HEREFORDSHIRE Council is taking high-level legal advice on how to get its executive and scrutiny committees for 2009/2010 up and running after a row over their membership put them all on hold.

The committees were frozen for a week while the council’s group leaders brokered an agreement between themselves on who sat on what.

That agreement has been reached, but, at the time of going to press, the council was still to confirm whether or not the committees - which essentially cover everything but planning - can meet and make decisions without formal approval of their structure until the next meeting of the full council on July 24.

The alternative, at this stage, is the calling of a special council meeting to secure that support at a vote. But there is also an option to take all executive decisions through the cabinet over the interim.

Three councillors forced the authority into the extraordinary constitutional position at the full council meeting of May 22 when the committee memberships were expected to be unanimously approved.

Councillor Mark Hubbard objected to the final membership lists being made available “minutes before the meeting” while the two Alliance members - Councillors Gerald Dawe and Marcelle Lloyd-Hayes - who said the lists, as proposed, left the two of them with less presence than they could expect under the proportional allocations the authority prefers.

Without unanimity the membership lists could not be ratified. Council leader Councillor Roger Phillips called on the group leaders to sort the situation out, threatening to re-draw the list and take most of the seats for his ruling Tory group - as the council’s rules allowed him to do - if an agreement was not reached.

The group leaders, including Alliance leader Coun Dawe, reached that agreement last Friday.