MISSING footage has finally been reinstated onto the offical video of a controversial council meeting held more than two weeks ago.

Last night a full version of the webcast of Thursday, March 24's full council meeting was uploaded onto the City of York Council's website, and its official YouTube page.

Council bosses promised yesterday that they would publish a full video of the meeting - including the speech made by York resident Gwen Swinburn. The pledge followed two weeks of controversy and wrangling as some councillors called for an end to the "censorship".

Ms Swinburn had been speaking in a formal public participation session at the start of the meeting, about an auditors' report that criticised the way senior council officers were paid extra to run the authority's trading coming.

At the meeting, she was interrupted by Lord Mayor Cllr Sonja Crisp, before being told to leave the council chamber. The Lord Mayor told Ms Swinburn she would not tolerate personal attacks.

The missing video now shows what happened during and after Ms Swinburn's speech, and shows the Lord Mayor asking for someone to remove Ms Swinburn and suspending the meeting for several minutes. 

The footage cuts out when the meeting was suspended, during which time Ms Swinburn left of her own accord.

When the webcast was first uploaded to the council's website in the days after the meeting, much of Ms Swinburn's speech was cut out along with the Lord Mayor's interventions.

On Thursday evening, council deputy leader Keith Aspden said the authority had taken external legal advice and been advised that 24 hours' notice should be given to council officers who were mentioned in the speech.

Cllr Aspden said notice had been given to the officers on Thursday morning, implying that the full, unedited footage would be back on the council's website 24 hours later.

See the reinstated footage from around 20:50 onwards

He said: "The administration is committed to improving openness and transparency at the council and will be carrying out a governance review in the coming months - I'm sure we will want to reflect on recent experiences as part of that."

On Friday evening, the council said it was uploading the full footage, and the video later went live.

In a statement, a spokeswoman said: "The council understands the importance of transparency and one of the ways of achieving this is through recording public meetings and ensuring that the recordings are available online for the public to access."

She said council rules were breached and added: "Having now had the opportunity to consider the position, the council has decided to reinstate the video of the meeting in full. That decision is not an endorsement by the council of the comments made by the member of the public."

Before that statement was issued, Conservative councillor Paul Doughty had said that with another deadline missed he would find it hard not to accept calls for an extraordinary meeting of the council to discuss the censorship row.

He said: "There comes a point when you can't give threats unless you are prepared to carry them out."

He later added: "There is much to learn from this sad episode. I have asked for the legal advice that led to the delay to be shared publicly and expect the promised governance review to leave no stone unturned when it comes to understanding how we ended up in this regrettable situation.

"With the issue of the webcast out of the way, we must now turn our attention to the content of Gwen's speech and properly scrutinise the Public Interest Report."

Independent councillor Mark Warters first made the calls for an extraordinary meeting early this week, saying councillors needed to discuss the "censorship" of the speech.