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 the cafe at St Ann’s Well.

Brian Pilcher said he raised his concerns over spending on the issue with the commission.

It was the third attempt to engage with them, and 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.

The saga dates back to 2009 when tenant John Redman was told he must leave the café.

A new lease was 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 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 handled better. I am not comfortable with what happened.”

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

"I was not thinking of having an internal inquiry until the whole thing was sorted.

"Despite my best efforts to make them respond, they did not want to pursue it.”

Carl Attwood, chairman of the Conservators’ independent inquiry committee into the matter, said the information was in the public domain as a copy of the papers had been requested.

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