A COUNTY councillor has resigned from a key post after being reprimanded over a Vladimir Putin and Nazi statement he made at a planning meeting.

Penyard ward member Cllr William Wilding said he had tendered his resignation from Herefordshire Council’s planning committee in frustration at not being able to put council policy into practice on the ground.

It comes after the council’s monitoring officer reprimanded him for saying of a planning agent’s report that “to pretend that building a couple of houses is going to soften the transition between human activity and nature is bit like Vladimir Putin saying he is eradicating the Nazis from wherever he’s going”.

The Independents for Herefordshire (IfH) councillor sat on the 15-strong planning committee which determines contentious planning applications in the county.

Cllr Wilding was told by the council’s monitoring officer to apologise to the agent, which he says he has done.

“In my letter of apology I make clear that I was not suggesting that the applicant or his agent were like President Putin in any way,” he wrote on the Herefordshire Politics Facebook group. “My criticism was of the language being used to greenwash the planning application, not the person.”

IfH controls Herefordshire Council in partnership with the Greens.

The coalition declared a “climate emergency” in 2019, and brought in a raft of sustainability targets for the county.

Coun Wilder said this week: “I resigned from the planning committee in protest at the dichotomy that I constantly faced by being a member.

“There’s an energy crisis, terrible flooding, a global mass extinction of insects. Yet if we block an application which does not address these problems, or adds to them, we are accused of ‘pre-determination’.”

He added: “I naively thought we could alter the way we judged applications, but it’s impossible to do anything but follow government regulations.

“At a local level, we are powerless to change policies, which encourage developers to make profits without addressing the climate emergency.”

Instead, “we are urged to pass applications which are not sustainable”, he said.

“National policies always trump local recommendations. Being a member of the planning committee was like banging your head against a wall, behind which government promises that climate change is taken seriously, are hidden.”

He said the planning system “is just one area that needs a total make-over, but instead of trying to do that, we just get repeatedly told that rules are rules and can’t be changed”.

Coun Wilding’s Putin comment was broadcast on the council’s YouTube channel.

Committee chair Coun Terry James told him to “please keep to planning policy”, to which he responded: “I refuse to do that, chair, because the (planning) policies were made up before we realised how bad the situation was ecologically.”

Planning agent James Spreckley then made a formal complaint, calling for the YouTube recording to be permanently redacted and demanding Coun Wilding apologise in writing and in person, make a further apology to the committee, and withdraw his comments from the meeting minutes.

He also asked for “consideration of Coun Wilding’s fitness for office in general, and fitness to sit on Planning Committee in particular, given his assertion that he will not limit his comments to planning matters and policy”. The monitoring officer ruled last week that Cllr Wilding’s remarks amounted to a breach of the Herefordshire Council code of conduct. “It has been concluded that Coun Wilding did not uphold the high standards required of him at the meeting,” the monitoring officer said.