A meeting to scrutinise Oxford City Council's annual accounts will have to be reconvened because not enough councillors turned up to meet legal requirements.

The meeting of the audit committee was held on Monday but an eagle-eyed member of the public spotted that with just two of the five members at the Town Hall meeting, the committee was inquorate and had no power.

It will now have to be run again tomorrow morning.

Chairman Bob Price, the Labour member for Hinksey Park, and Craig Simmons, the Green member for St Mary's, were the only councillors to attend. Three were needed to make it legal.

Before the start of the meeting, officers searched the town hall for any other councillor who could make up the numbers. The district auditors, working for the Audit Commission, were at the meeting to answer councillors' questions.

Gill Sanders, the Labour councillor for Littlemore and last year's Deputy Lord Mayor, was found and persuaded to make up the necessary quorum -- the legal number required for a meeting.

But she could stay only 15 minutes and after she left, the meeting continued, although it was breaking the rules.

That might have been the end of the matter if it had not been for the presence of a member of the public, Sean Feeney, 37, of Bullingdon Road, east Oxford.

Mr Feeney -- who has embarrassed the city council before over its handling of a complaint he made about noisy neighbours -- lodged a protest with the monitoring officer, who upheld his objection and ordered the meeting to be re-run.

Mr Simmons said: "It puts the council is a bad light when councillors fail to turn up or bother to arrange substitutes for such an important meeting. "I was unsure of where we stood after the third councillor left, but the chairman decided to continue, though it was later proved to be unconstitutional.

"This wasn't a meeting to be casual about, because it related directly to how council taxpayers' money is being spent.

"One item pinpointed was a surplus in council tax income of £1m -- a hot potato if ever there was one. It raised the question of whether Oxford residents had been overcharged.

"This wasn't the case and the district auditor explained that it arose because of there being more properties than had originally been calculated, but it needed debating and now the thing has to be re-run."

The members who failed to attend were Sabir-Hussain Mirza (Labour, Lye Valley), Sajjad Malik (Lib Dem, Cowley Marsh) and Clark Brundin (Lib Dem, North). Mr Price said they were absent due to holidays and illness.

"The officers tried to get members to indicate if they wouldn't be able to attend, but apparently to no avail," he said.

He added that he did not believe the meeting had been wasted because all queries had been answered.

Mr Feeney said: "This council has no respect for propriety. At the end of the meeting I suspected there hadn't been enough councillors there to make it official and that's why I raised the issue with an officer, but I wasn't 100 per cent sure myself.

"I was told that Councillor Sanders, who left the meeting, had just gone to the toilet, but she never came back. They must have looked into it and realised I was right and were scared of a scandal, so ordered a re-run of the meeting.

"But I hadn't realised that they had decided to do that. I will be there on Thursday counting numbers -- you can rest assured of that. I want to know what the city council is doing with our money."

None of the missing councillors was available for comment.

Last November a north east area committee meeting was called off as there were too few councillors present. Residents had turned up to protest against plans for bedsits.