Seven Conflicts, Seven Dispensations, No Problem

How Oswestry Town Council turned acknowledged conflicts of interest into permission slips

There are currently sixteen seats on Oswestry Town Council. Seven of those seats are occupied by councillors who also sit on Shropshire Council.

That is not twin-hatting. That is nearly half the room arriving with a spare council stitched into the lining.

This matters because Oswestry Town Council is being asked to take over services from Shropshire Council. Services that Shropshire Council no longer wishes to fund. Responsibilities that Oswestry residents may now be expected to pay for through their town precept, having already paid Shropshire Council for them through council tax.

In any normal negotiation, people would raise an eyebrow if almost half of one side also belonged to the other. At Oswestry Town Council, they raised seven hands instead.

The councillors concerned are Wendy Owen, Mark Owen, Rosie Radford, Duncan Kerr, David Walker, Duncan Borrowman and James Owen. Between them they include Shropshire Council portfolio holders, its Chair and a member of the Northern Planning Committee. This is not some accidental overlap caused by two parish councillors sharing a bus stop. It is a substantial bloc of county-level political power sitting inside the town council.

And to be fair, they declared it.

Each announced an “Other Registrable Interest” in agenda items concerning the transfer of Shropshire Council services. Each had applied for a dispensation. Each had been granted one by the Town Clerk. Each was therefore permitted to discuss and vote.

Seven conflicts. Seven dispensations. No problem.

Apparently.

This is not ethical cleansing. It is an exemption.

Yet the minutes present the whole arrangement with the calm efficiency of a cloakroom attendant returning seven identical hats. Interest declared. Form completed. Permission granted. Please proceed to the vote.

A declaration of interest exists because the interest matters. A dispensation does not prove the conflict has vanished. It confirms that the conflict exists, then gives the councillor permission to participate despite it.

The public is entitled to ask what exactly happened behind that neat little formula.

Were seven individual written applications submitted? On what dates? For which meetings? For which services? For how long were the dispensations granted? What precise ground did the Clerk rely upon? What reasons were recorded? Were conditions imposed? Did anyone consider whether the councillors’ different Shropshire Council roles created different levels of conflict?

Because they are not all in the same position.

A county backbencher, a portfolio holder and the Chair of Shropshire Council do not carry identical responsibilities. David Walker and James Owen are not merely passive members of the county authority. Duncan Borrowman does not stop being its Chair because he has entered another chamber and found a different nameplate waiting for him.

The idea that all seven could be dealt with by one standard paragraph may be administratively convenient. So is using the same key for every house in Oswestry. Convenience is not always a recommendation.

One possible justification for a dispensation is that council business would otherwise be impeded. But there are sixteen seats. Remove seven and nine remain. The quorum is six. Unless arithmetic has now been devolved as well, the council could still conduct business.

Perhaps some seats were vacant. Perhaps attendance was low. Perhaps the Clerk decided that the dispensations were in the interests of Oswestry residents. Perhaps there was another carefully reasoned basis.

Excellent. Publish it.

That is why The Alternative Council has asked for the seven applications, the dates, the periods requested and granted, the written decisions, the legal grounds, the reasons, any conditions, any advice from the Monitoring Officer or lawyers, the correspondence surrounding the applications, the delegation authorising the Clerk and the current register of dispensations.

Nothing excessive. Merely the paperwork that allowed almost half the council to vote on matters involving the other council they serve.

Oswestry Town Council has lately drifted into the soft upholstery of complacency. Meetings proceed, motions are passed, minutes are polished and everyone appears comforted by the belief that procedure and accountability are the same thing.

They are not.

A procedure can be followed badly. A form can be completed mechanically. A dispensation can be granted so broadly that it ceases to manage a conflict and begins to neutralise the Code of Conduct itself.

If these seven dispensations were individually considered, narrowly drawn and properly reasoned, the documents will show it. The councillors will have nothing to fear beyond the mild embarrassment of being asked to demonstrate that public safeguards were more than ceremonial bunting.

But if the applications were identical, the decisions generic, the duration sweeping and the reasons little more than “otherwise the county councillors might not get to vote”, then Oswestry has a rather larger problem.

The town council is supposed to represent Oswestry when negotiating with Shropshire Council. It should not resemble a joint committee in which Shropshire Council has quietly acquired seven votes on both sides of the table.

Twin-hatted councillors often assure us that they know which authority they are representing at any given moment. This is a touching claim. It requires the public to believe that political loyalties, private briefings, collective responsibilities and institutional relationships can be switched off at the chamber door like a mobile telephone.

Perhaps they can. Human beings are famously good at separating conflicting loyalties when money, power and public office are involved.

The point is not that these seven councillors are corrupt. There is no evidence of that. The point is that the appearance of conflict is obvious, acknowledged and substantial. That demands more transparency, not seven matching declarations followed by business as usual.

The dispensations may be completely proper. They may be models of careful local-government decision-making. They may even contain individual reasoning rather than the constitutional equivalent of copy and paste.

We shall see.

Until then, Oswestry residents are entitled to wonder whether the Town Council protected itself from a conflict of interest, or merely found a tidy administrative method of letting the conflict vote.

Seven conflicts. Seven dispensations. One council so comfortable with the arrangement that it appears not to have noticed how extraordinary it looks.

Perhaps Oswestry Town Council has simply grown unused to scrutiny.
That can be corrected.

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