them by residents to return to the council. Mr Spencer later accused Cllr Comotto of submitting a questionnaire on behalf of his under-age daughter and tried to see how other residents had voted by making a Freedom of Information request to see everyone else’s questionnaire. Cllr Stanford proposed that, because some residents (ie Mr Spencer) did not want to communicate with the council via their elected councillors, the council should set up post boxes in each ward. £400 was budgeted. The cost has turned out to be £160 per post box. Another well researched project!
Even Icklesham Parish councillors baulked at £640. The idea then rapidly unravelled. Councillors came to the conclusion post boxes were impractical. Where would they be installed, who would empty them, how often and so on? In the end, it was decided to place a box, which will be made by a councillor at no charge, inside Rye Harbour Stores to see if anyone uses it. That still means that £400 has been taken from tax-payers because councillors did not bother to think through another silly idea!
The council also missed a point of principle here. Although Mr Spencer apparently does not like the representatives who were elected to represent Winchelsea, even his personal friend and fellow jurat Cllr Turner, why should the council help him to circumvent his properly-elected representatives? Does any other elected body make special provision for voters who don’t like their elected representatives?
Cllr Stanford’s proposal for parish post boxes also begs the question as to why unhappy residents cannot phone, e-mail or send a letter to the clerk. Cllr Stanford said the post is too expensive and, of course, not everyone has e-mail. But is there someone out there who does not have a phone or e-mail, cannot afford a postage stamp, and dislikes all their elected councillors? Surely, it would have been cheaper for the council to buy Mr Spencer a book of stamps?

And yet more money wasted

Another £500 of council tax has been poured down holes in Smeatons Lane.
The council went ahead and spent £540 on allotment software (support and maintenance costs will be extra). There is a problem apparently with continuing to run a spreadsheet for some 50-60 plots.
At the insistence of Cllr Merricks, the council registered its playgrounds as part of the ‘Queen Elizabeth II Challenge Fields’, in order to stop itself building on them in the future. This is an utter waste of money. The clerk advised the council that it was unnecessary, because sufficient safeguards are already provided by the restrictive covenants on these pieces of land but he was over-ruled. No other parish in Rother has registered its playgrounds. Moreover, the council took the decision to go ahead without finding out the cost. Their decision was therefore illegal. Now, the council has discovered that its titles to Icklesham Recreation Ground and Harbour Field at Winchelsea Beach have not been registered at the Land Registry and it cannot find its deeds of ownership. Curiously, Cllr P Turner was supposed to have sorted all these out when he was chairman over 10 years ago.
The council has budgeted £2,000 to ‘refresh’ its Local Action Plan. Can £2,000 bring back something from dead? The LAP achieved response in most wards which were lower than the turnout in the election of Police and Crime Commissioners! It was of course also the cause of the complaint to Rother Standards Committee by other councillors against Winchelsea ward councillors, which the latter won earlier this year, when an appeals tribunal overturned Rother’s flawed judgement and dismissed the accusations.
On 26 November, the council will hold a special meeting to consider its budget for 2013/14. There is a question mark over the legitimacy of the meeting. Expect more whacky ideas on how to spend your money.

Cllr Sutton

The council wasted more time on a proposal by Cllr Sutton that the council should employ a maintenance man for a day a week to do small jobs around the parish at the bidding of individual councillors. The council already employs a maintenance man to do small jobs, although only as and when he is needed, and under the direction of the clerk. It is illegal for work to be commissioned by individual councillors, but why should the long-serving Cllr Sutton (proud alumni of Winchelsea primary school) know that? The reason why certain jobs in Winchelsea Beach appear not to be getting done is because Cllr Sutton does not report them to the clerk.
Ironically, Cllr Sutton is one of the reasons why councillors are no longer required to conduct monthly inspections of their ward --- a perfection occasion to report faults --- having admitted, after several years, that he did not know what he was supposed to be doing and that he therefore did not bother. This item should not have come onto the agenda.

Planning

Cllr Ramus welcomed a letter from Winchelsea Heritage expressing concern about planning enforcement at Rother, which is apparently a matter of growing concern on the Planning Committee.

Youth Club

One positive piece of news. Cllr Lyward has her youth club up and running in Winchelsea Beach. However, the skate park may have been put back on the agenda by the meeting to set up the club.

Postscript

Cllrs Austen and Chishick said nothing throughout the meeting, but Cllr Chishick had the excuse that he was abroad. Cllr Moore managed one contribution.

RC

And more on footlights

Just as Icklesham Parish Council decide not to go with the environmental and economic benefits of turning off footlights at midnight, the rest of the world moves on.

ESCC is proposing changes to street lighting in the Rother area as part of a wider plan being rolled out across the County in order to reduce energy bills. The process will begin over the coming months and will involve initial talks with Parish Councils, the police and community safety teams before holding a public engagement event. The works will involve installing dimming equipment on street lights along main roads so that they are dimmed between the hours of midnight and 06:00hrs and installing part-night lighting controls in all of the ESCC maintained lighting on residential roads and providing a reduced number of street lights on some of the secondary/estate feeder roads.  The part-night lighting will switch off between 03:00hrs and 05:30hrs. Town and Parish Councils will also be asked whether they wish to convert their own lighting to part-night operation at the same time. 

That footlight poll again!

The following article appeared in the Members' Bulletin produced at Rother District Council.

"Icklesham Parish Council has been considering if it should turn off footway lights in Winchelsea from 12 midnight to 5.30am for some time now. If this were to be done it would save energy costs and reduce the Parish Council's carbon footprint. But opinion varies as to whether the saving was outweighed by possible safety and security issues.

"Even the 'experts' the Parish Council consulted were not sure if this would have any impact on crime and personal safety. A survey carried out in 2011 was considered inconclusive so the Parish Council decided to conduct its own poll to find out, hopefully, more clearly what residents wanted. A few residents were proposing to call for a formal parish poll so the decision was made by the Parish Council to conduct its own 'local poll' based on the principles of a formal parish poll.

"The poll was arranged for 30 August 2012 and Rother District Council helped by providing a ballot box and set of polling booths. A flyer was delivered by the Parish Clerk to every home in the Ward of Winchelsea giving details of the poll and encouraging people to vote. Notices were also posted up and two weeks clear notice was given before the poll was conducted. In line with a formal parish poll only those registered to vote in a local election were asked to express an opinion.

"The poll was held from 4pm to 9pm at the Court Hall, Winchelsea, which again is similar to the times used for a formal parish poll with the Clerk and Deputy Clerk presiding over proceedings. 113 of the 401 registered electors turned out to vote (28% turnout) and, of those voting, 63 said they did not want the footway lights turned off. Given the result, the Parish Council has decided it will not turn the lights off and the matter has now been finally settled."

As readers of this blog will realise, there is a great deal of spin here (to put it politely).

1   The parish council consulted no "experts". The local police were asked but they are not experts (thus, their equivocal answer).
 

2   The article says, "A survey carried out in 2011 was considered inconclusive so the Parish Council decided to conduct its own poll to find out, hopefully, more clearly what residents wanted." The implication is that the survey was some casual exercise conducted by a body other than the parish council. But it was entirely a parish council exercise. In this survey, there was a clear majority in favouring of turning off the footlights but the result by the council because those who lost were "unhappy" with the result (to quote the chairman of the council), criticism of the conduct of the exercise, defamatory claims by Jurat John Spencer that Cllr Comotto had entered a vote by his underage daughter and because it was claimed that a turnout of 24% too low. The turnout in the latest poll was announced as 28%. But, as the parish council could not confirm who was a registered voter, it asked voters to confirm that they were, and only 26% did so. But 28% or 26% is insignificantly different from 24%. After the 2011 survey, the council deferred the matter to the Annual Parish Assembly. This voted to turnout the lights, but the council decided to go for a third ballot.

3 The third ballot has been heavily criticised for giving only two weeks notice, being held in the August holiday period, not being able to confirm that voters were eligible, excluding the disabled and not offering postal votes for those on holiday or the 20% of second home owners. Many felt that all residents should have been eligible to vote.

 

It is definitely not the end of the saga.

 

RC

Agenda for Icklesham Parish Council meeting on 8 October

Freedom of speech on Icklesham parish council
The council plans to waste more time trying to control the reporting of its activities, particularly on this blog. Cllr Merricks has proposed that the council “introduce a policy for councillors that recommends how a councillor should manage an internet blog”. Quite what Cllr Merricks believes this will achieve, other than wasting more of the council’s time on futile attempts to constrain other councillors’ freedom of speech, is unclear. It seems that the lessons of the recent complaints to the Standards Committee made against Winchelsea councillors by Cllr Merricks and others have not been understood. The Tribunal which threw out the flawed judgement of Rother’s poorly-advised Standard Committee was clear (see the blog of 22 December 2011). Councillors have the right to express their views. And Cllr Merricks received a similar rebuff from the Standards Board in response to an earlier complaint about the author. She once proposed stopping the Rye Observer Village Voice reporting on council meetings.
Another angle of attack on freedom of speech in Icklesham Parish Council may have been launched in the form of an item in the agenda about what constitutes confidential business. Members of the public cannot listen to discussions of confidential business by the council and councillors are constrained from discussing such matters in public.
Meanwhile, councillors will learn that its recording equipment is of limited use. Cllr Stanford had disputed that she used the word “rude” to describe the behaviour of the Winchelsea Diamond Jubilee Committee (see the blog of 20 August 2012). The tape of the meeting is not of sufficient quality to prove or disprove the report. The recording equipment was bought at the instigation of Cllr Stanford, after she disputed a council decision. However, she told the Standards Committee another story about the purpose of the equipment: that it was needed to hold the author to account.

Delegation to the Clerk

Another waste of time on the council’s agenda is the product of Cllr P Turner’s desire to restrict what the Clerk can do without seeking the specific permission of the council. When Cllr Turner was chairman of Icklesham Parish Council some years ago, the council he led was famous for being unable to get anything done.

 Parking at Pear Tree Marsh

This issue continues to haunt the council.
The background is that the council bought Pear Tree Marsh from Rother some years ago. The deed of sale contains a covenant that prohibits the parish council from using the land for anything other than allotments without Rother’s permission. But, for as long as anyone can remember, the derelict area between the allotment plots has been used as a car park. In theory, cars should only be parked there by allotment-holders when they are tending their allotments. In practice, it has been used by allotment-holders and their friends for overnight parking. Not only is this unfair on residents without allotments but it has led to a history of people taking plots merely to get access to parking and then allowing their plots to become overgrown.
It was proposed by Winchelsea councillors that parking at Pear Tree Marsh be opened up to all residents of Tanyard Lane who do not have offstreet parking. This has been opposed by councillors from other wards. They argue that, as the council’s solicitor has advised that parking breaches the covenant, a car park for all residents is not possible. However, they refuse to acknowledge that the current parking also breaches the covenant.
When Rother was approached about varying the covenant, their solicitor (David Edwards --- who was legal counsel to the Rother Standards Committee on the complaint against Winchelsea councillors) insisted that the parish council seek the permission of central government to convert the land from allotments. This ignores the fact that no allotment plots are to be converted to car parking. It also insinuates that Rother cannot move without government permission. This is wrong. Rother’s covenant is a private contract. They have no obligation to control the use of the land. That is the responsibility of the parish council (should they in fact want to convert plots --- which they do not).
There are numerous other unresolved questions. The covenant says the land can only be used for the “purpose of allotments” or “for such other activities not inconsistent therewith”. Is car parking on that part of the land that has never been used as allotments inconsistent with the “purpose of allotments”? If it is, then how can the council allow the existing parking, especially by residents without allotments and non-residents? Do Rother consider existing overnight parking to be a breach of their covenant. If they do not, then how can the proposed “re-organisation” of parking be a breach.

Spending money

The council is ploughing ahead with the proposal for an additional playground at Icklesham Recreation Ground at a cost of £46,043 plus VAT. The council hopes to get a grant of 50% from the Weald and Rother Rural Partnership (WARR) and something from the Land Fill Trust.
The council is also considering a Multi-Use Games Area and a skateboard park still appears to be on the cards. These facilities will be extra. The council has budgeted to borrow up to £100,000 for recreation facilities at Icklesham and other wards. This would be on top of the £40,000 already borrowed by the council (for the Icklesham Memorial Hall).
A rather better idea that appears on the council’s agenda is for a youth club. However, the council thinks that one youth club could serve the whole parish.
There is £1,800 in the budget to extend the council’s noticeboards. Why? For example, there were 13 pages to be posted on noticeboards for the forthcoming meeting plus the planning committee meeting that precedes it. The two cabinets available for notices can take 18. There are no other urgent notices that need to be displayed at the same time. So why do we need to spend money on noticeboards? The council has only recently bought community noticeboards for some wards.
It is proposed to spend £344 on another newsletter. The council needs to take a serious look at this expenditure.
But possibly the barmiest idea on the agenda is the proposal to spend some £540 on allotment management software (plus unspecified support and maintenance costs in future years). This seems like overkill. The council’s four small allotments merely require it to maintain a list of allotment-holders and a waiting list, and to send out annual bills and occasional leases.

 RC

Icklesham Parish Annual Parish Assembly

On Monday 21 May, Icklesham Parish held its Annual Parish Assembly. This year, it was in Winchelsea.

The Annual Parish Assembly is an event that the Parish Council has never understood and so has never been able explain to residents. Consequently, it tends to degenerate into an ersatz Council meeting and, as at proper Council meetings, few residents turn up.

On this occasion, 16, possibly 17, residents appeared. All but one or two came from Winchelsea. There were none from Icklesham or Winchelsea Beach, reflecting the fundamental problem of having a parish of separate and diverse villages.

Of those residents who did turn up, 10 came along at my request to register their disquiet against a Council proposal to borrow up to £100,000 and a Council decision to ignore the results of their own consultation on the question of an early cut-off time for the footlights in Winchelsea. But even with these reinforcements, residents were outnumbered almost 2:1 by Councillors, officials, the two Clerks (why two?) and those hapless souls who were persuaded to set up stalls to promote their activities to residents (including two understandably very grumpy chaps from Rother District Council).

The Assembly started with the Chairman’s Annual Report. This was a recitation from a written speech. It would difficult to describe either the content or the presentation as riveting.

It was no surprise that the speech failed to mention one of the major events affecting the Council last year. This was the utter and complete dismissal by an appeals tribunal of the accusations made to the Standards Board by councillors from Icklesham, Rye Harbour and Winchelsea Beach (including the Chairman but orchestrated by Cllrs Bronsdon, Merricks and Stanford) against the three Winchelsea ward councillors. The judgement of the appeals tribunal was of national significance in that it demolished an attempt by a posse of Icklesham Parish Councillors and Rother District Council’s Standards Committee to restrict councillors’ freedom of speech and suppress their right to conduct legitimate political activity. Apart from questioning the competence of Rother, the judgement also made it clear that the complaints by Icklesham Parish Councillors were vexatious and implicitly posed questions about the complainants. They had alleged that the Winchelsea councillors had made “untrue and misleading” statements. The tribunal said not. So, who was untrue and misleading? It would have taken a big man to admit that he had been so egregiously wrong but the Chairman did not.

It is also worth noting that even Rother had dismissed most of the complaints made by Cllrs Bronsdon, Merricks, Stanford et al. These ranged from being “very offensive” to bullying and intimidation of councillors and the parish clerk (who denied this). However, this little slice of history was airbrushed by the Chairman.

One puzzling part of the evening was why there was a presentation by Rye Police about Community Speed Watch. It was only in January that Icklesham Parish Council rejected the attempt by the former PCSO to extend the scheme to Icklesham and Winchelsea Beach. At that meeting, Cllr Stanford claimed to support Community Speed Watch but not community involvement, and Cllr Bronsdon claimed to support Community Speed Watch but not the use of speed guns.  In other words, they supported Community Speed Watch but not the community or speed watch bits! 

Cllr Horsman reiterated his fears that volunteers would be assaulted but, when yet again confronted with overwhelming contrary evidence, simply went into denial. Interestingly, his concern for the safety of volunteers did not stop him originally asking if Winchelsea volunteers would agree to do Speed Watch in Icklesham!

The one useful thing that Rye Police could have done at the meeting would have been to introduce the new PCSO for the Parish, Andrew Smith, but he remained an anonymous presence.

The high points of the evening were the discussions of the Council’s decision to ignore the results of a consultation on turning off the footlights in Winchelsea at midnight and its proposal to borrow up to £100,000, on top of the £40,000 that they have already borrowed.

On the question of turning off the footlights at midnight, the background is that, in November 2011, Icklesham Parish Council sent out consultation forms to all households in Winchelsea asking whether they would support, for economic and environmental reasons, turning off the 17 footlights at midnight.  The cost of fitting timers would be recouped in less than 18 months and then there would be an annual saving of some £750 a year (rising with electricity prices). Responses were received from 66 households (ie about 24% of the village). The result was 2:1 in favour of turning off the lights at midnight. However, at a subsequent Council meeting, one resident opposed to turning off the lights early attacked the consultation on the grounds that it may have been fiddled because residents had been given the option of returning their forms via ward councillors. The resident also argued that the consultation was not valid because it did not ask whether residents wanted more lights.

Councillors from other wards joined in, complaining that the consultation forms had given too much information to residents! The Chairman judged the rate of response to be too low. The Council therefore decided to ignore the results of their own consultation and bring the question to the Annual Parish Assembly.

When pressed about this decision, the Chairman simply repeated the excuse that the turnout was too low and that some residents were unhappy about the result. When he was asked whether the Council had a policy setting a threshold on the level of responses to consultations, he simply would not answer. He just kept repeating that the response was judged too low and that some residents were unhappy with the proposal. He continued in the same vein when it was pointed out to him that the response to the Local Action Plan, on which the Council are basing much of their spending, had responses from Icklesham , Rye Harbour and Winchelsea Beach of less than half the response rate to the footlights question! Nor was the Chairman any more forthcoming when the absurdity was highlighted of ignoring a consultation of all households in favour of the Annual Parish Assembly where less than a dozen residents usually turn up.  

By the time the Chairman was questioned on whether it was appropriate to ignore a clear vote in favour of a proposal because the losers objected to the result, he was sinking fast and proposed that the Council be asked to reconsider its decision to defer the question back to the Annual Parish Assembly! It had to be pointed out that, as the question had already come to the Assembly, this particular course of action could not be reconsidered.

A vote was taken and the result was 10:7 in favour of turning off the lights. At this point, I requisitioned a Parish Poll in order to ensure that the Council could not again ignore the balance of opinion among residents.  Cllr Stanford complained that this would mean that residents of other wards would have a vote on the Winchelsea lights --- putting her figure on the problem of having a parish composed of four separate villages. Cllr Bronsdon weighed in to express amazement that I was willing to have the Council spend money on a matter of principle and, for the first of many occasions during the evening, said how “sad” he was at my action.

The comic turn of the evening was the suggestion from one resident that the saving from turning off the lights early would be illusory because, without the lights, traffic signs in Winchelsea would have be illuminated or replaced by expensive reflective versions, and that the Strand Gate would have to be illuminated to stop cars crashing into it in the dark! It was explained that the lights in Winchelsea are footlights, designed to illuminate the pavement, not the road, so would not affect traffic. It was also questioned as to why the Strand Gate would need to be illuminated if the footlights were turned off early. There is currently no footlight anywhere near the Strand Gate and cars do have headlights.

Eventually, the Chairman agreed that the Council would be asked to accept the result of the consultation and the vote at the Annual Parish Assembly. I therefore withdrew the requisition for a Parish Poll on the understanding that, if the Council once again tried to ignore the balance of opinion among residents, that I would convene a special Parish Meeting and requisition a Parish Poll again.

And so to the question of the Council’s proposal to borrow up to £100,000 in order to buy more playground equipment. Icklesham Parish Council has already borrowed £40,000 in order to make a grant towards the repair of Icklesham Memorial Hall. It is the only parish council in Rother to have borrowed and one of the few in the county. Another £100,000 would bring its debt ratio to a level higher than Italy, Ireland and Iceland, and fairly close to that of Greece.

Cllr Stanford assured everyone that the Council would be getting grants of at least £25,000. One can have confidence that Cllr Warren and the Clerk will try, but Icklesham Parish Council has never bothered with grants before (missing out on at least one grant schemes for playgrounds) and would still add up to £75,000 to the council’s debt.

It was suggested that the annual borrowing cost of several thousand pounds a year was insignificant. But add that to the £3,000 plus already being paid to service the previous £40,000 borrowing and you start automatically taking out a significant chunk of the annual budget.

I indicated that, in view of the major impact of the proposed borrowing on Council finances, I believed that residents should be consulted and so wished to call a Parish Poll. It was claimed that residents had already been consulted and reference was made to an article in the Icklesham newsletter. Unfortunately, this did not explain that the cost or that the money was to be borrowed. Nor did it reveal how much tens of thousands of pounds has already been spent on playground equipment.

At the mention of a Parish Poll, Cllr Bronsdon again expressed his “sadness” and indulged himself in accusations that I was proposing to blight local youth by refusing to buy them extra playground equipment, missing the point that the question is how this should be financed. But I did offer to withhold my request if the Parish Council agreed to conduct a fair poll themselves. This will be discussed at the next Council meeting.

Council meeting of 13 February 2012

The meeting kicked off with Public Questions. A youngster from Winchesea Beach, aged 11, asked the Council for a skate board facility in Winchelsea Beach. The Chairman asked the youngster to consult residents. Not something that elected ward councillors should be doing then!

A Mr Spencer from Winchelsea, who claimed to speak on behalf of the Church Wardens of St Thomas’s Church, said that the Church wanted a grant towards churchyard maintenance. He quoted a figure of £170,000 a year but this is for all outgoings. One hopes that the Church knows what it wants this time around. It currently gets a grant from the Council for grass cutting but used to receive more until councillors from other wards objected to splitting the grant to churches in proportion to the relative costs (they now all get different percentages of their costs). The Church made no objection to the cut. Then, when the Rector approached the Council through a ward councillor for help with the cost of new central heating and with a proposal that the Council take responsibility for the War Memorial in the churchyard, a churchwarden turned up and objected! It is also worth noting that, when the Council was asked by a Winchelsea ward councillor to contribute to a new sign for the Wesley Chapel, one of the ostensible objections was giving money to places of worship.

District Councillor Osborne read out a letter that he had received from the owners of Look Out Cottage claiming that the damaged wall by the Strand Gate belongs to ESCC. The former have just repaired the wall after a delay of over year while they argued about its ownership. The letter was critical of both ESCC and Rother. The latter had threatened to serve a notice on the owners enforcing repairs. ESCC are adamant that they are not responsible for the wall and that it belongs to Look Out Cottage.

Cllr Stanford proposed that “factual inaccuracies” in this blog be included as an item on future agendas. This was seconded by Cllr Bronsdon. Cllr Chishick voted against, Cllr P Turner abstained. On the subject of factual inaccuracies, Cllrs Stanford and Bronsdon were among the principal authors of recent complaints against fellow councilllors which alleged they had made misleading and untruthful statements. These allegations, supported by Rother District Council’s Standards Committee, were dismissed in their entirety by an appeals tribunal.

Icklesham Recreation Ground car park continues to benefit from the Council’s largesse. It was resurfaced by the Council and they will now be paying for lighting. The Council will also buy a padlock to secure the gate. In contrast, the Council refuses to do anything to bring the unofficial residents’ car park at Pear Tree Marsh up to a reasonable standard (no repairs to the surface or further clearance of rubbish and undergrowth) and it has lost interest in regularising the status of this car park (the Council is in breach of the covenant on its deed of purchase by allowing parking). Nor will the Council lock the allotment, as it used to, despite having splashed out on an expensive lock and uncopiable keys. Of course, one car park is in Icklesham, while the other is in Winchelsea.

The subject of the conduct of Council meetings was discussed. There have been complaints of poor chairmanship leading to meetings over-running. Recommended best practice is a maximum of 2 hours, because long meetings dissuade members of the public from attending and deter working people from standing for councils. The Council decided it would limit meetings to 2 hours and 15 minutes, or 2 hours and 45 minutes, if the Chairman thinks a longer meeting is necessary. The big question now is what happens during the meetings.

A proposal to hire a graphic designer at £40 an hour to maintain the Council’s newsletter was surprisingly and sensibly rejected.

The Council adopted a revised complaints procedure. It is difficult to know whether members of the public will give it much credence, since the Council acts as its own judge and jury. And Icklesham Parish Council has yet to deal with its last complaint, lodged several years ago by Mr Jasper of Winchelsea.

The Diamond Jubilee did not receive a positive response from the Council, at least as far as Winchelsea went. Cllr P Turner opposed the planting of a Jubilee oak in Winchelsea. In his opinion, “the oak is a forest tree” whereas Winchelsea is a “suburb”. But if there was little enthusiasm for a Diamond Jubilee Street oak, there was even less for the Street Party in Winchelsea. Several councillors expressed concerns about the impact of the related road closures on local businesses. These included Cllrs S Turner and Stanford (both currently or formerly employed by local businesses). Cllr P Turner on the other hand was worried about the disruption to Winchelsea’s busy bus service, even though the bus stop will be moved only about 20 yards, as it has several times in the past.

Reply by Cllr Comotto to comments in Rye Observer by Cllr Maynard of Rother

It is clear from Cllr Maynard’s remarks in last week’s Rye Observer that Rother is determined not to learn anything from the recent appeal tribunal judgements. He seems to be arguing that the score was 2-1 to Rother. But Rother’s two goals actually relate to one and the same event, which was that I did not declare a prejudicial interest and failed to leave the room. This is hardly in the same league as Rother’s attempt to suppress the right of councillors to freedom of speech and to engage in political activity, which would have had national ramifications.
 

Cllr Maynard is understandably keen to deflect public attention from Rother’s fundamental legal error. But he is grasping at straws by seeking to derive comfort from the judgement against me. Consider what the appeal tribunal actually said, which was that my action was “not a serious breach [of the councillors’ code] and no consequences flowed from it”. In other words, the breaches to which Cllr Maynard attaches so much importance were technical and not material. That is why the tribunal overturned Rother’s sanction, even though this was only a censure. Even a censure was felt to be a “disproportionate sanction in the particular circumstances”.

 

Rother would like to believe that I was “attempting to use [my] position to improperly advantage [myself]” by failing to declare a prejudicial interest. Most members of the public will assume that a “prejudicial interest” is a financial one and indeed that is what Rother tried to argue. But the tribunal rejected Rother’s argument and stated explicitly that my interest was not financial. Moreover, the tribunal highlighted the fact that I had made “full disclosure of [my] interest and involvement” in the local not-for-profit organisation being discussed, by declaring a personal interest.

 

The point also needs to be made that I breached the code by failing to leave the room during a confidential meeting of Icklesham Parish Council to discuss a course of action which the law does not allow councils to take! In other words, the breach was not only technical but also hypothetical!

 

Cllr Maynard’s conclusion is that Rother has a duty to investigate complaints against councillors. I would not disagree but I would argue that Rother also has a duty, before spending tax-payers’ money, to exercise judgement and commonsense by determining whether complaints are vexatious and therefore unlikely to be proven if pursued. It failed to do so in Winchelsea, which means that, at the end of the day, all that Rother has to show for over £10,000 of tax-payers’ money is a technical (and hypothetical) breach of the councillors’ code of conduct.

As for Cllr Maynard wish that councillors with different opinions should keep a “low profile”, I bet he does! The one-party state that is Rother District Council rolls on.

Winchelsea ward councillors report in Rye Observer 27-Jan-2012

We’ve been rather quiet in 2011. The reason has been the vast amount of time that we have had to devote to fighting false allegations made, in February 2010, by councillors from the other wards of Icklesham Parish Council to Rother District Council’s Standard Committee. This story has already featured in the pages of the Observer, so there is no need to repeat it here. But one aspect merits elaboration: the subject of the parish council meeting in August 2009, which was the origin of the complaint against Cllr Comotto. This was a proposal by the chairman and some other councillors that the parish council should sue the Wincheslea website www.winchelsea.net (with which Cllr Comotto is involved) for defaming Icklesham Parish Council by referring to "a history of incompetent chairmen" and "a dysfunctional council”.
 

It subsequently emerged that local councils (and indeed central government) do not have the right to sue for defamation! Indeed, this is a basic principle of law, designed to protect freedom of speech. How did Icklesham Parish Council ever come to consider such a proposal?

 

We have tried to find out, but it has not been easy, not least because Icklesham Parish Council no longer has any of the relevant papers in its files! This is not the first time that official papers relating to a contentious issue have gone missing at Icklesham. However, from another source, we learned that the initial legal advice was obtained by an Icklesham ward councillor from an anonymous acquaintance (for all we know, this could have been a man in the pub, perhaps even the same man whose advice some years ago almost got the parish council prosecuted for VAT evasion).

 

A group of Icklesham councillors then consulted the Sussex Association of Local Councils (SALC). SALC say that their policy is not to give advice to individual councillors, only to councils (or clerks). They seem to have made an exception on this occasion. SALC have refused to answer further questions on their role but we know that they consulted their solicitors, Hedleys, a firm specialising in local authority law. Hedleys deny advising the council to sue for defamation but they did draft a letter for the council to send out which makes this threat. SALC did not spot Hedley’s error.

 

The proposal to sue the Winchelsea website was then placed, as a “confidential” item, on the agenda of the August 2009 council meeting. August council meetings are supposed to be only for the signing of cheques. Why could the council not wait until September? Was it because Winchelsea councillors had indicated that they might not be able to attend the August meeting? And then there was the agenda item. This was vague and made no mention of the proposal to sue. The resolution was tabled at the meeting. There can be no doubt that the intention was to keep Winchelsea councillors in the dark. So, when other councillors discovered that we had learned of the secret proposal, they openly protested that we should have been allowed to prepare ourselves for the discussion!

 

After an acrimonious debate, during which it became apparent that whatever legal advice had been received by certain councillors had been incomplete and not well understood, the council decided to delegate decisions to sue for defamation to two councillors and the clerk. The proposed delegation of powers (not to mention the vagueness of the agenda) was probably illegal. Given that a decision to sue could cost the council many thousands of pounds, it was certainly highly imprudent.

 

So, here we are, two years on. The text which so upset some members of Icklesham Parish Council, and which snowballed into the Standards Committee fiasco which has just ended, is still on the Winchelsea website. This includes the reference to the often “dysfunctional behaviour” of Icklesham Parish Council. Who can argue with that now?

Rother not to appeal against appeal in Winchelsea freedom of speech case

The Standards Committee of Rother District Council met on 11 January 2012 to consider whether to appeal against the judgement which comprehensively and utterly overturned Rother's ruling that Winchelsea councillors had breached the Councillors' Code of Conduct. As the Standards Committee could find no error in law in the appeal judgement, they decided that they had no grounds to contest it.


Rother seemed inclined to heap the blame for their decisive legal defeat on the solicitor they had employed (at a cost of some £6,500) to investigate the allegations against Winchelsea councillors by other Icklesham Parish Councillors. She was accused of failing to draw the attention of Rother to the freedom of speech issues raised by the case.


But why should the investigator take all the blame for ignoring a fundamental human right like freedom of speech, when the Rother sub-committee which ruled on the complaints against Winchelsea councillors included two solicitors (the Chairman and Rother's legal adviser)? And why did no one notice the issue of freedom of speech when it had been clearly flagged up to both the investigator and the sub-committee by Winchelsea councillors?


It also needs to be pointed out that the investigator's case against Winchelsea councillors rested primarily on a series of allegations that they had made untruthful and misleading statements about Icklesham Parish Council. In other words, her contention was that Winchelsea councillors had acted disreputably because they had lied. One can see why the investigator may have thought that freedom of speech was irrelevant.


The investigator's real failure was that she ignored evidence which destroyed the allegations that Winchelsea councillors had lied. Her failure may have been, in part, because she did not have an adequate understanding of parish council matters such as Local Action Plans (LAPs), despite the fact that they were at the heart of the complaints.


But the Rother sub-committee is even more at fault in these respects. It was given the same evidence against the allegations as the investigator but also heard that evidence confirmed, in person and in no uncertain terms, by the former Clerk to Icklesham Parish Council. Yet, when confronted with these facts at the sub-committee hearing, the Chairman interrupted the evidence and abruptly shifted the goalposts, stating that it was irrelevant whether the statement by Winchelsea councillors were true or not, what was at issue was whether their language was intemperate.


Ironically, by switching the case for the prosecution from the issue of truthfulness to the issue of expression, the Chairman himself brought the issue of freedom of speech into consideration. In the landmark Livingstone case (2006) --- ignored by the Rother sub-committee --- the judge said that, "The burden is on the [the person seeking to interfere with the right] to justify interference with freedom of speech. However offensive and undeserving of protection the appellant’s outburst may have appeared to some, it is important that any individual knows that he can say what he likes, provided it is not unlawful, unless there are clear and satisfactory reasons within the terms of Article 10(2) to render him liable to sanctions".


But even if the Rother sub-committee ignored the law, why did they not exercise commonsense? What reasonable person believes that the words "sham" and "ambush" are intemperate language and worthy of extended and costly consideration by a semi-judicial tribunal?


The Rother sub-committee, like their investigator, is also guilty of failing to understand parish LAPs. As noted, these were at the heart of the allegations against Winchelsea councillors. During the sub-committee, the Chairman expressed confusion over terms such as LAPs, LATs and Quality Parish Councils. He also expressed a lack of interest.


What indisputably breached Winchelsea councillors' right to freedom of speech was the sub-committee's opinion that councillors cannot question and lobby against council decisions, whether or not those decisions are flawed or even improper. This doctrine was expounded very firmly at the sub-committee hearing by Rother's solicitor and strongly supported by the Chairman and the District Council representative. Only the parish council representative was uneasy about this attempt to suppress freedom of speech.


Unfortunately, it would appear that Rother's Standards Committee has learnt nothing from the appeal tribunal judgement against them. They have not felt it necessary to consider how they came to be guilty of such a gross misinterpretation of the law. At least one member,  Rother Councillor Roger Bird, is in complete denial and resolutely rejects the appeal tribunal judgement. According to Cllr Bird, "The issue showed the lottery of going to judgement. It comes down to the spin of a coin." Was this an insight into how Rother reached its now discredited decision against Winchelsea councillors?

RC

Winchelsea councillors win appeal in victory for freedom of speech

We've been rather quiet in 2011. This blog explains what has been occupying us.

In February 2010, Cllr Bronsdon of Rye Harbour, supported by the other councillors from Icklesham, Rye Harbour and Winchelsea Beach wards --- Cllrs Bates, Drew, Horsman, Lyward, Merricks, Moore, Stanford, Sutton and Thompson --- lodged a complaint against the three ward councillors from Winchelsea -- Cllrs Chishick, Comotto and Terry --- for criticisng the adequacy of the Local Action Plan (LAP) questionnaire provided by Rother District Council and adopted by Icklesham Parish Council, protesting about the way in which Icklesham Parish Council had forced the questionnaire on Winchelsea, and calling on residents to boycott the questionnaire. He claimed that their actions had brought Icklesham Parish Council into disrepute, contrary to the Councillors' Code of Conduct.

A separate and very lengthy complaint was also made by Cllr Stansford of Rye Habour ward against Cllr Comotto alleging bullying of other councillors and the parish clerk, and failure to declare an interest at a meeting in August 2009.

All Winchelsea councillors were accused of making misleading and untruthful statements.

It is worth noting here that the August 2009 parish council meeting was held to discuss (in secret) a proposal to sue the Wincheslea website www.winchelsea.net for defaming Icklesham Parish Council by referring to "a history of incompetent chairmen" and "a dysfunctional council". The curious circumstances surrounding this meeting will be reviewed in another blog. Suffice it to say here that councils do not have the right to sue for defamation, as judges have felt that the threat of such action (even where it was unlikely to succeed) would intimidate critics and have a "chilling effect on democracy"! So, the whole discussion was pointless. However, under the Code of Conduct, Cllr Comotto should have declared a prejudicial interest, rather than just a personal interest, and left the meeting, as he is involved with the Winchelsea website. Cllr Comotto apologised for this error but argued that the breach was immaterial, given the pointlessness of the debate and the fact that he would have been aware of the resolution, whether or not he had attended, which meant he could have derived no material advantage.

Rother District Council commissioned a firm of solicitors to investigate the complaints. During this investigation, further complaints were made against Cllr Comotto. It is not possible to reveal these complaints as Standards Committees operate largely in secret but it is possible to say that the additional allegations made by Cllr Merricks would, if they had been made publicly, have been libellous. In the event, all the complaints bar two were dismissed by the investigator but she did conclude that the three Winchelsea councillors had brought Icklesham Parish Council into disrepute by making untruthful statements about the parish council's handling of the LAP. She also judged the language used by the councillors to have been intemperate.

At the hearing held by the Rother Standards Committee, the evidence provided to the investigator, by Cllr Stanford, purporting to show that Icklesham Parish Council had been preparing a LAP since 2005 --- and that Winchelsea councillors had therefore made untruthful and misleading statements about the suspicious suddenness of the council's proposals and demands --- was shown to be utterly incorrect. At this point, the Standards Committee decided that the issue was not the untruthful of statements but the intemperate language. The words that appeared to cause concern were "ambush" and "sham". On this basis, the Standards Committee concluded that the Winchelsea councillors had breached the Code of Conduct. The sanction imposed was a censure.

Winchelsea councillors appealed against the Standard Committee's decision on the grounds that the judge infringed their right to freedom of speech and obstructed their duty to defend their electorate against poor council decisions, and that they had not made untruthful or misleading statements and had not used intemperate language. On 12 December, an appeals tribunal agreed with the Winchelsea councillors, citing a long list of legal precedents, and quashed the judgment of the Rother Standards Committee. The judgement is worth reading:

"The Tribunal has determined that the three Appellants did not fail to follow the provisions of the Code because:
1 They were legitimately exercising their right to free speech.
2 The language employed by them had not been hostile, intemperate, ill-judged or misleading.
3 They were entitled to write to local residents informing them of matters they considered of particular relevance. The councillors’ actions were within the legitimate boundary of a local councillor defending local interests.
4 Residents had not been instructed to do anything unlawful and it was open to recipients to accept or reject the guidance issued by the councillors as to how to show their opposition to adoption of a parish-wide questionnaire.
5 The Code does not preclude a councillor from opposing council policy provided he uses legitimate and reasonable means. Local councillors are often involved in, or indeed lead, local opposition to locally sensitive issues. For instance, a planning matter which has a far greater impact on a defined locality than the rest of the district. This will, of necessity, bring councillors into opposition with local or party policy."

The tribunal could not have been clearer. The judgement is also forthright about the right of councillors to freedom of speech and the nature of the democratic political acitivity. It also made crystal clear that Winchelsea councillors had not been untruthful or misleading.

In addition, the tribunal dismissed, as inappropriate, the censure imposed on Cllr Comotto for failing to declare a prejudicial conflict of interest.

The question that need to be asked, in view of this judgement, is why did Rother, despite employing two solicitors and spending well over £10,000 of tax-payers' money, not see this one coming and allowed the complaint to proceed? As the tribunal made clear, there is a well-developed case law on the underlying issues.

And Rother's blunder is a serious one because, if they had won, it is difficult to see how genuine political activity could have continued in local government or how it could ever have been held to account. How did this happen? Perhaps, Rother has been a virtual one-party state for so long that it has just lost the hang of democracy. Some of the statements made by the legal adviser to the Standards Committee revealed a very restrictive view of elective democracy and the role of councillors. In effect, Rother's lawyer implied a collective responsibility on councillors that meant they could not seek to reverse decisions of their council, even where they considered these decisions to be utterly wrong, and could not campaign against unacceptable policies even in an election.

Rother also needs to reflect on its own undeclared conflict of interest. The first complaint centred on crticism of the questionnaire which Rother produced! This makes them something of an interested party.

And what about Icklesham Parish Council? Who can dispute its dysfunctional behaviour now? There have now been three complaints to the Standards Committee against Cllr Comotto. In response to the first (by 11 other councillors), Cllr Comotto was merely asked to send fewer e-mails to the then parish clerk. In response to the second complaint (by Cllr Merricks), it was explained that Cllr Comotto had been conducting normal political activity. And now, despite throwing a huge quantity of mud at all three Winchelsea councillors, a third vexatious complaint has also failed. The net result has been to waste everybody's time and provide employment to lawyers. No wonder, Eric Pickles is junking Standards Committees!"
RC