A council held secret meetings over a city’s future after signing a confidentiality agreement with a government agency, a regional daily has revealed.

Documents released under Freedom of Information-type applications have shown senior Plymouth City Council and Government officers have been meeting in private to discuss the “physical and the social regeneration of the city centre”.

Among the revelations are that the authority signed a confidentiality agreement with the Government’s Homes and Communities Agency, trading as Homes England, where it was stated that no information be given to journalists about moves to regenerate the city centre without Homes England’s approval.

Plymouth academic Dr Mike Sheaff made the discovery and has now shared his findings with Plymouth daily The Herald.

Plymouth civic centre

Dr Sheaff received the heaily-redacted minutes of the meetings under the Environmental Information Regulations, a similar tool to the Freedom of Information Act.

He said the signing of a non-disclosure agreement by the council makes “public scrutiny of its discussions and decisions difficult”.

Dr Sheaff said: “I’m not saying everything should be in the public domain but this is a project on such a large scale. It’s public money, the investment is enormous, there’s legitimate public interest in knowing about the plans.”

He added: “Local authorities now have to deal more with commercial interests, which makes it more important that they are adequately scrutinised and that as much transparency as possible is maintained.”

In response, Mark Lowry, cabinet member with responsibility for the city centre, said: “It’s disingenuous to imply that the council is somehow doing something wrong in not providing sensitive commercial information about ongoing negotiations to a member of the public.

“In fact, the opposite is the case – it would be highly irresponsible to publish commercially sensitive information about potential grant funding or contracts with investors, developers and partners. Doing so could jeopardise grant funding and investment and the losers would be the city of Plymouth and local taxpayers.

“In local government we operate under very clear guidelines on when information should not be published and there are very good reasons for them.

“We aim to be as transparent as possible and the vast majority of our meetings and decisions are public but in cases where information is sensitive and is not published, it is still subject to full scrutiny and challenge by elected members.”