A bid to cut the number of council meetings has been thrown out by Bradford Council's executive committee.

Labour and Liberal Democratic councillors joined forces to block a move by the Tories to hold fewer meetings each year.

Instead the Labour-Lib Dem pact put forward a suggestion that there should be eight full Council and executive meetings a year instead of the seven suggested by the Conservatives.

This will be passed to the annual meeting of the Council in May for a decision.

Liberal Democrat leader Councillor Jeanette Sunderland said the Conservatives' recommended timetable was too harsh because it meant there would be a three-month gap between July and October meetings.

After the meeting she said: "The Conservatives wanted to reduce the number of times the Council and executive committee were meeting.

"The reasons they gave were that the meetings were not interesting enough, but what I say is that we have to change the meetings themselves.

"We need to give the back-bench councillors the chance to debate issues about Bradford and these meetings mean that non-executive members have this chance.

"If people think these meetings are boring then let's make them more imaginative and get more people to participate in the debates. I think this way it is more democratic."

But Conservative leader Margaret Eaton said: "The recommendation was only meant to be a starting point because many people, from all parties, had expressed concern that council meetings were too frequent. We wanted to give all members the opportunity to have their say on the schedule."

Councillor Barry Thorne (Lab, Keighley West) who supported the Liberal Democratic amendment said: "We thought that the amendment put forward by the Liberal Democrats was much more democratic. That is why it was fully supported by the Labour group."

l Concern surrounding the spending of £500,000 of taxpayers cash have been kicked out.

Bradford Council's executive committee heard that allegations surrounding the spending of Newlands Single Regeneration Budget cash - financed by the taxpayer - had been investigated.

A report by the Regeneration and Business Partnerships Director found no major concerns arising from its investigations into the way the £500,000 budget was spent.

Councillor Simon Cooke, executive member for economic development, told the executive committee: "There are some important lessons to be learnt for the way we should organise a project in the future."

Councillor David Green (Lab, Odsal) said: "It's important that these things are investigated and I'm happy that the report appears to have identified some managerial problems that the Council had and we can now go on to strengthen on these issues."