A FEUD has erupted over who should be running Datchet Village Hall.

It burst into the open at a Datchet Parish Council meeting on Monday – held in the hall itself.

Ian Bacon, Village Hall Management Committee chairman, angrily claimed two parish councillors had written to the Charities Commission making untrue claims about the way the hall was being run. He said: “For the record the Village Hall Committee takes great exception to these accusations.”

But Cllr Pamela Barnes-Taylor, the parish council’s lead member for planning, insisted members of the Hall Committee had no right to be described as its trustees on the Charity Commissioners’ website.

She said: “The parish council owns the hall. The chairman and vice-chairman have always been trustees – people who run the hall are answerable to the parish council.”

Mr Bacon was insistent that a meeting in 2012 between a parish councillor, the council’s clerk and two members of the Management Committee had hammered out an agreement to share responsibility for the hall's upkeep.

He was supported by parish vice-chairman Cllr Harry Clasper, recently re-elected onto the parish but a longstanding member of the hall's management committee.

He said it was standard practise for the people who ran a building like the Village Hall to be listed as trustees and that Cllr Barnes- Taylor was talking about a situation that existed decades ago by claiming parish members were the only possible trustees for the hall.

A meeting will now be held between parish councillors and the hall committee in an attempt to reach an agreement.