By Colin Martin

Yesterday morning (Thursday), Cornwall Council’s Standards Committee voted to give me a written censure for failing to apologise to the Cabinet Member for Social Care for making a statement on social media that he was “not capable of doing his job at RCHT."

But I cannot apologise for saying that he couldn't do his NHS job because I simply didn't say that.

What I actually said was "If I were the Leader of the Council, I would start by telling the Cabinet Member for Social Care that he has to quit his second job, or quit his Cabinet post as he is clearly not capable of doing both."

If I had said "he is not capable of doing either", then this complaint would be fully justified and I would have apologised months ago.

In his spare time, I believe Mr Virr is also a lay preacher, so he will know that Matthew and Luke's gospels both record Jesus as saying "No one can serve two masters. For either he will hate the one and love the other, or else he will lean to the one and neglect the other."

I never said that Cllr Dr Virr was doing both jobs badly. I certainly never said he was doing his NHS job badly. I simply said that he can't do them both well at the same time.

Over the subsequent four weeks, I asked numerous people whether they thought I was criticising Dr Virr's performance as an NHS doctor. None of them did.

So after 28 days of careful consideration, I concluded that I could not apologise for saying "the Cabinet Member was not capable of doing his job at RCHT" because that's not what I said.

I decided that the only option available was to challenge the decision. That’s when things got weird: First, although I had been given 28 days to decide whether to make an apology, I only had 14 days to request a review of the decision!

But even if I had a time machine, my appeal would have been rejected because the process does not provide any remedy for a flawed judgement by the Assurance Manager. The Monitoring Officer is not permitted to disagree with the Assurance Manager, even if his ruling is clearly unreasonable. According to the statement I was given, the Monitoring Officer can only overturn the ruling of the Assurance Manager if "fresh information" is presented. Clearly, the process assumes that the Assurance Manager will always make a correct judgement on the basis of the available evidence, and since the wording of my statements is already known, the logic of the ruling cannot be challenged by the Monitoring Officer or by the Standards Committee.

After the meeting, Cornwall Council’s new Monitoring Officer told me that in fact under human rights legislation I may have had a right to challenge the original officer’s decision without providing new evidence, but the decision notice did not make this clear and the wording of future notices “might need to be tightened up.”

Several members of the committee agreed that I was being told to apologise for something I hadn’t done, but they were repeatedly told that they were only allowed to debate whether I should be sanctioned for failing to issue the apology.

It seems bizarre to me that the Standards Committee has no power to rule on whether or not a Councillor has breached the Code of Conduct, but only to decide what sanction to issue for failing to abide by the ruling of an unelected officer.

I have already issued a clarification that I have no opinion whatsoever on Dr Virr's performance as an NHS employee and that my criticism relates entirely to Cllr Virr's performance as a Cabinet Member.

Meanwhile, Cllr Virr is recommending that when the National Living Wage increases to £10.42 in April, Social Care workers in Cornwall should be paid just £10.90. It’s clear to me that unless this figure is increased to at least £13 per hour, we will continue to face a desperate shortage of Care Workers. This would cost around £39 million, but would of course reduce the pressure on the NHS which is currently spending millions of pounds every month looking after people who are stuck in hospital. I have repeatedly asked Cllr Virr to go and ask the NHS or Central Government to provide this cash to Cornwall Council, but as far as I am aware, he hasn’t yet found the time to do so…

Councillor Colin Martin is acting leader of the Liberal Democrat group on Cornwall Council