Sir,

Councillor Susan White accuses me of being ill-informed and she may well be right.

Along with the majority of the Monmouth electorate, I find myself with little in the way of expenses-laden free time to trawl through council documentation if I knew where to find it in the first place.

However, isn't it interesting what you can discover when you kick the hornet's nest?

It appears I was mistaken in my belief that Councillor White's failure to vote against the LDP was as a result of her being at the beck and call of her party puppet-masters.

No indeed, the reality is far more interesting. It seems that the councillor has a "personal and prejudicial interest" in the LDP because her husband rents part of the LDP site.

This prevents her from voting and she seems to believe that makes everything alright.

What is the point of a councillor who cannot fulfil her most basic duty to her community because of her family business interests?

I am grateful to Mrs White for enlightening us about the change of words in the LDP. Assuming her explanation is not simply an exercise in buck-passing (it weren't us squire, it was the guvverment wot dunnit), it offers more questions than answers.

Am I correct in my belief that the LDP was reworded after the council had approved it?

If so, is the Welsh Government really entitled to alter it after approval?

If not, is Monmouthshire County Council challenging this action?

Will the rewritten document be returned to the council for ratification and if so, will Cllr White step aside in plenty of time to allow someone more capable of voting to participate?

Enlightenment please.

Finally, I must address the councillor's wholly irrelevant and, frankly, fatuous remark about which way her support would have gone had she had a vote.

"For the record," the record tells us that Cllr White failed to represent her community in the most important local issue in decades (for whatever reason) and no amount of what ifs, maybes or might-have-beens will alter that fact.

Chris Williams

(Monmouth)