UPDATED:

Hadleigh's beleaguered council staff and members were left red-faced last night when they were forced to call off a meeting after it was revealed to have been unconstitutionally arranged.

Rolf Beggerow, chairman of the Town Council Matters committee, was forced to cancel the extraordinary meeting, which had been called to discuss the controversial cemetery extension, and the council's terms of reference, after it transpired it had been called by the town clerk Wendy Brame, despite not having the power to do so.

An EGM can only be called specifically by the chairman or two councillors, and eyebrows were raised that neither the £25,000 per year clerk ,and £42,000 per year town manager Cheryl Tye who was at the meeting in the Guildhall, did not know the correct procedure.

A number of councillors have recently attended training organised by the Suffolk Association of Councils, following advice from Babergh's monitoring officer after a large numbers of Code of Conduct complaints, and to help new councillors bed in.

Frank Minns, the town's mayor who was at night's meeting, today explained the meeting was cancelled in the absence of the clerk Mrs Brame as a precaution to ensure due process was followed correctly.

He said: "The town clerk had to absent herself due to a family emergency, and in her absence, neither the chair nor the TCM could respond with confidence to the challenge.

"She has now been able to show councillors the chain of emails that establish the chair's consent to an emergency meeting, and she did not summon the meeting on her own authority only.

"It therefore was lawfully called, but in her absence this could not be demonstrated, and prudence required that the meeting be abandoned."