> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://www.calderdaleinsideout.co.uk/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # EXCLUSIVE: Local government legal expert called in by Calderdale Council. - URL: https://www.calderdaleinsideout.co.uk/exclusive-local-government-legal/ - Published: 2026-08-25T17:57:03.000Z - Updated: 2026-09-06T11:29:28.000Z - Description: Following a series of alleged missteps an external legal expert has been appointed to investigate the council’s legal procedures, sources have confirmed to Calderdale Inside Out. - Author: Nick Meir - Tags: News, Investigations, #calderdaleinsideout, #Migrated-1788611362892, #Import 2026-09-05 12:30, Calderdale Council, Borough-wide Spare a thought for Calderdale Council’s Legal Department. It’s been a torrid few years. From judicial reviews to ombudsman complaints, humiliation over the Shay Stadium disposal, standards committees that hardly ever sit, record amounts on external legal counsel, they even got burned (geddit?) on the Sowerby Bridge incinerator (before it was even alight – which it never will be because it had its permit revoked… twice). Just when you thought his year couldn’t get much worse, last week Calderdale Inside out learned from multiple internal sources, that a highly experienced local government lawyer has been called in to perform a health check on the council’s legal processes and procedures. We’ve been told there has been a specific complaint made surrounding procedural issues which, let’s face it, is unsurprising given the legal rapsheet over the past few years. As they say in TV, let’s run the VT….. --- ### ### THE SHAY STADIUM DEBACLE Let’s go back to 1889\. Because, in a report made to Calderdale Council’s Cabinet in March last year the Shay disposal was discussed – and informing that discussion was a piece of work called “Legal Implications”. This document does pretty much what it says on the tin: gives councillors making the decisions information about what may happen when they make decisions. Sorry, back to the nineteenth century. The ‘Legal Implications’ report traced the council’s title back to an 1889 conveyance between Sir Henry Abbetson and Halifax Corporation (ah – the halcyon days). It then skips to 1930s working through the acquisition power under a 1933 Act, the holding power under the 1972 Local Government Act, section 19 of the 1976 Act, the best consideration duty under section 123, the government consent that allows a sale upto £2m below market value, the Subsidy Control Act 2022, the Asset of Community Value moratorium (and the land registry restriction that goes with it), and a full comparison of selling the freehold against granting a 999 year lease with overage and clawback. Why do you care? I know, that was a long list – but stay with me. Because while “Legal Implications” had an impressive array of legislation there were some glaring omissions. No mention of: a) the Gunning Principles or b) section 149 of the Equality Act 2010 Why does this matter? It matters a lot, because following the disposal decision the council was threatened with judicial review over the Gunning Principle (a duty to properly consult the public), and section 149 of the Equality Act which the rules on consulting the public properly, and the duty to consider how any decision impacts disabled people, older people, women and different communities. Funny thing is, the council’s legal team were not blind to judicial review risk because Paragraph 7.7 of the report says: an independent valuation “significantly reduces the risk of any judicial review claim being successful against the Council where any disposal involves land being sold at an undervalue”. Shay lovers are aware of how this played out. Supporters found themselves a barrister and threatened a judicial review because the legal process was not properly followed. The proposed buyer then pulled out. ### THE SOWERBY BRIDGE INCINERATOR And there’s the saga of the Sowerby Bridge Incinerator. Twice the council granted an environmental permit for the incinerator on Belmont Industrial Estate at Sowerby Bridge, twice it was taken to the High Court, and twice it gave up before a judge could rule - agreeing a consent order to have its own permit quashed in September 2021, and again on 19 December 2025, fifteen days after a judge granted permission for judicial review at a renewal hearing in Leeds. The second permit, granted on 28 November 2024, had gone out under a delegated officer’s signature rather than through Cabinet, as the first had. For a plant this size the pollution permit is the council’s job, not the Environment Agency’s, so Calderdale refused planning permission, lost on appeal in February 2020, and then had to license the plant it had tried to block. It also apologised, in October 2022, for missing the ten-working-day deadline to publish the statutory notice of that appeal. And it was probably quite costly, because when a challenger gets everything they asked for, the usual rule is that the losing side pays the costs; no costs order in either claim has been identified, but it doesn’t mean the saga hasn’t eaten a hole in Calderdale Council’s legal budget. ### A LEGAL “FIRST” …. but probably not the sort of first you’d want to brag about. Calderdale is a charity trustee thirteen times over, and on 2 September 2024 the Charity Commission issued it an official warning on how it had discharged that role. The Commission recorded in its annual report, laid before Parliament, that this was the first official warning it had ever given to a local authority. Its finding was that the failure to file annual returns, together with a failure to comply with an action plan issued in 2023, amounted to misconduct and/or mismanagement in the administration of the charities. The council’s own report to its Audit Committee three weeks later traced the lapse to 2007 for eight of the thirteen, and said it was not clear why filing had stopped. The returns were brought up to date in January 2025\. There is no live regulatory instrument, and there has never been a statutory inquiry. But the Commission’s published policy is that it is unlikely to warn where a breach is minor and technical and the trustees have acted honestly and reasonably. The other half of what the Audit Committee resolved that day - a report on the land the council holds on charitable trust - has not appeared since. ### THE COST OF DOING BUSINESS Unsurprisingly, Calderdale Council’s external legal spending has risen sharply, and the council cannot readily demonstrate what it comes to. Figures released by the authority under freedom of information, and reported in May, put spending on external solicitors and barristers at £286,579.10 in 2023-24, rising to £379,802.20 the following year and £413,694.10 in 2025-26 — an increase of 44 per cent in cash terms, or 36 per cent once inflation is stripped out. The figure appears nowhere in the council’s published accounts, which carry no line for legal costs; and payments to law firms including Shoosmiths, Ward Hadaway and Kings Chambers appear in a separate council dataset, where they are classified not as legal spending but as consultancy fees. The accounts themselves have carried a disclaimer of opinion from the external auditor for four consecutive years, and in June the auditor reported significant weaknesses in the council’s financial reporting arrangements. The council publishes no log of its freedom of information responses and no supplier payment data before 2020-21\. In its own governance statement for 2024-25, the authority lists recruitment and retention in specific roles - legal among them - as an area needing improvement. ### STANDARDS? WHAT STANDARDS? Calderdale appoints a Hearings Panel every June: three councillors and two co-opted members, whose job is to well, hear hearings. They sit when a complaint that a councillor has broken the code of conduct is serious enough to need determining - cases the Monitoring Officer refers on (the council’s Monitoring Officer is also its Head of Legal, Ian Hughes). The last time we can find the panel doing that job was September 2018\. It found that a councillor had breached the code by tweeting that Cabinet had approved a loan to a community pub about an hour before Cabinet discussed it. He lost the use of council email and the photocopier for two weeks. The decision was reported to the Standards Committee that December. We can find no record of a hearings panel being convened for over eight years. The committee that appoints the panel does not sit much either. Of its last fourteen scheduled meetings, nine were cancelled: 11 March, 19 August and 21 October 2024, 10 March, 18 August and 20 October 2025, and 9 March, 15 June and 17 August 2026\. The five that went ahead did the annual appointments, one dispensation application and the members’ allowances scheme. Not one of those five agendas carried a report on how many conduct complaints the Monitoring Officer had received, what happened to them, or how any of them ended. The independent side of the committee, the co-opted members who are there to be the outside eye, had two of up to eight seats filled in June 2024, six vacant after resignations. On the other side of Ainley Top our neighbours runs the same system under the same Act. But it looks very different. Kirklees takes a written report on councillor complaints at every Standards Committee meeting, with numbers, categories, sources and what happened to each case. The September 2025 report logged eleven complaints over six months, against twenty-two in the six months before; one ended in a finding of breach, and of nine cases carried over, five went through the formal process and all five produced a breach finding. It carries a chart running back to May 2017 so members can see whether complaints are rising. Upheld decisions go on the Kirklees website, naming the councillor, the conduct and the date of the decision. Kirklees is the principal authority for its town and parish councils, as Calderdale is; section 27 of the Localism Act 2011 puts both under the same duty to promote and maintain high standards among their members. None of this, taken singly, is a scandal. There has been no Best Value Notice, no statutory intervention, no statutory recommendation from the auditor, and no statutory inquiry into the charities. But taken in it’s totality - the documentary evidence - that’s harder to dismiss: a council that has repeatedly had to be told by somebody outside it - the Ombudsman, the Charity Commission, its own external auditor about failures of record-keeping and follow-through it was in a position to find for itself, and a rulebook that still routes conduct complaints through a law repealed in 2012\. That huge rise in the use of external legal counsel, we can’t say if it’s a question of competence, carelessness, or just bad luck. What we do know is the external legal investigator employed by Calderdale Council isn’t going to be underemployed. Calderdale Council has been approached for comment. One small ask. Sharing our content helps keep local journalism alive, please hit the orange button. It really does make a difference. Enjoyed reading this? Give our latest podcast a listen!