Councillor faces calls to quit over staging of fake meeting
FORMER CHAIRMAN TO BE SANCTIONED FOR PLOY TO KEEP FELLOW MEMBERS ON AUTHORITY
A CONSERVATIVE Derbyshire councillor set up a fake meeting to stop fellow colleagues losing their seats for not going to meetings.
Cllr Mike Wallis, who was chairman of Ockbrook and Borrowash Parish Council at the time, and is a cabinet member on Erewash Borough Council, is to be formally sanctioned for his actions.
The other councillor or councillors involved have not yet been named.
The parish council is holding an extraordinary meeting later today to discuss the issue and decide what to do next.
The Local Democracy Reporting
Service has been told by a parish councillor that a vote will take place on whether the authority feels Cllr Wallis should resign.
The borough council’s standards board, in a meeting held entirely in private, agreed that Cllr Wallis had breached the parish council’s code of conduct during the incident.
Cllr Wallis was found to have created a fictitious meeting – one that did not take place – at which he and another councillor both signed a “constructed” attendance register to show they had been present.
This, the upheld complaint says, was a bid to keep one or more unnamed parish councillors “ceasing to be members of the parish council due to the failure to attend meetings under section 85 of the Local Government Act 1972”. Section 85 dictates that if a councillor does not attend a meeting for six consecutive months they “cease to be a member of the authority”. Minutes for the borough council standards meeting say: “The chairman (Cllr Valerie Custance) confirmed that following careful consideration of the investigator’s report, the written and verbal submissions and mitigation put forward by the subject member and witness, there had been a breach of the code of conduct. Following deliberation, the sub-committee resolved that its findings be recommended to Ockbrook and Borrowash Parish Council for information by way of sanction.”
The incident is believed to have taken place two years ago but has only now come to light after a formal complaint was lodged earlier this year.
The Local Democracy Reporting Service has been told that Cllr Wallis had stepped down from his role of chairman shortly after the incident two years ago but did not resign from the parish council.
A parish councillor, who did not wish to be named, told the service that the authority was taking the issue “really seriously” and that “we are not hiding anything”.
They said: “It was wrong, it was wrong what he did and it wasn’t honest and open and we don’t do that.
“Things are different now, everything is above board and has been for the last two years.
“We won’t have anything underhand going on. We have got to have this meeting to decide what to do about it.”
Cllr Michael White, chairman of the parish council, did not wish to comment in advance of the extraordinary meeting.
Cllr Wallis was approached for comment by the Local Democracy Reporting Service and said he would provide a statement over the weekend, but has yet to do so.