Followers of the Pembrokeshire Council Watch (PCW) Facebook page may have noticed that things have recently become a bit fractious between Cllr Alan Dennison and myself.
It all follows from my most recent post which carried details of the deal – some would say stitch-up – between the Independent Political (sic) Group and the cabinet that led to the 9+% increase in your council tax that was agreed at the council meeting on March 6.
Someone decided to share my post with PCW and it seems that Cllr Dennison – thought to be one of the IPG’s leading intellectuals and the moving spirit behind this near-double-digit tax increase – was not well pleased that I had drawn attention to this rather unexpected meeting of minds
For whatever reason, he has taken umbrage at the fact that I voted in favour of the 7.5% increase proposed by the Tories. And he is, it seems, particularly agitated by my failure to produce an alternative budget of my own.
I’m a bit baffled by all this because there is no rule that says you must table your own budget before you can vote against what is proposed.
Indeed, in the 2024-2025 budget meeting Cllr Dennison and the vast majority of his IPG chums voted against the Cabinet’s proposed 12.5% council tax hike even though they had not tabled a valid budget.
Sauce for the goose, and all that.
My own view has always been that there is a balance to be struck between what the council needs to fund services and what my constituents can afford to pay. And simple arithmetic tells us that tax increases that regularly outstrip pay are unsustainable because eventually all our income is consumed by council tax.
I would have thought this was uncontroversial – it certainly seems to be the view of the Cllr Dennison’s group [party] leader, Cllr Huw Murphy, who emailed me and other unaffiliated members on 3 February canvassing our views on the upcoming budget discussions. As he put it: “…the conundrum we as Councillors face is making tough decisions between services and the capacity of residents to afford council tax rises consistently well above the rate of inflation.”
In any case, I notice that Cllr Dennison’s 2022 election address promises that he will attack “wasteful spending” and I would be the first to agree that that should take priority over hammering the taxpayer. Would it be churlish to point out that cutting wasteful spending doesn’t feature prominently in the IPG’s plans?
Unfortunately, not a few of my fellow councillors behave as if they think it is their role to represent the council rather than the people who elected them.
None of what his leader had to say about the balance between council spending and the taxpayers’ ability to pay seems to have impressed Cllr Dennison because his Facebook challenges on PCW became more and more strident and personal:
“So, I ask again, what are your proposals, to save us all paying huge council taxes. I await with baited breath, you’ve decades of taking the salary as a councillor, you huff and you puff but never actually do anything constructive. Remind me again, what have been your top 5 achievements for your constituents in 20 years plus?”
This was all very strange, because, while we haven’t been on the best of terms since he abandoned his election promise to be “Truly independent” and joined the IPG. There had been a bit of a thaw recently, and just a couple of weeks ago he rang me up and we had a friendly and constructive discussion about the situation with developments in Milford Haven.
Casting around for some reason why I might have rattled his cage, it occurred to me that events at the recent Planning Delegation Panel (PDP) meeting might have some bearing.
Without getting bogged down in too much detail, this is a body set up to consider members’ requests for certain planning applications to be removed from the scheme of delegation where they are determined by officers in private, for consideration in public by the planning committee, made up of councillors.
This meeting of the PDP, on which I sat recently, considered such a request by Cllr Dennison in respect of a planning application by Mr Lee Bridges for a beer garden at Imperial Hall Ltd Hamilton Terrace (aka Masonic Hall).
There is a bit of a back story, here, because these requests are usually made by the local member – in this case Cllr Terry Davies. However, if the local member has a prejudicial interest in the matter under discussion, another councillor can be asked to stand in for them. It seems that, in this case, Cllr Davies must have had such a prejudicial interest, though we were not told of its nature, and Cllr Dennison had been summoned from the subs’ bench. However, I was also aware that Cllr Dennison’s register of interests included his employment by the applicant: Imperial Hall Ltd.
It seemed obvious to me that, if the local member had to be free of any prejudicial interest, it must follow that anyone chosen as a substitute must be similarly unencumbered. So I raised this matter at the PDP on 25 February and the debate can be heard at about 7 min 20 secs into the meeting.
The Planning Officer explained that it was her understanding that Cllr Dennison’s relationship with Imperial Hall Ltd had terminated some time earlier and he had simply forgotten to make the necessary change to his register of interests. And there the matter rested until our recent Facebook spat on Pembrokeshire Council Watch.
However, when I opened my emails after supper last Thursday evening, the reason for Cllr Dennison’s displeasure became somewhat clearer. Much to my dismay, there in my inbox was a communication from the Ombudsman’s office informing me that Cllr Dennison had made a complaint against me regarding my conduct at the Planning Delegation Committee.
My dismay quickly turned to delight when I read on and found that the Ombudsman – the councillor standards watchdog – had kicked his complaint firmly into touch.
The complaint had two legs: (a) that I had a prejudicial interest because the boss of Imperial Hall Ltd, and the applicant in the present case, Mr Lee Bridges, had been one of my opponents for the Hakin seat at the 2022 local elections, and (b) I had made some remarks about the PDP which brought the office of councillor into disrepute.
Thin gruel, indeed!
In short, the Ombudsman decided that standing in the same election nearly three years ago was not sufficient to establish the sort of close personal association required to found a prejudicial interest, and that what I had said about the dubious practices of the Planning Delegation Panel was political speech of a type that was protected by my rights to Freedom of Expression enshrined in the Human Rights Act 1998.
So Cllr Dennison’s attempt to have me hauled over the coals can be summed up with the words: “Nice try, but no cigar!”
The Ombudsman’s decision notice can be read here.
It would be remiss of me not to pay tribute to my former county council colleague Malcolm Calver for his part in establishing councillors’ rights to freedom of expression.
At one time Malcolm and I were the only two unaffiliated members – what I used to refer to as “dictionary independents” – on the county council.
In about 2015 he posted a series of articles on his website about the conduct of Manorbier Community Council, of which he was also a member. One item concerned a survey of local residents designed to be the basis for a community grant of some sort. At this distance in time the details are a bit sketchy, but it involved the fact that a certain proportion of the survey forms had to be returned for it to be valid. And, when this threshold wasn’t met, one prominent member resorted to the photocopier to make up the deficit.
Malcolm reported all this, and more, on his website and I seem to remember that what particularly upset his enemies was his use of the word “shenanigans” to describe these dubious activities.
He was reported to the Ombudsman who found that, even though nobody disputed the truth of what he wrote, he had brought the office of councillor into disrepute. That led to an appearance before PCC’s Standards Committee and, despite his plea that he was simply exercising his right to free speech, it issued a reprimand and ordered him to undergo re-training. Although this was a fairly minor sanction, Malcolm refused to comply on a matter of principle, and exercised his right to appeal to the Adjudication Panel for Wales, which upheld the Standards Committee’s decision.
So it was off to the High Court in Cardiff, where Mr Justice Beatson found that despite some of Malcolm’s comments being “mocking and sarcastic,” his postings attracted the enhanced protection afforded to political speech. He also observed that politicians and senior council officers were expected to have “thicker skins”.
What should be remembered is that Malcolm was acting purely out of principle and that, throughout all this, he was on the hook for several thousand pounds of his own and the opposition’s legal costs. I for one am grateful that his efforts have established that we are all protected from the censorious activities of the likes of Cllr Alan Dennison.
So keen young students; studying Human Rights Law as it applies to freedom of expression, will now all have the famous case of Calver v Public Services Ombudsman for Wales on their reading lists.
Whether he’ll ever be up there with Carlill v Carbolic Smoke Ball Company is another matter.
When passing the offices of the Tenby Observer, your attention might be drawn to a plaque on the wall which reads “a pioneer of press freedom”.
While there is an element of hyperbole in this claim, it is true that the paper did play a leading role in changing the law to allow the press to report on council meetings.
Mr Frank B Mason – the editor of the Tenby Observer – challenged Tenby Corporation [town council] in court over its practice of holding its meetings in private. Though Mason lost his case, Parliament was so concerned by the outcome that it soon after enacted the Local Authorities (Admission to Meetings) Act 1908. A more comprehensive account of these events can be found at Free speech rules – OK.
It is interesting that these two very important cases should both have their roots just a couple of miles and a little over 100 years apart in the south east corner of Pembrokeshire.