Jacob Williams https://jacobwilliams.com

One of the items tabled for a vote at today’s council meeting was a motion submitted back at the February meeting by Cllr. Reg Owens. It called for a three year pay freeze for the lowest paid council staff who were to be losing out as part of the authority’s recent pay and grading review.

From the word go, this one had been a prickly issue, because the costs associated with this proposal, if implemented, would be monumental – the worst case scenario, taking into account the potential for incalculable claims against the authority under equal pay legislation, estimates the costs could amount to as much as £51 million. The fact that it was submitted by a ruling group councillor (the IPG) had long been known as a matter of great regret for the party’s most senior members.

The floor was handed over to Cllr. Owens, to present his case. He’s previously been known as quite the rebel, so it came as somewhat of a deviance from normal form, when he opened by stating that he intended to withdraw his motion. He said he did not wish to jeopardise the continued employment of existing council employees by risking large payouts and potential redundancies, and that this was never his intention, or for the subsequent knock-on budgetary effect this might have on the council’s ability to maintain its services.

Before formally withdrawing his motion, Cllr. Owens said that he wanted to state on record that he did not appreciate his leader’s actions prior to the February council meeting at which he originally tabled the motion.

Cllr. Owens recalled that, in the days prior to the February meeting, when the terms of his potentially disaster-laden motion came out into the open, the cabinet “sent their heavies” – his own words- round to visit him at his house, to try and persuade him to reconsider and remove the motion. The back-story goes that, on the instruction of the council leader, a cabinet member paid Cllr. Owens a home visit to hammer home the ramifications of his proposal – including possible redundancies and huge additional costs to the authority. Apparently the repercussions were laid on thickly during this stand-off, in a bid to put the frighteners on.

He held back on naming who the cold-caller was, and this wasn’t quite enough for some of those present- they wanted to know exactly who the leader had detailed to the St. Ishmael’s patch to implement his latest dirty trick. Cllr. Ken Rowlands’ name was touted quite loudly as the chosen ‘heavy,’ to a reply of “…what a terrifying prospect!”

It obviously didn’t work, and there is good reason to believe it may have been a counter-productive exercise, because Cllr. Owens felt insulted by this skulduggery. He pressed ahead, and his motion was referred to the April meeting of cabinet, where it was dismissed in a flash with barely any consideration given to it.

By the time it made its way back to today’s council meeting, for the final say-so, the message had got through, though precisely what precipitated Reg’s last-minute u-turn is an issue of great debate. It is a possibility that Cllr. Adams had threatened to send round another one of his senior party colleagues to pay a second home visit.

I’m not completely sold by this conjecture, but having said that, I’m sure the prospect of an uninvited visit from Cllr. Sue Perkins could be quite persuasive!

❏Further updates from today’s council meeting, (and, no doubt, tomorrow’s AGM) will be posted in due course.