THE CHAIRMAN of Ledbury Town Council, Cllr Nina Shields, said the focus of the council should be on recovering costs, if possible, following the recent judicial review, which the council lost.

But this could be affected by documents relating to the court case, which still may be missing, and also the possibility that some emails may have been deleted.

Speaking in the section allowed for public comment at last week's full town council meeting, former town councillor Richard Hadley asked about the "progress on recovering missing documents" and "deleted emails".

Mr Hadley also asked whether recently resigned councillors and the former town clerk might be asked for advice on "how to locate the missing records".

But one recently resigned councillor, former major Bob Barnes, went on record last month to say it was simply not the case that any documents were missing.

He said: "There are no missing documents: all the minutes regarding the handling of the complaints process, and the subsequent introduction of protective measures, were presented to and approved by full council."

Speaking at last week's meeting, Cllr Shields said: "I would say the focus is on how we can recover costs and not on who did what and when."

She added the aim was to make the case with evidence "to enable us to recover costs".

Mr Hadley also raised concerns about the security of the town council building.

But Cllr Shields said: "I think it's fair to say we have pretty high security at the building right now."

If a robust paper trail is put together, the town council could then seek to recover court costs, widely reported to be in the region of £200,000, from bodies such as The Herefordshire Association of Local Councils (HALC) and the National Association of Local Councils (NALC) , which give indemnified advice to councils.

In a press release following the meeting, Cllr Shields said while she wished to present the evidence as she found it, she would not be commenting further on this information "because of the need to avoid prejudicing any potential claim for costs".

She would continue reviewing documents to establish whether or not there was evidence to support a claim for costs.

Cllr Shields said: "The work so far had been to: identify the decision-making process; review what advice had been received; ascertain whether or not such advice had been acted upon; and establish whether there had been any undue external influence on the decisions made by the standing committee."

She told the meeting that documents "provided evidence that the standing committee believed they had delegated authority to make all decisions".

But Cllr Shield believes the standing committee might have been operating beyond its powers.

She said: "Given the sums of money involved, this appeared to be a breach of the council’s finance regulations. While there is provision to suspend these regulations when there is work of such a specialised nature, no record of such suspension had yet been found".

Cllr Liz Harvey took her own town council to Judicial Review when she was accused of bullying staff and sanctions were imposed on her and then extended.

The judge ruled this was procedurally unfair, because Cllr Harvey had not been given a fair chance to respond, and the town council should have taken into consideration a Code of Conduct ruling which cleared Cllr Harvey of any wrong-doing, including bullying.

It has emerged that the town council received conflicting legal advice on its position, with one barrister disagreeing with another.

Attempting to recover costs, from advisory bodies such as HALC or NALC, could also prove costly to the public purse.

Cllr Shields advised that in her view "the council would need a strong case before it considered incurring more legal costs in order to fight such a claim; but that this would be a decision of full council."