A ROBUST defence of a former Minehead mayor at the centre of an ‘unlawful’ £25,000 honorarium payment was presented to town councillors at a special meeting on Tuesday (July 1).

Andrew Kingston-James, a human resources consultant, received the money in 2022 for helping to defend the council from an unfair dismissal claim brought by a clerk it had sacked.

But the council’s auditor PKF Littlejohn has now reported that councillors did not have any legal power to make such a payment, although the firm said it would not try to seek recovery of the money.

Councillors met on Tuesday to discuss the auditor’s findings, known as a public interest report (PIR), which they were legally required to do.

Andrew Kingston-James’s husband Mark, who was also a serving town councillor at the time in 2022, said the two of them had left the council meeting at which the honorarium was being discussed and it had been approved by nine of the remaining councillors in their absence.

Mark Kingston-James said: “To attempt to sabotage or act against decisions made, undermines the very ethos of democracy as well as damaging relationships with one another.”

He said those who had raised a complaint with the auditors leading to a two-year investigation of the council’s accounts and eventual publication of the PIR had probably cost the authority another £30,000, when they were among the councillors who had employed the sacked clerk in the first place.

Mark Kingston-James said the experience had ‘taken a toll on Andy’s health’.

He said: “He was in a very dark place.

“Minehead Town Council very nearly committed corporate manslaughter.

“The council needs to recognise what its actions have caused and the toll it has taken on Andy and I.”

Mark Kingston-James said Andrew had been asked to do a job and he did it, working closely with a barrister, ‘and won the case’.

He said the honorarium had been approved on the advice of the council’s officers and questioned if it was wrong, were they going to be asked to return part of their salaries.

Mark Kingston-James also criticised the Free Press for publishing a photograph of Andrew Kingston-James and not of other councillors.

Town clerk Ben Parker responded to a question from a member of the public attending the meeting on the legal outcome of the employment tribunal and if the case had actually been ‘won’.

Mr Parker said the outcome had been a ‘drop hands agreement’, which was a settlement where both parties agreed not to continue and to meet their own costs.

The meeting was chaired by current Minehead mayor Cllr Craig Palmer, who declared that he had been a councillor at the time of the honorarium being approved.

Similar declarations were also made by Cllrs Mimi Palmer, John Bonar, and Marcus Kravis.

Tuesday’s meeting was attended by all 11 town councillors - the authority currently has three vacancies which it has been unable to fill - and 10 local residents, including Minehead’s two Somerset Cllrs Mandy Chilcott and Andy Hadley.