EXECUTIVE decisions could make a comeback at West Somerset Council almost a decade after they were dropped following some controversial and unpopular choices. The council is considering reintroducing executive powers which allow individual cabinet members to make decisions which are not deemed to be "key decisions" without the need to go through a committee. They are already widely used at Somerset County Council and Taunton Deane Borough Council. But they were suspended in West Somerset following a series of decisions including one by then cabinet member Colin Hill to allow a local businessman to create a mini open-air café in Wellington Square without any consultation. That was overturned following opposition from fellow councillors and representatives from the nearby St Andrew's Church, who feared the privacy of funerals could be compromised by the café. The council's leader at the time, Cllr Steven Pugsley, was eventually forced to stop councillors making executive decisions. At last week's meeting of the council's scrutiny committee, he said the powers were suspended because the system effectively went into meltdown and not because things had gone wrong with the decisions themselves. He said the process had ground to a halt when councillors questioned virtually every decision which was being made by using 'call-ins', which allowed non-cabinet members to challenge decisions, effectively putting them on hold until the scrutiny committee was able to investigate. But Cllr Jon Freeman told the meeting: "I'm not the only person in the room who remembers executive decisions. "I am confident the cabinet we have at the moment is very unlikely to do anything daft, but let us remember what caused this to be withdrawn before. "A member of cabinet at that time was spending £2,000 of public money a week on a publicity campaign to polish up his own tarnished image. "Who knows what the cabinet will look like next year." Cllr Pugsley - who, as lead member for executive support and democracy led the call for executive decisions to be reintroduced - said he did not recognise the council Cllr Freeman was referring to. But he did accept that at the time he had had no choice but to suspend the use of his cabinet members' executive powers. "How can I put it? At that time, the atmosphere at the council was not conducive to continuing it," he said, but added: "We have moved on. We are different authority." Cllr Puglsey said executive decisions enabled choices to be made with the least amount of bureaucracy and the system would be transparent and subject to strict rules, regulations and criteria. Current cabinet member Cllr Kate Kravis said she was neither power hungry nor trying to sweep things under the carpet through the re-introduction of executive decisions. But it was a waste of councillors' and officers' time when decisions to change or introduce things which were effectively mandatory could not be made by one member but had to go through a lengthy process of committee meetings. "We don't want to be sat around talking about something when it's something we have to do anyway, so I do support this," she said. Councillors were told more work needed to be done on the finer details of the proposal before they could decide on whether to change the current system of committee-backed decisions. They were told that under the authority's existing rules, an executive decision could only be made on things that did not affect two or more wards, would not have a significant impact on a single ward, would not impact the revenue budget by £25,000 or more or affect the capital pot by more than £50,000. Such decisions had to be made in consultation with relevant lead or ward members or officers, and a clear record had to be kept of the decisions explaining the reasons why they had been either approved or rejected.