A TECHNICAL error has been blamed for the temporary disappearance of a recording of a meeting about school closures from Powys council’s website.

Visitors to the authority’s website last Wednesday were greeted with a message that the recording of the February 23 cabinet meeting that agreed to start the process to close four secondary schools had been deleted from the site’s webcast archive.

Where viewers would have expected to find a full recording of the five hour cabinet meeting there was instead a message that read: "Sorry, this webcast has been deleted."

The recording of full council meeting of February, 25 where the cabinet member for schools confirmed the authority has budgeted for a £60,000 saving from closing three Radnorshire primary schools was also unavailable.

Both recordings were restored to the archive section of the council’s webcast area of its website by Thursday, March 10.

A spokesman for the council said the webcasts are managed by an external company, Public-i and blamed a technical error with the company.

Councillor Gary Price, the Conservative member for Llandrindod North, said after discovering the webcasts were unavailable: "It is obvious the council are strangers to openness and transparency and that they are running scared that these webcasts will be used as a stick with which to beat them over these ludicrous recommendations."

Council leader Barry Thomas, hit back at Cllr Price. He said: "To suggest that these webcasts have been deleted because the council are strangers to openness and transparency is totally unacceptable and couldn’t be further from the truth. Since I became Leader, I have said frequently that I believe in openness and transparency.

"We used Public-i to webcast these two meetings and it is their webcast library that host the archive of these meetings. Unfortunately there has been a technical issue that meant the webcasts did not show on their webcast library.

"We contacted Public-i to make them aware of the issue. They have resolved it and the webcasts of those two meetings are now available.

"We will continue to monitor the webcast library to ensure they are available for members of the public to view. The agreement we have in place with Public-i is that a webcast is available to view for six months after the meeting."