A parish council needs to "rebuild its trust" with the community after a string of resignations and upset.

Mike Henderson, a volunteer with the Bearsted Woodland Trust, said it is time the council "to show some humility and recognise that mistakes were made." said

He added: "Then they can move forward and start to rebuild trust with their parishioners and the wider community."

He was speaking after another round of resignations from the council in the village that has been split over a proposal called Project A, to expand the tennis club over the existing village allotments.

It seems that Mr Henderson has got his wish.

The council has put its hand up and admitted it was wrong not to have disqualified one of its members after she failed to attend any meetings for six months.

The decision taken by an extraordinary meeting of the council on Tuesday last week reverses a previous decision taken at a meeting in November to allow Fabienne Hughes to continue in her role, even though she had been missing meetings while living in France.

Mrs Hughes had in the meantime already tendered her resignation, but the council agreed to record her departure as disqualification rather than resignation.

The about-face came after a group of residents, headed by Valerie Springett of Roundwell, engaged a law firm, Weightmans, to threaten legal action against the council unless it corrected its error.

The wrong decision had arisen over a confusion about apologies that Mrs Hughes had sent to the meetings she missed, and whether the council had 'accepted' them.

David Hall is now the parish council chairman, although he wasn't the chair at the time of the November meeting.

He said: "Weightmans have a specialist lawyer in local government protocol and his arguments were clear that we had been wrong as a point of law.

"I have since also done a lot of research on his myself and found some guidance from the National Association of Local Councils (NALC) which makes it quite clear that a councillor is disqualified after six months unless before the end of that period they request an extension of the six-month period and the council considers such a motion and votes to accept it. That we didn't do."

Cllr Hall said that he had first asked Weightmans to consider dropping any threat of action, because Mrs Hughes had in the meantime resigned.

He said: "I wanted to be as conciliatory as possible. Mrs Hughes and her husband Jon had both been parish councillors for a long time and done a lot for the village - I didn't want this to seem like some kind of witch hunt.

"But the residents' group were not prepared to accept that. They wanted an acknowledgement that the council had been wrong."

After what Cllr Hall described as a "very grown up" debate on Tuesday last week, the seven councillors present voted unanimously to reverse the previous decision and to record Mrs Hughes as having been disqualified.

Cllr Hall said: "We should really have done this last October when her six months were up."

Subsequently, Val Springett, speaking for the residents who began the action, said they were happy with the outcome and no further action would be necessary.

But that is not the end of the troubles for the parish council.

Ahead of Tuesday's meeting, three other parish councillors handed in their resignations. They were Cllrs Sandra Knatchbull, Joanne Tribley and Suzanne Camp.

So the parish now has four vacancies to fill, which because the vacancies fall within six months of the date of full council elections, they will be filled by co-option.

Cllr Hall said: "We know of one person who is interested. If anyone else is willing they should contact the parish office."

Appointments will be made at the next council meeting on February 14.

Those selected will only be councillors for the remainder of the four-year term, which ends this May.

Cllr Hall said there would also be an item on the agenda of the February meeting around behaviour and bullying.

He said: "I am concerned that some former councillors feel they were bullied. We need to make sure that doesn't happen in future."

Mr Henderson thought there was still work to do.

He said: "It would appear that the key promoters of Project A have now resigned, but the situation remains far from clear.

"Has the council abandoned Project A or does it intend to pursue it in a revised form?

"The legal issue regarding the disqualification of Fabienne Hughes has been resolved, but there are other issues that have not been addressed."