HAVARDS - COMPLAINT
V0.3 Sep 2025
This web page contains the complaint submitted to the Havards Directors via Hugh McCormack in August 2025. It also highlights the main areas of the complaint.
COMPLAINT 1: The website has been unchanged for almost eight months, affecting business and footfall.
The Havards website is unchanged since January. It continues to say that the road is closed and that
Havards is operating winter opening hours - ie only open until 3 pm.
There used to be about 1000 unique visits to the website each month, so this will be seriously damaging the business.
It's peak visitor season at present and many visitors new to Pembrokeshire will be searching for shops and services.
In addition an unchanged website loses its search engine ranking, important to promote Havards footfall.
Click this link to see a screen shot of the website taken on 27th August 2025. (Here's the link to the live site: https://siophavards.cymru (hopefully this complaint may soon get it updated).
Why was this allowed to happen?
The volunteer who created and updated the website was forcibly prevented from doing any further updates after he raised the concern documented below (Complaint 2) and argued against the transfer of control of a key asset (the Havards domains) to a third party.
This is all detailed in the full complaint document below.
COMPLAINT 2: The Directors allowed the secretary to ignore agreed processes and to disparage and lie about the work of a volunteer
They failed to intervene when bullying emails were sent and when legal action was threatened.
The secretary was allowed to place a new order for a website without going through agreed processes, including applying due diligence checks or proper consultation with the advisory committee or the team set up to plan the new website.
A new website was ordered at a cost of thousands, but it has not been delivered at the time of writing. The secretary wanted to change to an English Language domain, havards.wales. All that has appeared (since the beginning of 2025) is this: havards.wales website (Screen capture taken on 27th August 2025).
The transfer of a well ranked domain to this new English Language domain will almost certainly result in a reset of the search engine ranking. Advice about this has been ignored.
Click here to see the placeholder for the new website. It's now 9 months since the order for a new website was placed, and nothing has appeared. Again, I hope this complaint may finally result in some action.
LETTER TO THE CHAIR CONTAINING THE FULL COMPLAINT AND SUPPORTING MATERIAL
LIST OF ALL SUPPORTING DOCUMENTATION
View List of all supporting documentation
