THE chairman of Malvern Hills Conservators has come under fire for calling on the Charity Commission to get involved in the dispute with the tenant of St Ann’s Well.

In a statement to the board on Thursday, May 10, Brian Pilcher said he raised his concerns over the spending on the issue with the Commission and it was the third attempt to engage with them.

He felt the two previous attempts were not vigorous enough and it was a statutory duty of the organisation to inform the Commission of its £75,000-plus expenditure on the issue. The saga dates back to 2009 when tenant John Redman was told he must leave the hillside café.

A new lease was finally agreed in May 2011, but the matter has racked up legal and professional costs totalling £75,365 Mr Pilcher said both he and vice chairman Tym Musgrove felt correspondence to the Commission should be more “robust”.

“I did not really pick up on the fact that it stepped over the line where it should have been brought to the board,” he said. “Both Tym and I feel it could have been a better-handled situation.

“I am not comfortable with what happened. Let’s put it behind us and say it isn’t going to happen again.”

But Mr Pilcher’s predecessor Clive Smith said: “Why, as previous chairman, was I not asked how much vigour we pursued it? I was not asked what went on.

“I was not thinking of having internal inquiry until the whole thing was sorted. Despite my best efforts to make them respond, they did not want to pursue it.”

He also said it was “most unfortunate” that the matter had appeared in the press before coming to the board.

However Carl Attwood, who is the chairman of the Conservator’s independent inquiry committee into the matter, said the information was in the public domain as a copy of the board’s papers had been requested.

“There’s nothing in our standing orders that this correspondence was anything other than public,”

he added.

Meanwhile the deadline for members of the public to submit comments to the inquiry committee has been extended to Monday.