A NORTH-EAST council leader last night rejected calls for his resignation over a gas pipe blunder during a town centre revamp which cost taxpayers £780,000.

John Williams, leader of Darlington Borough Council, said he would only resign when the majority of councillors had no confidence in him.

His retort followed resignation calls from Liberal Democrat councillor Mike Barker at a cabinet meeting to discuss a legal report into a incident when a digger hit a gas pipe during the Pedestrian Heart project in 2006.

The £40,000 Ward Hadaway solicitors’ report was discussed in public, rather than in private, after The Northern Echo obtained a copy of it and published it last week.

Councillor Barker said: “This is a damning report, isn’t it? A multi-million pound project using taxpayers’ money just became a comedy of errors.”

He said that under the cabinet system, Councillor Williams should accept responsibility and resign.

Conservative councillor Alan Coultas said there had been a “failure of governance”, which had cost the taxpayer and private businesses thousands.

He said: “It is completely insufficient to respond by saying that the project has not been well-managed and that significant changes have been made. Who is going to take responsibility and step down?”

But Coun Williams refused to resign.

He said: “I will gladly resign as leader of this council when the majority of councillors in this council have no confidence in me. I don’t understand that to be the case.”

He also moved the report be examined thoroughly by the all-party resources scrutiny committee.

Resources scrutiny would then make the decision about whether to follow officers’ advice and not take legal action unless new evidence came to light. The Cabinet agreed this unanimously.

Councillor Ian Haszeldine, chairman of the resources scrutiny committee, hit back at Tory claims in The Northern Echo earlier this week that they had been responsible for all the changes to processes to project management implemented by his committee.

“They seem to have forgotten the scrutiny committee is very non-political. It galls me greatly that the Conservatives claim credit for everything which went on,” he added.

It also emerged at the meeting that any investigation to discover individual officers responsible was likely to be fruitless.

Chief executive Ada Burns said: “In terms of responsibility with the authority for mistakes made by the council, in reality a number of officers at different kinds of levels were involved in this project at different ways and times.

“My investigations in a sense concluded that the issues were more a failure and absence of process than a failure of officers to adhere to the processes in place.”

She said that in light of this, any investigation to assign responsibility to individuals would be inconclusive.

When questioned about whether all the officers had left the council, Ms Burns said: “Some are still with the council and some are not.”

■ The report will be sent to the resources scrutiny committee for a decision on whether to take legal action to recover taxpayers’ money.