A COUNCIL meeting ground to a halt after a member refused to leave the chamber.

The police were called to the full Wigan Council meeting to the Leigh Town Hall after the majority of councillors first voted to silence Cllr Bob Brierley and then to remove him when he refused to be quiet, last night.

The meeting was adjourned after an hour by the chair and deputy mayor Cllr Susan Loudon when Cllr Brierley returned to the chamber after the vote calling the council a 'disgrace' and saying 'they had shut him down'.

The police arrived but the decision was made by the panel not to escort the Hindley Green representative from the chamber.

The meeting was restarted but swiftly brought to close by Lord Peter Smith, a move supported by the majority of councillors.

Lord Smith said: "I am appalled that we have to do things like this. It does not represent the good work that the council does.

“In future meetings we should behave with respect or have to keep doing the same thing again and again. If people want to be childish they should go to a nursery and play at being councillors."

The end of the meeting meant that issues such as Devo Manc, the Leigh guided busway and the Town Centre Transformation Project for both Leigh and Wigan town centres were not discussed.

Cllr Brierley had been warned earlier in the meeting by Cllr Loudon not to argue with her when he asked how a new monitoring officer the council was voting on would be funded.

The deputy mayor explained that it required no extra funding to appoint someone but Cllr Brierley pushed the point, prompting Lord Smith to comment that ‘it was because of councillors like him that they needed a monitoring officer’.

Cllr Brierley then stood to comment on a motion about the outcomes of his own standards hearings and one for Standish independent councillor Gareth Fairhurst which prompted the vote for him not to be heard.

Lord Smith had earlier passed comment on the presence of Tyldesley representative Cllr Robert Bleakley who would have lost his seat had he not attended as he would have breached regulations that say councillors must attend at least one meeting in a six month period.

Lord Smith said: “Cllr Bleakley has been described in the national press as the worst councillor in Britain and although I am not sure about that, I would like to nominate him as one of the most expensive in terms of the hours he puts in.

“He is running at some £2,000 an hour considering the number of meetings he has been to - even a banker would be embarrassed at that rate.”