Hucknall councillor demands changes to rules after Whyburn Farm petition controversy at meeting

Coun Chris Baron (Con), who represents Hucknall West on Ashfield Council, added his voice to those criticising the ruling Ashfield Independents for the way the meeting was handled.

And he labelled as “tosh” claims by the Independents that they were simply following constitutional protocol that Coun Baron himself had set down when he was Labour leader of the council.

In particular, Coun Baron was unhappy that he was not chosen to speak in the 15-minute debate following the presentation of a 7,600-name petition, despite, he says, his hand clearly being raised first.

Instead, chairman Arnie Hankin (Ash Ind), chose three Ashfield Independent councillors to speak only.

The three, Dave Shaw, John Wilmott and Lee Waters, all represent Hucknall North and all spoke against the proposals.

But Coun Baron echoed the views of Coun Lauren Mitchell (Lab), who represents Hucknall South, who said last week that members from other parties should have been able to speak.

Coun Baron said: “There’s a lot of people not happy about how the meeting went last week.

"There’s not just me, all the members of the public there were unhappy too.

"They could clearly see that democracy was not being done.

“Not only did I say I had my hand up first to speak, the chief executive, who was sitting right next to the chairman, also said I had my hand up first.

"No opposition members were allowed to speak.

“The chairman attempted to make me leave the meeting, and only after the legal officer told him that he couldn’t do that did he carry on with the meeting.”

Coun Baron felt another of the issues was the lack of time available for councillors to speak, something he raised at a meeting of the council’s standards and personnel appeals committee meeting on December 8.

He continued: “One of the roles of this committee is to yearly review the constitution of the authority and I brought this meeting up and said that democracy had not appeared to be done and they actually largely agreed with me.

"One of the things I brought up was time limits for discussing items like petitions because one thing that was noticeable at the meeting was the chairman was quite prepared to giver extra time to portfolio holders to explain what they had done but not give any extra time to the petition.

"So there must have been some flexibility or he would have been breaking the constitution.

Addressing the notion that the meeting was following rules written by him, Coun Baron said it was ‘a load of blah, blah blah’.

He continued: “This was raised at the committee meeting and Ruth Dennis, the monitoring officer, and the legal officer for the authority said it was incorrect.

"These current rules were drawn up when John Knight was the leader, or perhaps even before that, so to say otherwise is a load of tosh.”