A TOWN council's website is now up and running after being shut down for several days - apparently due to unpaid bills and a dispute.

For several days this week residents in Yarm were unable to access minutes of town council meetings or councillor contact information, nor were they able to contact the council through its website.

Instead, when they accessed the yarmtowncouncil.org.uk page, they were met with a message saying: "Welcome To Yarm Town Council.

“Yarm Town Council's website has been removed due to non payment of invoices."

Chris Cutler, of CPC Computing, which hosts the website, said he had restored the site on Wednesday night after he received the overdue payment.

But he said he had decided to stop hosting the site from October anyway because he claimed he had been threatened with legal action over his refusal to give a member of the public access to the former clerk's emails.

He said: "I wouldn't pass on the details. At that point I didn't know the former clerk had resigned and I certainly can't give a member of the public access to them."

Yarm Town Council chairman Jason Hadlow, who was re-elected to the council in May as a Yarm Residents Association candidate, said: "The guy who was doing the website has resigned. He wrote an email saying it would be taken down by October but then it was taken down obviously earlier than expected.

"We had some issues around it, like dead links, and the fact it needed updating more regularly - and we raised these issues with him a while ago."

Mr Hadlow said he had been unable to get the registration details for the website or email accounts and had been left in a "hiatus" this week.

He said: "The guy who did the website has obviously decided to take this action. We are trying at this moment in time to contact the previous town council clerk and take back the domain name and registration for Yarm Town Council."

May’s election left the council deeply divided between two factions, the Yarm Residents Association and the Yarm Independent Association.

The Yarm Residents Association said on its Facebook page that the council was now looking at using a new domain name from October, and setting up a new email address for the new clerk, from October.

Anyone wanting to contact the temporary town council clerk in the interim can do so on chris.hoggart@gmail.com.