COUNCILLORS will take part in a special meeting to publicly discuss how Oxfordshire County Council ended up paying out £1.6m after a dispute with a parking company.

In February, it was revealed that the county council had to pay out £1.6m to Marstons Holdings Ltd after the company challenged the process for awarding a contract for parking enforcement in 2019.

County councillors were due to debate the authority's transparency and scrutiny procedures when they met last week, but after an emotional discussion about domestic abuse the meeting was called to an early end.

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Now, a cross-party group of councillors has won a bid to discuss the pay out and other items which had been due for debate, and a meeting will be held on Wednesday, April 7.

Richard Webber, the Liberal Democrat group leader on the council, said discussing the £1.6m pay out and the mistake that led to it in public was important for the council to learn from its mistakes.

Mr Webber said: "We are a big organisation at the county council and there are hundreds of contracts made each year, but we need to deal with mistakes by bringing them forward like this."

Mr Webber added it his group were not pressing for the motion to be discussed as an election ploy.

He said: "It is regrettable this has got so close to an election but if it had been done and dusted months ago, as it should have been, then it would not be so significant as it is now."

Richard Webber

Richard Webber

It is understood other political groups, including Labour and the Greens, supported calls for the debate to be held, alongside others which had fallen off last week's council agenda.

Mr Webber's motion calls on the council to 'commit to ensuring that, in future, in the interests of transparency and good governance, any breaches of procedure are made known to members of the Audit and Governance Committee as soon as they are known to the Executive'.

One of the lessons shared in a report on the payout was that communication between senior paid council staff and elected leaders needed to improve.

When the report was released, the council's chief executive Yvonne Rees said there was 'a resolute determination throughout the organisation to minimise the chances of such circumstances ever re-occurring.'

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Also due to be debated at the extraordinary council meeting are a motion on delivering an 'improved facility' for the Horton General Hospital by Conservative councillor Eddie Reeves, and a motion by Labour's Susanna Pressel that a planned workplace parking levy should cover a larger area of Oxford than just the 'eastern arc'.

Three other motions are also due for discussion.