Complaint over 'behind closed doors meetings' including with police commissioner

A top councillor has complained about behind closed doors meetings being staged ahead of one with the Gwent Police and Crime Commissioner. 

Jane Mudd, who was elected as a Labour candidate last year to the post that oversees the police service and helps set its priorities, is due to attend a briefing that is only for Monmouthshire County Councillors in September. 

While regular meetings of the council, and its various committees, must be held in public, with only limited powers to go into confidential session, the briefings referred to as “member seminars” are closed to the public including members of the press. 

Councillor Armand Watts, who chairs Monmouthshire council’s public services scrutiny committee, questioned the number of seminars being arranged, with his committee having been attempting for a number of months to arrange a meeting with Ms Mudd. 

That committee meeting, which will be open for members of the public to attend to view in person or follow on the council’s YouTube channel, has now been penciled in for the end of October, with the member seminar on September 1. 

Labour’s Cllr Watts told his committee: “My natural democratic instinct is to have these meetings with all the members there. I think it would have been a great meeting.” 

The Chepstow Bulwark and Thornwell councillor said the seminars are held “behind closed doors” and questioned the number being held: “They keep doing this. Committees have identified issues and they grab hold of it and have a seminar.” 

Magor West councillor councillor Frances Taylor said she would like the public services committee to have a meeting with the Cardiff Capital Region, which is made up of 10 local authorities including Monmouthshire. It recently had to fund a £5.25 million settlement following a High Court case brought over a contract to demolish a former power station, at Aberthaw, near Barry, it bought in 2022. 

Cllr Taylor, who leads the council’s independent group, said: “That email about the ‘fine’ was the first communication I’ve had from the Cardiff Capital Region in quite some time. I’d be really interested to know about the cost, and the benefits, as we are quite financially strapped.” 

Cllr Watts said he would consult the council’s legal and democratic services officials over inviting the Cardiff Capital Region, which is also the combined joint committee, as he sits on the city region joint committee and the committee clerk said there is also the Corporate Joint Committee on which all 10 local authorities are represented.