Today I had a partial reply to this (Carmarthen Council or Audit Office - Who's Telling the Truth?), apparently the delay in the council releasing further information to the Audit Commission (I asked on July 2nd) is partly due to to our "ongoing relationship with the Council has meant obtaining information has been somewhat difficult" - I shall be asking him to explain this statement further.
The initial information from the Audit Commission confirms my suspicions that in fact, the council legal department have not been entirely truthful, the Audit Commission and the Freedom of Information office about incurring costs over the constitutional amendments regarding defamation; they now say that they have incurred legal costs.I shall add to this when I have a full response.
Anyway I can now confirm that the changes to the constitution to enable the council to fund defamation cases brought by officers was (as I thought) based on the case law; R (Comninos) v Bedford Borough Council [2003] LGR 271, [2003] EWHC 121 (Admin.).To summarise the case, the district auditor brought the case (Judicial Review) as he felt that the council should not have used public money - around £500k - to fund officer's libel claims. He didn't win which was partly due to the fact that the council officers concerned had homes and families and to make them repay the money would be too greater burden.
The judges in the Bedford case had a few words of warning to say on the matter, including;
"This case seems to be very much a 'one-off'...The hazards of defamation actions are, or should be, notorious. Common sense suggests that the Council's disastrous experience in the present case should be sufficient to warn-off all but the most litigious of local authorities from granting indemnities in respect of the costs of defamation proceedings brought by their officers"
That must make Carmarthenshire County council one of the "most litigious of local authorities" then.
Carmarthenshire Council still cannot, of course, sue for defamation as a body, this was laid down by the case of Derbyshire Council v Times Newspapers in 1993, but those legal eagles in County Hall have a good way of getting round that. We still believe, of course that the council backed the libel claim by the Head of Planning against us, the Bedford case law states that the three officers all swore that they would definitely not have commenced the libel action without the full backing of the Council.
A previous post on this matter can be found here.
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