Councillor Ian Ward, Portfolio Holder for Planning found himself under scrutiny from Managing Director, Shaun Scrutton in a standards complaint filed in December 2019.
The Council often takes a long time to resolve standards complaints and this one seems to have taken quite some time to resolve.
A formal investigation has now taken place and it appears that the Managing Director had serious concerns over the conduct of Cllr Ian Ward and in a rare act by Council officers, felt it necessary to raise a standards complaint which led to an investigation.
The monitoring officer report states
I received a complaint from Mr Shaun Scrutton, the Managing Director of the Council, regarding the alleged conduct of Cllr Ian Ward (subject councillor), a District Councillor, on the 19th December 2019.
The circumstances which led to the complaint related to a meeting that was held on 22nd November 2019, between Cllr Ward, a Council Officer, a Planning Consultant and a developer. The meeting related to a live planning application, which had been refused a few months earlier at the Council’s Development Committee.
The full standard complaint is published on the Councils website here