Dear Mr. Hopson
Thank you for your e-mail of 22nd October 2009, a copy of which will be given to the members of Review Sub-Committee.
The Sub-Committee must consist of at least three members – a member of Chichester District Council, a Parish Councillor member and an Independent member. They will not be members who sat on the Assessment Sub-Committee on 22nd July 2009.
All three of the Chichester District Council’s members of the Standards Committee were members of this Council at the time of the Adjudication Panels decision to disqualify Councillor Davies. Therefore, I have no option but to include one of these members in the forthcoming Review Sub-Committee.
The Regulations provide that the Sub-Committee must meet in private and the complainant is not invited to attend. Furthermore, I am unable to provide you with the names of the members of the Review Committee.
If you wish to provide a summary of your complaint, it should be two or three sentences / a short paragraph long. Please submit this to me within the next week.
A provisional date of Monday 30th November 2009 has now been set for the Review Sub-Committee. I will confirm this date to you in due course.
Yours sincerely,
Nicola Golding
From: David Hopson [mailto:nunnington@gmail.com]
Sent: 22 October 2009 11:43
To: Nicola Golding
Subject: Re: FW: Review Sub-Committee
I have interleaved some comments below.
In respect of the statement in your earlier email:
"I am aware that you did not wish any Conservative members to sit on the Assessment Committee, but for the reasons explained above, this may not be possible for the Review Sub-Committee."
I do not know how often I have now said this, but the primary concern I have expressed about the membership of the committee has nothing whatsoever to do with their party political affiliation.
I will try again: in the witch hunt that was pursued against erstwhile Councillor, Taff Davies, which ultimately resulted in his removal by the Standards Board, my name and my business were cited regularly and it was clearly implied that I was the casus belli in this matter, This information was passed to every one of the then elected Councillors, with the admonition that they were to have nothing whatsoever to do with me whilst the matter was sub judice - an interesting assault on democracy. I could bore for England on this subject, but a number of things are true:
Firstly the Standards Board tribunal, following pre-hearing submissions from me, agreed that whatever my relationship to Taff Davies was, it had absolutely no bearing whatsoever on the matters raised against him in the witch hunt. Not surprisingly, no letter was circulated in CDC to correct any earlier 'misunderstanding.'
Secondly, as a result of what happened, the then leader of the Conservative group, Janet Duncton, got kicked into touch by her own people, for having made such a hash of things in the way that she handled Taff Davies +++. It got so heated that Andrew Tyrie himself, no less, got involved.
So: my view is that any present Member of CDC who was an elected councillor at the time of the witch hunt (regardless of party affiliation) is willy nilly going to have a view of me that may prejudice their judgement; and that this will be particularly true of anyone who was a member of the Conservative Party at the time of the hunt, and is now a Member of CDC.
Please let me know if this isn't clear.
As said earlier, my other comments are interleaved below.
Please note that I have now put this correspondence into my public domain system. I should have done it before, but failed to add your email address.
WBW
David
In the interests of open, transparent and accountable democratic government, this email has been posted to http://wwpcmailstore.blogspot.com/
.. Earlier content excised - see previous posts
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment