27 September 2022
Follow me @LindaDerrick1
Facebook Linda Derrick for Ridgeway East
It is over 2 months since I blogged about Hughenden Parish Council. I took a break over the summer, not least because my husband and I were due to have operations and we both needed to self-isolate and recover.
There wouldn’t have been much to report. The latest Council meeting – an Extraordinary one - was yesterday and it was the first Council meeting since 18 July. It had a relatively short agenda and was intended to cover non-controversial items leaving more time at the scheduled Council meeting on 11 October.
However, one controversial item was included – the transfer of land to Hughenden Community Support Trust – which I have blogged about many times before.
Another controversial item was touched on – decommissioning of all the streetlights in Widmer End on 31 March 2023.
For both these items, Council have expressed the view that it couldn’t afford the necessary expenditure.
So before we go any further, I thought it would be helpful to provide some financial context.
How much money has HPC got?
HPC has an annual income of about £250k, about £220k coming from the money residents pay in rates.
Over the past 5 years or so, HPC has failed to spend all its income so its reserves have steadily increased and, at the end of 2021/2, stood at about £400k.
So this year, HPC has about £650k at its disposal, give or take.
HPC’s budget for 2022/3 was agreed by Council in January this year and is on HPC’s website at Budget-Visualisation-2022-23.pdf (hughenden-pc.gov.uk).
In total, the budget sets out spending of £440k.
Now I wish I could tell you how much HPC has spent against that budget i.e. is HPC short of money? However, 6 months into the financial year, Council has still not been presented with any information about its spending, much less how this compares with its budget.
It is also worth looking at some items where HPC has spent money.
One of the major items has been on locum clerks. Roughly, HPC has paid about £10k a month for a part-time locum Clerk and a second very part-time locum Clerk.
Over the last 6 months, this meant about £50-60k for locum services – services which did not even amount to a full-time post.
Apart from this, Council has authorised very little expenditure except for the normal routine invoices for grass cutting etc. To give you an idea, it authorized about £6k at its July meeting and about £7k at its meeting yesterday.
I don’t know what Council will spend over the next 6 months as it has no agreed priorities nor plans.
So I am forced to guess. And my guess would be that once again HPC is not going to spend all its budget (by a long way). Once again, its reserves will increase.
So I would say that HPC is not short of money. It can easily afford some major items of expenditure. If it decides not to spend money, it is not that it can’t afford it; it is because it chooses not to.
How much would it cost to maintain the lights in Widmer End?
About 8 years ago, HPC invested in LED lights for the streetlights in the Windmill Estate. Apart, from that very little had been spent on the streetlights in Widmer End.
Last year a survey of all the streetlights was carried out by a company called SPARKX and they recommended that 5 streetlights should be repaired urgently – two in the Windmill Estate replacing columns damaged by vehicle collisions. These were carried out at a cost of about £10k.
At that time, the then Clerk estimated that further repairs for streetlights which should be repaired “as soon as possible” would cost about £35k spread over 2/3 years. About £1k of this would be for repairs to the streetlights on Windmill Lane, Primrose Hill and Brimmers Hill which are basically just lights stuck on telegraph posts.
To this should be added the annual cost of the electricity which was estimated to be £3k, taking into account the increase in electricity costs.
£14k was put into the budget for this financial year to make a start on those repairs. None of that money has been spent.
Council needs to resolve who owns the lights but the money to maintain them is there in the budget. In fact, it is a pretty small percentage of HPC's total budget (3% to be exact).
Or to put it another way, the total expenditure for the next three years on the lights would be considerably less than what the Council has paid for a part-time locum Clerk since the Council became quorate again in March.
Transfer of the land
The land in question consists of 4 allotments and land at Great Kingshill. It is worth at least £100k and, with development permission, about £15million.
The question of the ownership of the land has been a running sore for nearly a decade. Resolving the issue is critical to the validity of leases for the land between HPC and Hughenden Community Support Trust, a local charity. The leases commit HPC to paying thousands of pounds of rent to HCST for 99 years.
So you would think the Council would want to get definitive legal advice on this issue.
Council has previously considered getting definitive legal advice but has never done so.
In 2014, Council instructed its solicitor to “assume that HPC was happy to transfer the land”; it merely asked its solicitor for advice on how to make the transfer. It didn’t ask who owned the land.
In 2015, when the Council was asked to approve an Order to transfer the titles to the land, it took no legal advice on the grounds that “at a cost of £3000- £5000 it would be much more likely “to incur fierce public criticism then doing the deal” and because “the Council was likely to be seen as pedantic”.
In 2020, the then Clerk wrote to HPC’s solicitors seeking an assurance that “although registered as land owners, the Parish Council were in fact only Custodial Trustees”.
In response, the solicitors were unable to give that assurance. It said HPC was the registered proprietor, and there was no evidence that the land was held by a custodian trustee. In order to establish whether the land was held by HPC as custodian trustee it would be necessary to review any trust deed which has been put in place, or the various Inclosure Awards which were made.
Council never asked anyone to carry out that review.
So Council has had three opportunities to seek definitive legal advice on ownership over the years and on each it had failed to do so.
Council was given a fourth opportunity to seek definitive legal advice yesterday and once again it failed to do.
On the agenda was a resolution put down by HPC’s Land Transfer Working Group recommending that Council take definitive legal advice.
Two of the three councillors on the Working Group couldn’t make it to the meeting. The remaining member, HPC’s Chairman, in introducing the resolution said a Tribunal had already decided that HPC held the land as a trustee (which is not correct). He then went on to vote against seeking definitive advice.
There were only 5 councillors at the meeting (just a quorum). I welcomed the resolution to seek definitive legal advice.
The remaining 3 councillors, as I understand it, thought the issue had been mismanaged in the past and if they had been councillors in 2020 (or 2015), then they would have got definitive legal advice.
Oddly, however, having criticized Council for not seeking definitive legal advice in the past, they then voted against seeking it now.
It seems that the “Council was where it was”. The important thing apparently was for the Council to get closure so it could move on. It was not interested in resolving the issue, just closure.
One councillor said he could not justify the expenditure to residents. The Council knows that in the last two years alone, it has spent over £23k on legal fees just to transfer the titles and negotiate the leases. About £10k of this was paid out to HCST’s legal advisors. So HPC has paid the legal fees for both sides to the negotiations. This has been questioned by HPC’s internal auditors.
Last night, Council could have decided to get to the bottom of this issue, involving potentially millions of pounds and with financial commitments for 99 years.
But it thought it could not justify the expenditure – an expenditure of roughly the same amount already given away to HCST’s lawyers, apparently without legal authority and without so much as checking the invoices.
Or it could have sought definitive legal advice for the price of a month’s payment for a part-time locum Clerk.
But like the previous Council, it decided not to do so. This for a Council with £650k at its disposal.