Promises, Promises? Or Administrative Amnesia at Betley Parish Council (A Bird’s eye view of Local Administration)

 

Reading the Minutes of Betley Parish Council, one could easily conclude that a peculiar form of collective amnesia pervades the meeting room.  Items raised in one meeting rarely seem to reach any satisfactory conclusion in subsequent ones before being quietly buried beneath the next agenda. Matters drift in, are discussed vaguely, and then disappear into the administrative fog.

·  Administrative Amnesia

Many of the issues debated by the Parish Council appear only loosely connected to its actual remit.  Until 2024, the Council seems to have functioned with few, if any, meaningful policies of its own.  When policies finally began to appear, many seemed to be heavily based on policies used by other authorities, with limited obvious adaptation for local circumstances.  The suggestion to make them more suited to Betley was cursorily dismissed.  Although a few positively presidential in tone clauses appear to have been inserted, which, if not challenged, might grant the Chair powers that would not have looked entirely out of place in the Oval Office.

Yet few councillors seem inclined to challenge either the Minutes themselves or the conspicuous absence of meaningful follow-up.  Rules are often cited, though not always consistently interpreted, and sometimes appear to be either misinterpreted, misunderstood or ignored. The result is a council that appears to drift from one confusion to the next with admirable consistency.  ‘My perception is my reality’ is a frequently quoted mantra to stave off any objection/observation.   But since this this is so lacking in logical substance that even the resident mice in the meeting room decided to vote with their feet, and leave.

·        Vanishing S106 Funding  

 Take the village hall car park. The S106 funding to resurface it has reportedly been available since 2019, but not claimed until 2024/5 and still little visible progress has been made after claiming it, re beginning work on the resurfacing  (Village Hall report to the PC in March 2026).  Pedestrian access also could be significantly improved, though this too appears to have joined the growing archive of neglected intentions.  A new fence has, however, reportedly, been erected between the sewage works access road and the children’s play area and a new floor in the hall, itself, has been reported — hopefully funded, through contributions connected to the expansion of the sewage works and the village hall lease of land to the sewage works for the access road. 

Then there are the gates

 

·        The Curious Case of the Gates on the Paths

What began as a sensible project (see Report 1) to replace dangerous and broken stiles with accessible metal gates now appears to have stalled somewhere between aspiration and spreadsheet management.  There was once talk of a GIS map identifying all gate locations, along with a tracking spreadsheet for easy reference (2023) to be made available to the public.  Reports since have been vague so that it is difficult to determine precisely when gates were purchased - after the five recorded in 2023 with only £2527.20 of the available fund being used.  Installation is also vague  and it is difficult to know if what is reported is discussed as an intention or is a record of implementation and installation.  The accounts are even more confusing. 

The project itself was financially kick-started not by the Parish Council, but by the Bonfire Committee, which contributed the majority of the first £4,000 raised and needed to purchase the 10 gates. The Parish Council contributed £1,000 — a sum some residents considered disappointing.  So were ten gates actually purchased at this time and how many since?

Since then, smaller sums have been donated by the Hand and Trumpet dog walkers, or 'privately'.   The Parish Council increased its own allocation from £1,500 to £2,500.  Whether this represents new funding or merely the recycling of previously unspent allocations is far from clear.  By now, one might reasonably have expected the stile replacement project to be substantially complete.  Instead, only around seventeen gates (out of a possible 40+/-appear to have been installed — some of them, ironically, by the County Council, which has the statutory duty to maintain accessible Rights of Way.

The Minutes now inform us that yet another application is to be made to the Bonfire Fund for further money (2026). This raises an obvious question: Why? The Parish Council holds unearmarked reserves and possesses the power to raise funds through the annual precept. A council capable of earmarking £8,000 for elections that never occurred might reasonably be expected to provide £2,000 for gates — particularly alongside the apparently unspent £1,500 from previous years and the additional £2,500 recently allocated.  However, this should not surprise since in 2023 there was an allocated budget for Highways of £8070 (Minute 261/23).  Was this ever used?  It seemed to have been reduced to £1500 in later years to be finally removed in 2025 because it was rarely, if ever used.  So herein lies a mystery - unless, of course, these allocations belong to that increasingly familiar category: promises destined never to materialise, or are allocations that residents may reasonably struggle to reconcile with visible outcomes.  An FOI Act request for this and other financial proof has been rebuffed over the past three years.  The obvious question might be - Why?

·        Working Party Wish Lists

Councillor Owen had volunteered to establish a working party three years ago.  It would learn how to install the gates and carry out the work independently of the County Council.  Cum 2026, the Minutes once again speak optimistically of forming a working party.  One begins to suspect that this proposed working party itself may now qualify as a heritage concept. 

And then there are the Minutes themselves.

·        The Saga of the Missing Minutes

At one stage, the Council stated that Minutes prior to 1959 had been lost.  Yet the surviving Minutes — which were apparently not lost — recorded that documents dating from 1930s onwards were in the safe keeping of the former Clerk, Gwyn Griffiths.  When a Freedom of Information request was later submitted to inspect these records, they suddenly could not be located, while the 1959 volumes were declared too fragile for public access.

A resolution was subsequently passed agreeing that the historic Minutes should, in line with best practice, be deposited with the Staffordshire Record Office.  When the new Clerk took up post in 2023, the Minutes reported that she and the Chair had deposited the Minutes between 2016 and 2022 at the Staffordshire Record Office (‘for safekeeping').  Later Minutes, however, appeared to retreat from this certainty, suggesting instead that they had merely discussed doing so.

More recently, (April 2026) the Record Office itself confirmed that no Betley Parish Council Minutes had yet been deposited, though they were “expected”.  Given the reported fragility of some of the documents, the continued delay invites obvious questions re their ‘safekeeping’ in what appears to be another administrative delay, another misunderstanding, or simply another promise quietly dissolving into a procedural mist?

·   Evaporated Invoices

The same atmosphere surrounds the mysterious case of the alleged Code of Conduct hearing costs.

After repeated questions over two years, and remarkably little information from the Clerk, the Chair announced under Item 8 of the March 2026 Minutes that:

‘The Parish Council had not paid any funds towards the hearing for the breach of the Councillor Code of Conduct, and the Clerk had been advised that the account at the Borough showed a nil balance.’

This was something of a surprise. When the alleged £24,000 (at least) liability first emerged, considerable alarm accompanied claims that the Parish Council might be forced to pay the costs from its reserves.   Residents, however,  felt that the complainants themselves should bear the expense, given the questionable quality of the allegations involved.

Now, however, the matter of payment appears to have evaporated entirely. The invoice, once treated as a financial threat not to say major event, has seemingly vanished into the administrative ether.  But since Newcastle Borough Council evidently raised the invoice, it can only be wondered what became of it.  How were the  costs accounted for by the NBC if the bill had been paid?  Further clarification from the relevant authorities would help resolve the apparent inconsistencies in the public record regarding who ultimately paid the solicitor instructed to pursue the matter?  And how did this end up as a nil return?  Such questions need (truthful) answers.

The issue of receipts and invoices not being released under a Freedom of Information request is also puzzling since the Clerk reported in the Minutes of November 2023 that 'invoices had ben scanned'.  If that was the case then it would make them easily accessible and perhaps not warranting the Clerk's estimated cost of more then £700 to produce them.  It was also reported that that any remaining paper items had been passed to the Betley Local History Society’ (ibid)– would this include reports?    

Perhaps this too was merely another storm in a teacup.  But not quite comparable to the one reported by Councillor Amanda Beresford when confronted with another version of reality (not her own).  In her public and official code of conduct complaint, she alleges that she had been physically sick after reading an email refuting her allegations, to the point where she was unable to work for several days.

So, perhaps Betley Parish Council has simply perfected a uniquely local form of governance: administrative illusionism of unfulfilled proposals, projects that appear not to have progressed and initiatives discussed but evidently not completed.  Which suggests that readers of the Minutes might struggle to follow the progress – or resolutions – of a number of issues which should matter.  The public record presently leaves some uncertainty as to how these costs were ultimately resolved and accounted for.   Hopefully further clarification from the relevant authorities might help to resolve the apparent inconsistencies in the public record.   Truth will always out.

(In order to save Anonymous, Observer and Mrs Judith Bettley-Smith from wasting their time and mine this article is based on the publicly available Parish Council Minutes (those available and not missing) and related correspondence.  The interpretation is further informed by the salutary experience and my perception of the reality of being a member of this Parish Council.)