A debate about community groups becoming part of the Beaconsfield Forum has been put on hold for a year.

The Beaconsfield Forum, which meets up to four times a year, has a say in how the county council spends its budget locally and makes decisions for the town, and is currently made up entirely of councillors.

In the build up to the latest meeting on November 19, community groups took to Twitter to debate whether they should have some representation on the board.

The Beaconsfield Society said it believes community representation is 'long overdue.’

Beaconsfield resident and Beaconsfield Society committee member, Laurence Smaje, raised the issue at the meeting.

He said: “The Bucks County Council website talks about how it is made up of district and town councillors as well as police and other organisations.

“I wanted to ask the new council whether they have had an opportunity to discuss the composition of the [Local Area Forum] because Beaconsfield is unique in the county for having lots of community groups on its lap.”

County councillor Adrian Busby, who chairs the forum, said it has a ‘completely different’ constitution to other local area forums, which is ‘quite specific’ about who the members are.

He said: “If you as a member of the public are requesting a review of the constitution… if that is something you wish to put forward and indeed the members of the committee are happy to go forward with, then that is something I will take away and talk about.”

Cllr Philip Bastiman proposed the forum ‘continue as we are’, saying: “I think we have represented the views of the local people of the town well and put forward a number of very good ideas.

“We have a town meeting every year and we haven’t had, when we’ve invited ideas from the public, a really strong response from any organisations in town.

“I feel we seek to be representative of the community and I completely agree that we could do more to communicate better with the community and become even more representative.”

Cllr Alastair Pike said now is 'not the time' to be reviewing the forum when the town council is being ‘proactive’ in looking at the town plan.

Cllr Sandy Saunders, who is also chairman of Beaconsfield Old Town Residents Association, said he could not ‘remain quiet’ on the debate.

He said: “I don’t feel I can remain quiet when I know my committee at BOTRA has similar views expressed as Mr Smaje. They would like to see the constitution reviewed in order to encompass other organisations in the town.”

Cllr Busby said the situation could be approached again in a year to allow work on the Vision for Beaconsfield recommendations to be undertaken first – one of which is to create a ‘virtual hub’ of information to connect the town organisations together.

He said: “I don’t want to seem like I am kicking the can down the road but it’s probably a situation where we should defer taking any action about the constitution of the forum giving all the work that is going on.”