But Cllr Arnold Woolley, who has been in charge at Flintshire's County Hall since the local elections in May last year, said he made the comments after discovering that a small number of council employees had not been disposing of confidential details properly.

Cllr Woolley aired his views both on his website and in an end-of-year newsletter.

The newsletter read: "For our safety, any administrative paperwork that has any personal details, names, addresses, etc, on it, which becomes waste, must go into special, secure, waste paper bins.

"The contents of those special bins, many kilogrammes of assorted paperwork every working week, have to travel under secure courier van to a specialist commercial document-shredding company quite a long way away from Mold.

"The transport costs and service costs, charged per kilogramme, are high.

"My concern arose from a suspicion that lazy, idle and careless employees were not segregating 'ordinary' waste paper from the essentially confidential material, thus costing you and me and the county a lot of money."

The comments prompted outrage from other senior councillors, among them opposition leader Cllr Aaron Shotton, who said the words used were "disgraceful" and has called for Cllr Woolley to apologise.

He said: "The council workforce includes many varied professional people, including teachers and care workers.

"The workforce is dedicated and committed to serving our county and I am disappointed that they are subjected to such disparaging remarks by a council leader, who should be boosting morale, not destroying it.

"If Cllr Woolley does not make an unreserved apology to council staff, then questions have to be asked whether he is right to continue in his position."

But Cllr Woolley insisted his comments were based on fact and that they were very clearly directly at a specific group within the workforce.
He said: "I never say things that are not factually or evidently correct.

"Any council workers who are behaving in a careless way are costing taxpayers money and these comments were very specifically directed.

"There are lots of hard working people employed by the local authority, who go the extra mile without a word of thanks and I have pointed this out, both to workers and managers.

"Our workforce is the most valuable resource we have - but not those who are lazy, idle and careless."

Cllr Shotton said he would be calling on trade unions and council chief executive Colin Everett to declare whether they supported Cllr Woolley's comments.

A spokesman for Unison, the union which represents many local authority workers, declined to comment on the issue.

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