22nd July 2011, 07:10 PM
(This post was last modified: 22nd July 2011, 07:12 PM by Marcus Brody.)
To play devil's advocate for a moment, I suppose it is just about possible that the FOI person is being accurate, and that there isn't any formal correspondence relating to this. From Councillor Melton's various public statements, it seems plausible to me that he's the type of person who'd open his mouth first, and worry about the consequences later. He may have thought he could use the occasion of his first public pronouncement as leader of the Council to articulate the way he'd like to see them implementing policy, a sort of 'vision statement' by the bold new broom, sweeping away years of accumulated bureaucracy and red tape. It was only after he'd made this that it was pointed out to him that he probably doesn't have the power to make this sort of wholesale change, and certainly not without running it past the rest of the Council. If this interpretation is correct, and that he opened his mouth before engaging his brain, then there may not be any minutes of Council meetings to find (of course, that doesn't mean that he didn't discuss it with other developer-councillors over a couple of pints at the Bunny Hugger's Arms, but it would be difficult to prove).
The acknowledgement in the FOI response that legal advice has been produced in relation to the leader's speech does not necessarily negate the interpretation that Councillor Melton may have been articulating his own personal agenda rather than something that the Council as a whole wanted to enact; after all, the response doesn't say when this legal advice was produced. It may be that they asked a lawyer after he'd opened his mouth, in the period when they / he were receiving letters from archaeologists asking how the statement related to their own and national policies. It seems possible that in the aftermath of his speech, the Councillor or one of his staff may have thought 'whoops, may have put my foot in it here, best check how we stand legally'.
The acknowledgement in the FOI response that legal advice has been produced in relation to the leader's speech does not necessarily negate the interpretation that Councillor Melton may have been articulating his own personal agenda rather than something that the Council as a whole wanted to enact; after all, the response doesn't say when this legal advice was produced. It may be that they asked a lawyer after he'd opened his mouth, in the period when they / he were receiving letters from archaeologists asking how the statement related to their own and national policies. It seems possible that in the aftermath of his speech, the Councillor or one of his staff may have thought 'whoops, may have put my foot in it here, best check how we stand legally'.
You know Marcus. He once got lost in his own museum