Mayor accuses council of ‘shambolic’ process

Nicholas Thomas, Local Democracy Reporter 

A local mayor claims he is the victim of a “totally undemocratic” decision to defer his appointment to county borough council’s standards committee.

George Etheridge was nominated for the role in Blackwood last March, but has since seen his appointment fall at the final hurdle on two separate occasions.

Last November, the local authority deferred the decision after receiving “a complaint alleging that town councillor Etheridge had breached the code of conduct for members”.

At the most recent full council meeting, held on Tuesday January 13, members backed another call for deferral after hearing claims the selection process had been “flawed”.

Cllr Etheridge, an independent member of the town council, claims he has suffered a “personal attack” and has pointed the finger at senior officers for the delays.

“It seems the chief executive and monitoring officer acted without proper cause undemocratically and all of this has been totally unnecessary,” he claimed.

Caerphilly Council has rejected the claims it acted undemocratically and says its response to the situation was “wholly appropriate”.

According to Cllr Etheridge, monitoring officer Robert Tranter told him an hour before the November meeting that he and chief executive Richard Edmunds “saw fit to defer the appointment, as an alleged complaint had been made against me”.

He then alleged Mr Tranter “refused to provide any evidence to the contrary to prove such a complaint existed”, but Cllr Etheridge later discovered the complaint surrounded “a screenshot from a Facebook post in 2021”.

The Blackwood mayor did not say what was in the alleged post, but claimed he had been “ignored” by the two officers in the aftermath of the November meeting.

A council spokesperson confirmed the appointment was deferred at that meeting because of the complaint.

“There was nothing ‘undemocratic’ about this decision and it was wholly appropriate given the information that was available at the time,” they said.

“It was a decision that was taken in the interests of protecting both town councillor Etheridge and the [county borough] council from potential embarrassment.”

The matter was rescheduled for January’s full council meeting, but Plaid Cymru councillor Teresa Parry urged those present to again defer the appointment.

She claimed the community council liaison committee’s selection process was “flawed, and that due diligence was not followed” – with “pen portraits” of the candidates not provided to members.

Parry said: “This is not in any way a reflection on the character of the nomination before us, but a matter of the committee not following a fair and equal process.”

A subsequent vote saw all but two councillors present back the call to contact the chair of that committee, “and respectfully ask that nominations for a representative on the standards committee be reopened, and follow a robust, transparent process diligently”.

Cllr Etheridge blasted those proceedings as “shambolic” and said the deferral had been backed “even though a democratic vote was taken on this earlier in the year and I was chosen unanimously to take the appointment”.

He claimed: “It’s clear it has now become a personal attack against me, and most of all democracy itself is being made a mockery of.

“This has created a clear rift now between town and community councils and Caerphilly County Borough Council.”

In response, the council spokesperson said the second deferral “was completely unrelated to the previous decision, and was a decision taken by elected members and not officers”.

They confirmed the council would now “write to the community council liaison committee and convey to them the council’s desire that the process be rerun.”