A SPECIAL meeting of town councillors will be held in Minehead at the beginning of next month to discuss an auditor’s report which revealed a £25,000 honorarium had been ‘unlawfully’ paid to a former mayor.

Then-mayor Andrew Kingston-James received the money in 2022 in recognition of work he carried out to defend the council from an unfair dismissal claim after it had sacked a former clerk.

Auditors PKF Littlejohn received a complaint at the time about the council’s accounts and has now published a ‘public interest report’ which said the authority did not have powers to pay an honorarium.

However, the firm said it was not going to try to recover the money because of the cost of doing so and the fact it had been a one-off incident.

The council is required within a reasonable time to hold a meeting in public to debate the ‘public interest report’, which it has now decided to do on Tuesday, July 1.

The meeting will be in the Irnham Road community centre, starting at 7.30 pm, and 15 minutes will be set aside for non-councillors to speak before the report is discussed.

Town clerk Ben Parker said: “Councillors will formally receive the public interest report’ and consider an action plan aimed at strengthening governance and ensuring improved accountability going forward.”

The action plan includes measures for any future proposed payments outside of existing policies to first be reviewed by the council’s internal auditor.

It is also proposed to formally ban councillors from carrying out any paid work on behalf of the council, prohibit any advance payments, and require receipts with claims.

Mr Parker said a meeting of the council’s planning and licencing committee scheduled for the same evening would now be brought forward to Monday, June 30, and held in the council offices in Summerland Road.