For the last few years so little has happened in August that I’ve put up a summer photograph and gone away until well into September. Traditionally it’s the ‘silly season’, when parliament and the courts aren’t sitting, and neither does Surrey County Council and its committees.

In-Year Cuts

But the Government has been busy since the election, and this has knock-on effects for local Councils. As soon as the Coalition got organised in May it announced £6.2 billion of cuts in government spending nationally in the current year. Of this, £1.165 billion is to come from local government. The emergency budget was in June, and further in-year cuts to local government grants were announced on the 5th of July.

A number of the grants to local authorities that have been reduced were originally linked to particular uses, but now the ‘ring-fencing’ has been removed from many of them.

Surrey has lost £6 million revenue income for this year (2010-11), and more than £3 million in capital funding. Making cuts to budgets that have already been set and have begun to be spent is extraordinarily awkward. Staff (quite rightly) can’t be instantly dismissed to save money; buildings still have to be maintained; contracts with outside organisations can rarely be abandoned without serious cost. The longer decisions are left, the fewer the options and the worse they are likely to be.

Hurried change

On the 13th of July Surrey’s Cabinet allocated the new cuts. They ran across the board, details were sparse, and there had been little time for consultation. Included in the appendices was a reduction of funding of approaching a quarter for the ‘Connexions’ service which works to help young people get into work or training. Some of this work is commissioned from the voluntary sector, which now faces rapid cuts. (papers here , see especially appendix 6b)

The ‘Stronger and Safer Communities’ Committee is supposed to keep an eye on the Connexions service, which only came back under Surrey’s control quite recently. The Chairman called an extra meeting for the 4th of August.

In their submission to this meeting, the Surrey Youth Consortium (which includes Woking YMCA and the Surrey Care Trust) pointed out the extra value Surrey gets from voluntary organisations; the commitments that have already made to programmes for young people this coming autumn; the threat to the very existence of some small voluntary organisations without reserves; and the loss of experienced and highly trained people who will not be easy to get back.

Doing this much damage is particularly counter-productive when Surrey has already said its longer term strategy depends on increasing the amount of work it commissions from the voluntary and community sector.

The Council’s ‘scrutiny’ committees can question Cabinet decisions, but not change them. All the ‘Stronger and Safer Communities’ committee could do was refer the decision back to the Cabinet, asking them to think again. The Cabinet then had to have an extra meeting in the middle of August.

I was not surprised that the Cabinet upheld its own decision and nothing changed. But I was impressed at the determination shown by Lavinia Sealey and her committee in dragging questions about the impact on the Voluntary Services, and on the commitments Surrey has already made to them, more into the open. It’s not just the Connexions service. The cuts to Connexions are symptomatic of a system forced to slim down, with no time for dieting or exercise to take effect, and resorting to surgery.

But it could be worse …

According to the cabinet papers, Surrey had been bracing itself for £20 million in government cuts this year if they had been shared out ‘pro rata’ between local authorities. As it is we’re getting £5.30 less a head. This time round, Durham loses £13.09 a head, while the national average reduction is £9.70.

For years the complaint has gone up from Surrey County Council that our money is virtually being shipped north by the truckload. At the last full Council meeting this July it was agreed to ‘press the government for a fairer share of funding for Surrey’ after blaming the country’s ‘parlous financial state’ on the ‘previous government’s mishandling of the economy’.

The Medium Term Financial Plan has been based on the expectation of a £70 million reduction in revenue funding, with capital grants reduced by half. Now we wait to find out in the autumn, and particularly with the ‘spending review’ in October, whether local government money for 2011 – 2015 will be as restricted as Surrey County Council currently assumes.

Puttenham’s Public Sex Environment

The ‘Stronger and Safer Communities’ committee had to meet for a second day running to discuss the motion put to Council about closing a lay-by on the Hog’s Back near Guildford.

Among the papers for this meeting was the clearest and it seemed to me most balanced account of what was happening, its effect, and the legal position, in the police report which you can find here.

The Committee recommended that the lay-by be closed, as you can see in the report to the same special meeting of the Cabinet that considered the Connexions cuts. (here) The Cabinet did not agree, reasoning that the lay-by was too generally useful to close, especially when closure would not fully solve the problems felt locally. The minutes are here if you want to see them in more detail.

 More Local Committee Stuff 

This posting is going to be shorter than it would have been if I were not about to go out (in the customary summer rain) to a site meeting at Victoria Arch in Woking, with other members of the Local Committee. We will be looking at what the plans to adjust the cycle lanes will mean literally on the ground. We failed to come to a decision about cycle routes through Victoria Arch and also the shared use between pedestrians and cyclists of parts of Woking Town Centre in July. As a result we now have an extra meeting on the 2nd of September at Woking Borough Council’s Offices, 6.30.

Although it is an extra meeting, primarily for these left-over decisions which still have to be made, it is also a ‘proper’ public meeting with some time at the start for an open question session with the public, and public as well as members’ written questions. So if you have strong feelings on the issues and want to be there, this is open to you - I don’t think you’ll be alone … papers for the meeting are already on the SCC website here  .
 

I wish I had a gift for satire …

Woking Local Committee, at the beginning of this month, had less to decide than ever before. We started at 6.00pm, and finished somewhere around 11.00 pm.

The first two hours of  ’public engagement’ over-ran drastically.  By 9.00 pm we were just getting stuck into the formal part of the meeting.

There were three petitions brought to the Committee:

• Maybury and Sheerwater residents want their roads repaired (don’t we all want our roads repaired?)

• Residents of Brookwood hate the new ‘cycle Woking’ signs on the Basingstoke Canal /Sheets Heath stretch of the Saturn Trail and want them removed or replaced. (The Surrey and Hampshire Canal Society would go further than this, and want all of them removed.) One of the residents described them as ‘completely outwith any decency.’  They just look like ordinary signs to me.

• Residents from the Brookwood area also want the small pedestrian / cycle island north of the Brookwood Crossroads removed. It was put in to make it easier for pedestrians and cyclists using the cycle path along the canal to cross the road where it emerges, and has been named ‘Fishwick Island’ by residents after the Cycle Woking programme manager. Apparently this island stops motorists from getting into the right hand filter as early as they want. This frustrates them, which forces some motorists go the wrong way round the island.  The island needs to be taken away to protect the cyclilsts and pedestrians from this natural compulsion afflicting motorists. 

Maybe I’m being unfair - for another view, Fishwick Island has its own website here . I’ll also do my best to be at the Local Committee site visit to this and the offending Cycle Woking signs before a decision is made, with a mind open to compromise. 

We came to written questions. I had taken up issues left from last autumn, including the failure to get road markings refreshed in Knaphill; and the work needed to restore traffic calming and safety measures in Warbury Lane.

Crucial bollards creating the width restriction in Warbury Lane have been knocked down again. The SCC report says ‘The bollards at the beginning and end of the one-way section were replaced using steel-cored bollards for greater strength. They were installed correctly but even so, they have sustained severe and deliberate damage. Two sets of intermediate bollards were replaced on a like for like basis and in each location, one bollard was been completely sheared off at the base … ‘

A commitment was made at the meeting to mend or replace them. I hope it will be soon. It seems totally wrong to me that drivers can do deliberate damage and gain by having easier access up this rat-run of a lane.   

I also hope the refresh of road markings ‘on the list’ again for Knaphill High Street and the top end of the Broadway will be done soon. Knaphill High Street is in such bad condition that it cannot be resurfaced in the ordinary way, like stretches of Lockfield Drive,  but needs major maintenance. It should have been repaired this year but there was not enough money assigned to it, and ‘it is not possible to guarantee what will be achievable in 2011-12′.  So refreshing the road markings is now regarded as being worth doing.

Time was going on (just as this posting is getting longer and longer) and we did have few genuine decisions to make, not least about whether to continue the Experimental Order allowing shared use between cycles and pedestrains in Woking town centre, and popssible changes to the way traffic, pedestrians and bicycles share the space under Victoria Arch. Some Councillors weren’t happy to just say yes, others didn’t want to see a ‘no’ while we were too weary to talk it through properly - so those two items have been deferred. There’ll be an extra meeting, probably on the 2nd of September, to give it all the consideration it deserves.

And we still had items 9 to 15 to go. I’m going to sleep just writing about it …

Full Council 20 July

Public Sex Environment

(I have to wake myself up somehow) Apparently there is one, on land close to Puttenham Church of England Primary School, and it’s often accessed from a layby on the A31. Tony Rooth, the local County Councillor, put forward a motion saying the lay-by should be closed. There were a number of residents in favour of this lobbying outside County Hall, and watching from the public gallery. We didn’t debate it - it was referred to Committee.

Neither did we debate a motion saying we should spend the money to make sure speed limits that Local Committees have already agreed get implemented, instead of the ’decisions’ being ignored and so lapse because speed surveys are ‘time limited’. 

We did debate at some length two motions put forward by the ruling (Conservative) group supporting the policies of the new Coalition government. The second of these gave four out of six points to a hard-line analysis of the current national economic situation. The last two points were difficult to disagree with - getting help from the Government for a freeze on Council Tax, and asking for a ‘fairer share’ of funding for Surrey. (Fairness by definition is good, though people outside Surrey might argue we get more than our share already.)

I felt this motion was a deliberate trap for Liberal Democrats - we’d be damning ourselves whether we voted for or against. However looked at, it was political game-playing, and the opposition (not just the Liberal Democrats) abstained en masse.

Reports on important decisions made by Cabinet went through this meeting, for example on the School Special buses, and also on the £6.2 million additional cuts that have to be made this year as the result of mid-year changes to funding announced by the Coalition government. Surrey has had less than a month to adjust to these - but speed of response is essential, if changes are to be spread out as much a possible through the year and so made as well as possible in the circumstances.

Why didn’t we talk about these cuts? I think partly because the decisions have been made already,  but mainly because it is all too complex and hasty to be understood properly by anyone except the senior officers charged with identifying and making cuts.

Have you felt history is being re-written around you? 

I was surprised to hear it said a while ago that the Youth Development Officer posts in each Borough and District were not after all to be removed. Papers in the lead-up to the budget said all these posts were being cut, and I pulled it out as an issue to talk about both in Full Council and the Local Committee. A reprieve would be good news, but I wanted it confirmed. I asked in a written question if there had been a change of plan.

Apparently, ‘there never was a plan’. It was only an ‘option’. The savings are being made by ‘deleting vacant posts and reducing uncommitted grant allocations.’

All the protests from parents and schools, including the Heads of Schools on the secondary phase Council’, had an effect - though some parents and children will still find their buses cut.

On-the-ball Governing Bodies and Principals realised from the outset when  phased consultations/proposals were suggested last year how serious this could be for their school communities. As a result of their pressure Surrey’s Passenger Transport group agreed to look at all schools at once, and seem to have taken on board the arguments made, to come up with proposals that will save up to £827,000 a year currently going out in subsidising these bus services. 

The sorts of things they had to consider were, how many children on each service were entitled to free transport that Surrey was obliged to provide? What price would other parents be willing to pay before putting the fares up further reduced the amount of money brought in? What would be the effects on schools in terms of applications and school admissions?

You can find the main paper here.

The services the Surrey Cabinet decided to cut are listed in categories B,C, D and E of the list you can find  here.

In summary, the cuts are:

Category B - Services to schools outside Surrey, includes eg Tiffin Girls School in Kingston.

Category C - routes where each child is subsidised by £15 or more a day, includes eg some pupils for eg Christ’s College and the George Abbot School.   

Category D - more than £30,000 subsidy a year. Includes eg some pupils for Fullbrook, Howard of Effingham, the Ashcombe School.     

Category E  Between £20,000 and £30,000 subsidy. Includes some pupils for eg Esher High School, St John the Baptist/Woking College, Lingfield primary school.

Surviving Services

Services costing up to £20,000 in subsidy remain. So do services where there are more than 50% of pupils using them entitled to free school transport, and also schools where the potential ‘admissions impact’ has carried the day. The latter include Therfield School, St. Andrew’s School (Leatherhead), and Collingwood School.  

Fares will go up to £2.50 a day - the experts reckon that going higher would reduce uptake and so bring less money in.

The whole exercise has in the end been better carried out, more transparently, and with more evidence of a logic behind it than initially. Earlier on, there seemed almost a blind panic to cut out every non-statutory service.

There are losers. If I were the parent of a child using a subsidised bus to one of the non-Surrey, out of County Schools, I think I might feel upset - we’re all living in the same country, should it make any difference if the school concerned is across a county border?

Parents wanting to keep the services to over-subscribed schools might also feel sore -even though there is a strong argument in terms of school place provision for giving preference to services to ’weaker’ schools.

£2.50 a day fare does not seem unreasonable, though I know that means £12.50 a week, and parents may well be paying for more than one child. However if children are forced to travel over the specified distance because more local schools are full they should end up being entitled to free transport.

One constant suggestion has been that the subsidy on travel to Church Schools (’Denominational Transport’) should also be looked at, and this review will start in the autumn.

I hoped the effect of Academies in Surrey would be much clearer  after Tuesday’s Education, Leaning and Development committee meeting where the programme included an ‘update’ on the ‘new government initiative regarding academies’ and the ‘implications for Surrey’.

A less-than-three page statement by the Cabinet Member to Full Council on the 15th of June, giving the story so far, had been recirculated beforehand. It covers succinctly the ‘academy freedoms’ that schools would get by becoming academies, the speed with which ‘outstanding’ schools could apparently leave Surrey’s control, and a reminder of the way Surrey has recently made ‘effective interventions’ to improve failing schools by helping them work with and learn from an ‘Outstanding’ partner school.  

Will Forster, Liberal Democrat County Councillor for Woking South, has already written about the local schools that might want to be academies (here, 25th June) . He helpfully included a link to DFE information which I’ve copied  here which in turn will lead to a lists of outstanding schools which have expressed interest (here) and less stellar interested schools. (here) 

In Woking, the first list includes St. John the Baptist (secondary); and the second Goldsworth Primary School.

The ‘Update’ was given  by Nick Wilson, Head of Schools and Learning, and Cllr. Peter Martin, the Cabinet member, was not there. Nick Wilson started off speaking to a set of slides around ‘Strategic Challenges’ for this year, not designed specificially around this issue. Colin Caswell, from Surrey NUT, came back to the Committee table as a witness, returning from the public seats to which he seems to have been banished with a Committee change of Chairman, and he was joined by Jerry Oddie, Principal of Collingwood College and also Chair of the Surrey Secondary Heads Phase Council.

There was unusual agreement around the table that the situation is very unclear. There were still some interesting things said which I will simply report as best my hand-scrawled notes allow. I have shortened and paraphrased except where direct quotations are indicated by quotation marks - I hope those concerned will forgive any inaccuracies, which I would be happy to correct:

Nick Wilson: all schools can put in an expression on interest … about 40 have done so ... some asked for advice and were told they should get the information, though others did not, because detail are ‘far from clear.’ If they all became academies there would be a large transfer of money both from Surrey’s schools budget, from the dedicated schools grant,  and from central government funds. This would ‘mean shutting down of direct services’ though it is ‘far from clear what the [full] impact would be.’  

As far as the ‘proposed freedoms’ go Nick said ‘we see marginal benefits to certain schools at the moment,’ and then only at the secondary level: he ‘can’t see how infant and primary schools … can run on budget tranferral … [there’s] merit in some central services.

Colin Caswell (NUT) quite rightly said we would not be suprised he was ‘opposed to academies in the way they are presented at the moment’. He was concerned by the speed with which they were being introduced, and also by their ability to set their own pay scales for staff. They are ‘ill considered and won’t address the issue.’

Jerry Oddie (College Principal and Phase Council Chair) said an expression of interest should be construed as interest, … ‘you really wouldn’t buy a ticket to a very uncertain destination’ until the benefits were clear. The primary driver for any move away would be financial, but the difference between now and the 80s was that now any Academy ‘will need to keep some degree of collaboration.’ 

Jerry Oddie did not expect more than ‘a very few schools’ to go for Academy status in rapidly, and Nick Wilson confirmed that ’to my knowledge, only three schools have applied’ and they are ‘testing the system … talking with Surrey about land and capital implications.’

I was concerned about the effect on admissions, and about school place planning. Nick Wilson confirmed that selection of any sort would only be allowed where a school was already a grammar school, and did not immediately see problems with admissions - Jerry Oddie later commented that as with Foundation schools they would be their own admissions authorities, but within a co-ordinated admissions scheme. On school place planning, and setting up new schools, there has to be a lead time of around two years, and it was far from clear how this would work.  Another Councillor asked about the differences between Academies, Trust and Foundation schools - and again this was unclear.

But the really strong concern for now is much more around the treat to the Surrey’s capability to provide services for schools. This came out even more clearly when one Councillor said he didn’t ‘have a problem with Academies as such - but what if they were set up so that that ‘bore unreasonably and unfairly’ on those not Academies?’ and asked ‘is there a tipping point … at which it [would be] impossible to provide services?’

Nick Wilson was clear that there was - ‘if the forty schools go that have expressed interest [that] will be a tipping point’ that might mean, for example, ‘no behaviour support services at all’.

I’m reminded of the famous quote that most Google sources attribute to Thomas Paine: ‘If we do not hang together, we shall surely hang separately.’

PS on School Maintenance

Keith Brown. Technical and Contracts Developments Officer with Estates Planning and Maintence, explained in very straightforward terms that Surrey’s contract with Mouchel was terminated in March.

All bids from contractors were too high so the service has been brought ‘ in house’ and Surrey is saving something like 25% t0 30%, with, it’s hoped, more gain to come next year through using local suppliers.

This is very good to hear. (Again I’m relying on my notes rather than the papers, and hope I got it right.) Unfortunately he also had to tell us that it would take £40M per year to keep Surrey’s schools in ‘tip-top’ condition, there is still a £75M backlog on School Maintenance - and around £10M is being given to the maintenance of schools this year.

New - the ‘Public Engagement Meeting’

Surrey’s ‘Woking Local Committee’ is made up of the seven County Councillors for Woking, matched by an equal number of Woking Borough Councillors. It now only meets three times a year, with increasing numbers of private meetings in between.

We used to have half an hour before the formal meeting for Public Questions. This Wednesday evening (7th July) there’s a significant innovation with two hours, from 6.00pm to 8.00 pm, being used for a ‘public engagement meeting’.

As well as the open Public Question Session, the reports from organisations such as Fire and Rescue and Trading Standards about how their services are delivered in Woking will be presented in this part of the meeting, with the opportunity for members of the public as well as Councillors to ask questions  (which inevitably also offers a vehicle to express opinions.)

The decision-making part of the meeting will happen afterwards, at 8.00 pm, scheduled to go on to 9.30 pm.

I think this is a jolly good idea, and I’d encourage any Woking resident interested in what Surrey is doing with your money to come along at 6.00pm to Quadrant Court, on Guildford Road on the corner with York Road. My only reservation is that I think we’ll really need a break sometime during the three and a half hours  …  

Why the Woking Local Committee needs something new to do 

When I first became a County Councillor, about six years ago, it was often called the Local Transport Committee, with most of its work to do with roads, interlarded with the reports from other Surrey services. 

This year we have hardly any decisions to make about roads because no money has been allocated to the sorts of local road schemes people have got used to arguing about. In report after report the same phrase appears: ‘There is no budget for Integrated Transportation Schemes / improvement work for this financial year and that is likely to be the case for the next four years or so.’

So what is there for us to do? ‘Localism’ comes blithely off the tongue of the Conservative leader of Surrey County Council, Dr. Andrew Povey, and we Liberal Democrats have been talking about it for quite as long as they have, if not longer.

We’ve been told we’ll be able to ‘approve’ the budget for Youth Services in Woking - the image given is of a ‘menu’ from which we can pick and choose what we want for each area, though the fear is this will be with only the equivalent of the loose change found down the back of the sofa in our pockets. And even that meal has been delayed - I’m not at all sure when we’ll be eating.

Dr. Povey has set off a couple of relatively modest funds that we can occupy ourselves supporting bids for - last year the Climate Change Fund, where we did get some extra cash for Oak Tree School’s innovative eco-classroom project; this year there’s a ’disadvantaged small area fund’ to set off competitive grant applications.

We still have a local ‘Members Allocation’  which at its best lets County Councillors allocate money to local organsations for projects that benefit the community, but always risks descending into pork-barrel politics - and the amount of money available to us getting smaller does nothing to mitigate this risk. 

Not to mention that half the Members of the committee don’t get to play at the dosh-doling game since they come from Borough rather than County.

Maybe Dr. Povey will decide ‘localism’ is supposed to happen outside the Local Committees. Perhaps ‘localism’ will end up just being about local government officers and their equivalents in other public service organisations talking to each other in various ‘Partnerships’. If it is, three meetings a year should be enough for the Local Committee.

But if it isn’t - if ‘localism’ involves the people you have elected to represent you, working at a local level - then Surrey’s Local Committees will have to get back to working harder. In this case, I hope we retain the ‘Public Engagement’ commitment in Woking, and hold more meetings in public during the year. I would hate to see an increase in private meetings, with decisions either made or agreed in advance behind closed doors.

I am still deciding what I think about the coalition’s Emergency Budget. The attempt to suspend disbelief in the efficacy - let alone moral acceptability - of much of what is proposed is painful.

My mental model of how the economy works stems back to the early 70s, before the triumph of Mrs. Thatcher and monetarism. It is predominantly Keynesian. Unemployment is waste, because lost output can never be recovered. Economic growth will be best fostered by a high savings rate, so long as the money saved is re-invested in industry and business. Increasing demand is important in a recession, but increasing consumer demand will increase imports and this will not benefit our economy. Government spending is the most effective way of combatting recession because it gets quickly to the parts of the economy other spending cannot reach. Governments cannot go bust because they have the power to tax as necessary.

Every now and then I find articles by respected economists that I recognise as current developments of this set of assumptions. Will Hutton, writing in the Guardian, is one. I find this personally reassuring, even though it might be better for the country if they/we were wrong.

But everywhere else, the conventional wisdom - what is thought to be a matter of common sense, evidently true - has shifted.

Governments have credit ratings. The National Debt is intrinsically a Bad Thing. Taxation and public spending are bad because tax-payers have less money to spend on consumer goods and services. More resources proportionately being used to provide consumer goods and services will be good for the economy because it encourages businesses, some of which will be selling even better versions of the public services to those who can afford them. 

So while there are still some sensible policies around (with money attached) let’s make use of the Future Jobs Fund.  

Although the Future Jobs Fund is being discontinued, it is still here for this financial year, and Surrey is still working to meet its targets and use up the allocated money.

The Future Jobs Fund gives enough money to an employer for them to give six months work experience to a young person (between 18 and 24 years) who has in most cases been on Job Seekers Allowance for 6 to 12 months. It pays for up to 25 hours a week work at the basic minimum wage of £5.80 an hour, plus 17% for costs to the employer.

The work has to benefit the local community. It can be work that will suit the unskilled ‘NEET’ - the young person ‘not in education, employment and training’, or the unemployed graduate, or anything between.  It might leads to more work with that employer, and it is also open to the employer to offer extra hours during the six months. These placements will at the least give the young person work experience, and a chance to prove to themselves and to other people that they can do a good job.

You can find more details here.  

As for the economy, the budget, and the coalition government, it’s still early days. I want to see the details of some of the most potentially noxious proposals, for example relating to Disability Living Allowance. Liberal Democrats are still in opposition in Surrey County Council and Woking Borough Council.

ps from The Observer Sunday 27th June:

“Allowing financial markets to dictate economic policy is no way to run complex economies and societies … The arguments are no longer rational. The market prejudices are fetishised: if they want lower public debt, then they must have lower public debt.’ - Will Hutton, p34

While others write about more remarkable matters, such as the strange sight of David Cameron and Nick Clegg apparently on the verge of revealing themselves to be identical twins separated at birth, I have to apologise for not yet having covered the events at Surrey County Council that are the very raison d’etre of this website …

Annual Lunch

First of all, it was truly an ‘annual’ lunch. We haven’t had a sit-down waitress-service three-course formal meal like this since the last Annual Meeting. This is an improvement on the situation six years ago, when I first became a County Councillor. Then, they happened frequently. Nevertheless, I thank you as tax-payers for this one.

Second, it was a formal lunch like no other before, in that there was no alcohol. Fruit juice on entry, and more fruit juice or water with the meal. There were no printed menu cards, but we started with smoked salmon, and moved on to chicken in a pleasant sauce, followed by creme brulee.

The speaker was Jim Al-Khalili, physicist and Professor of Public Engagement in Science at Surrey University. I’ve much enjoyed hearing him on the radio, but he didn’t seem to be taking advantage of the situation to advance the understanding of science in his captive audience of (sober) local politicians, and the jokes were not sufficiently memorable for me to repeat any of them. I still thought it better than other speeches on previous occasions. Maybe we didn’t pay him enough - or, indeed anything?

We drank the toast to the Queen in orange juice or water, according to taste. (As I would have done anyway - alcohol at lunch time tends to send me to sleep.)

I heard indirectly the suggestion that ‘they’ didn’t want to see descriptions of a lavish meal on my blog. Maybe I have ‘made a difference’, if only to the menu cards? - boozy lunches at work are already history in much of the private sector.

The Annual Meeting (and question on respite care for children) 

The Annual Meeting came only five days after the elections, including of course the general election. The coalition at national level between Conservatives and Liberal Democrats is an interesting complication when it comes to Surrey County Council. We are still the largest opposition group, and will continue to oppose wherever appropriate and to hold to account the present administration, which has a tendency to (metaphorically) hold its hand in the air and declare ‘it wasn’t us, honest!’ when we point out past errors and muddles.

One huge example is in the waste and confusion over the provision of respite care for disabled children, with the delays on building two new homes - Ruth House and Applewood - the first of which will now be half-closed, and the second remain unopened.

I asked a question about these cuts that can be found with its answer here .

(I also asked a question about Knaphill High Street - the full text and answer can be seen further down that document. More to follow on this.)

One positive note: Andrew Povey, the Conservative Leader, announced that petitions to Full Council are going to be allowed.We have been asking for this for a long time. The details of how this will work are being hammered out even now, and will probably come to the next Full Council meeting in June. 

The initial three-phase consultation on the withdrawal of ’school special’ bus services would have meant some bus services stopped this September (2010). This brought such a strong reaction that in February Ian Lake, the Cabinet member for transport, announced that no services would be removed until September 2011. However all school special services are now being considered together, with the Cabinet expected to come to a decision on 13th of July. 

‘School Specials’ are the  public bus services paid for by Surrey County Council - they’re not the same as school buses provided exclusively for school students where there are a large number of pupils entitled to free transport, where spare places can be used by children not entitled to free transport for a fee.

One example of a ’school special’ in Woking is the 690. Its route is Worplesdon-Pirbright-Pirbright Camp-Brookwood-The Winston Churchill School-Kingfield Green (for St.John the Baptist /Woking College.)

There are many more. For a full list see the SCC website here.

If you rely on one of these services, don’t assume it will be there after September 2011. As part of the budget in February, the Conservative Cabinet at Surrey County Council decided in principle all these services should be cut.  The consultation and report to cabinet on the 13th of July are a chance for exceptions to be made and alternatives considered - but they won’t be, unless parents and schools make the case and show clearly why their service should be saved.

At the same time, I feel little doubt the consultation is genuine in the sense that both Surrey’s Officers and the Councillors involved want to know the extent of the need removing these services will create, the possible effects on patterns of school applications, and ways of working with schools to find ways of making alternative provision. More details and evidence of this can be seen in the presentations given on the 22nd of April to Headteachers of the schools affected, and on the SCC website here.

Stage two of the consultation goes on up to half term, and parents, and the online SCC survey for parents can be found here. 

This won’t be the end of the school transport story: all forms of school transport that Surrey doesn’t legally have to provide are going to be reviewed, including subsidies for ‘denominational transport’ to Catholic and Church of England schools.

- FOR YOUR MP

- FOR YOUR WOKING BOROUGH COUNCILLOR IN KNAPHILL AND GOLDSWORTH WEST

Rosie Sharpley is our Liberal Democrat candidate for Parliament here in Woking.  I think she would be excellent as our MP.

Rosie has been my friend getting on for twenty-five years, from the time when we were both mothers with young children living on the very new Goldsworth Park.

Rosie is among the most conscientious and hard working people I know. After many years as a Councillor, she still has the energy and conviction to be passionately on the side of people who are going through a hard time and need someone to understand their situation and speak up for them in the face of bureaucracy. Her own weekends, her own evenings and holidays, have always been set aside when needed to help sort out the problems of people she represents.

In dealing with Council work, Rosie has seemed to me a bit like a human terrier - intelligent, reasonable, but utterly persistent and unwilling to put any issue down until it has been thoroughly teased out and resolved.

Local Councillors, however persistent, find it hard to affect the big issues in society. Especially in the areas of health and social welfare, among our legislaters we need the informed and realistic views of MPs like Rosie, who will look at proposals, think through the effect that they will have on real people, and work to make them better. Rosie has repeatedly proved herself locally; why not let her take it to the next level?

Richard Sharp and Denzil Coulson  are both standing for re-election to Woking Borough Council, in Knaphill and Goldsworth West.

They both ‘go the extra mile’ for residents when there are problems to sort out. That’s important, but with Woking Borough Council so closely balanced between Liberal Democrats and Conservatives, it matters that both are committed to Liberal Democrat values, in terms of freedom from unnecessary bureaucracy and respect for individual rights, while still fighting for good services for those who really need it - the disabled, the elderly, the young and disadvantaged. I have heard and seen them concerned by all these issues, and I hope your vote will let me go on working closely with them, since Goldsworth West and Knaphill form my County Council division.

Tired-All-The-Time is a boring condition. Name it as such and you don’t get much sympathy. When you confide in all but the most understanding colleagues (you know who you are) they tend to tell you how tired they themselves feel, but how hard they are still working. 

There are lots of possible causes for TATT.

The good news is, some of them are fixable! I’ve now been on replacement tablets for an under-performing thyroid for just over a month. Big improvement! I can now stay awake all day, though I’m not yet up to getting out there and delivering leaflets or canvassing. This Thursday/Friday morning I will be watching the early results on television and waking to catch the final score, for the first time in years missing the count at Woking Leisure Centre.

Among other things, in the last month I would have been writing about School Special bus services, proposed cuts in Childrens Services including respite care for disabled children, long-term proposals for Youth Services, and the appalling removal of Knaphill High Street from this year’s major maintenance schedule.  I will come back to these as soon as possible, because as issues they are not going away. In the meantime, see above …