I’m definitely still here - but I owe you an explanation if you were looking for me in Knaphill High Street last Saturday morning -

• On-Street Surgery February 27th

I normally join Cllrs Olly Wells and Richard Sharp for an ‘on street’ surgery in Knaphill High Street on the third Saturday of the month, between 10.00 and 11.15 am. We have been there regularly in the cold this winter - as some of you may be able to verify. 

This Saturday Cllr Sharp and I reached the Vyne car park at 10.30 am in the middle of a downpour worthy of ‘February fill-dike’. We waited, hoping it would ease off.

It didn’t.

We then decided no-one would want to stand talking to us under these conditions. Even if they did, any notes we made would be turned to mush by the wet.

But if you live in Knaphill or Goldsworth West and want to talk to me or one of your Borough Councillors about local issues, please do get in touch so that we can arrange another time. 

The end of February was quite full - here’s a quick run-down of events:

• ‘Pupil Referral Units’ are now being reconstitutated into ’Short Stay Schools’ ,

and I went to the first meeting of the new Management Committee of the one at Pyrford (covering the North West of the County) on the 10th.

Surrey Schools have been working hard on reducing exclusions, while Surrey County Council has an impressive if small team working on supporting schools and pupils at risk of either being thrown out of school or of excluding themselves.  A ‘Surrey Alternative Learning Programme’ (SALP) has started work and should be fully implemented in September. The idea is to offer more flexible ways of learning to young people at risk of exclusion early, minimising both harm to them and conflict or disruption in the schools they come from. 

• The Streetlighting Revolution starts now!

- if everything we were told at a briefing for Councillors on the 15th of February comes to pass. This was an internal meeting so I can’t write about it directly, but virtually all of what was said is in the public domain.  

A twenty-five year ‘PFI’ contract with Skanska Infrastructure Services comes into effect on the 1st of March. They’ll work as Surrey Lighting Services.

In the first five years all Surrey’s lights will be upgraded- 70,000 entirely replaced, 19,000 just the lantern. Three teams will be doing this. Here in Woking we’re last on the list for the West 1 team. (This I see as a good thing. They can practise in Spelthorne, Elmbridge and Runnymede first.)

Skanska / Surrey Lighting Services immediately take over all maintenance. The contract is tighter in the standards required, and - oh, joy! - EDF are no longer responsible for all electrical connections. This has previously held up work for what has seemed to me and the residents concerned absurd lengths of time. Months. Years, even.

I hope I am not going to be disappointed.

If you want to know more it’s on the SCC website here, with links to further FAQs

• Equality and Diversity Training, part two of three -

Again I can’t say much about this because it was a private meeting, but some interesting discussions, especially in the light of current concerns about ‘bullying’ by those in authority nationally.

It lit also up a number of my own ignorances - for example, while I knew Domestic violence was high in Surrey, I could not have put a number on it (55 recorded instances per thousand of the population.)

Plus the legislation keeps moving on, and the computer-based course I took last year is going out of date, at least in the detail. 

• The Basingstoke Canal Joint Management Committee Friday 19th Feb

There is far too much that could benefit from being written about here than I can get into a general posting right now! There were (and are) a number of places where the Basingstoke Canal is a risk to people and property. There has been a ’condition survey’, followed up by an ‘Asset Management Plan’ which has not yet been completed. 

The result of the survey was not as bad as feared. Ian Brown, the Canal Director, commented: ‘The cup is half full … we thought that it was going to be very much more expensive … it’s almost a good news story so long as we get the finance … ‘

Surrey has allocated some capital in the budget, and although it did not appear to me to be a lot there was some optimism around the table, so long as the ‘riparian authorities’ put in their share for the general running costs. Even so, staff numbers are being cut and the chance of the whole canal being navigable any time soon or for any length of time still seems quite remote. 

I came out of it with two new and interesting facts:

The Greywell Tnnel, at the Hampshire end of the canal, has the largest population of bats in Britain.

About half (87) of Britain’s native aquatic plant species can be found in the Canal. This is because of the ‘interesting ph gradient’ caused be the water flowing from Hampshire rocks down over Surrey soil.

• The launch of Woking Dance Festival, held at the Lightbox

that evening gave me the chance to trot these out in casual conversation, before going in to  performance (I think the first performance) of a dance piece - ‘Maven Commission -Censor(ed)’ -performed by one dancer in the main gallery, and as a response the the current exhibition of Jenny Holtzer’s work. This featured prominently a large screen with a moving electronic ‘ticker-tape’ of slogan-like fragments of text called ‘Blue Purple Tilt’.

My companion did not applaud and I will not publish the words actually said (though they were quite mild, if disparaging). After looking sadly at the ‘Audience Self Evaluation’ (sic) form nothing they wrote nothing down, because the answer to the question ‘What is your profession’ would have been ‘accountant’ - inviting instant dismissal.

I don’t have a profession, so felt a little inhibited by the wording of the form. However in a slightly more grown-up version of the primary school approach to criticism, here are my three wishes and a star:

I wish ‘Blue Tilt’ had not been constantly flashing. I found this difficult to tolerate, and it was not necessary - when I saw the artwork previously the flashing was intermittent.

I wish use had been made of the space. The audience was confined to standing in two relatively small boxes marked out on the floor, facing each other. The dancer moved only on one central straight line between the two, making slow and limited movements - generally only visible to half the audience.

I wish the black costume, complete with anonymous visor, had not included a top so sheer that the dancer’s white bra and knickers showed clearly through. I’d have preferred black. (Unless this was actually a post-modernist determination to combine sci-fi and M & S imagery.)

A Star: I’m still challenged by ’Maven’, remember bits of it quite vividly, and can’t help thinking about what I would do if I was given the chance to put a sound-track to it. So there must have been something of some strength in there.

• Schools and Learning scrutiny committee on 24th February

- covered a great deal of ground, a lot of it quite well trodden already. There were a few moments of note:

In discussing the forward programme, Cllr. Sally Marks wanted room left to discuss the implications of the policies of any new Government (the Conservatives feeling fairly confident at the moment that this means them.) This met with less approval than might have been expected. Chris Townsend (Independent) commented that ‘A lot of things that will be said in the next few months will be electioneering’, while the Cabinet Member, Peter Martin, while volunteering ‘ … I’m actually seeing Michael Gove tonight’ seemed to take the view that such talk ahead of time was not to be taken seriously, for example where in recent news reports ‘there’s a bit of rhetoric’ about ‘cutting out [the] evil Local Authority.’ 

There was relatively little sturm und drang around proposed admission arrangements for 2010/11, because the Howard of Effingham school -with its two warring communities - has taken its admission arrangements out of Local Authority hands by becoming a Foundation School. 

The suggestion is that admission criteria stay as they are except for a few tweaks.

Locally, the ‘Published Admission Number’ for Knaphill Junior School will increase to 90, levelling it up to the Lower School. Preference for admission to the Junior School with then go to children at the Lower School. 

A change is also proposed to the sibling rule, to let older siblings get sibling preference - this is particularly relevant for families moving in to the area.

Then there were huge chunks of information to consider on how Surrey will handle new responsibilities for post-sixteen education as the Learning and Skills council comes back ‘in house’, about School Exclusions and the SALP (see above), and about the reform of Services to Young People. I can’t attempt to summarise so much of an on-going story right now - if you have a specialised interest, check out the relevant paper here.

Towards the end of the discussion, I suggested to Garath Symonds, the Assistant Director responsible to Services for Young People, that if he wanted, as he put it, the Service to be ‘co-designed with young people’,  just bussing in a random selection in might not work - perhaps he could find work placements, out of one of the pots of money around, for selected youngsters to work with the project team and put their ideas forward that way? I was thinking, for example, of people with the determination and ability of the care-leavers who came into County Hall last year with NYAS (National Youth Advisory Service) to give Councillors from the Children and Families committee training on the realities of being in care, as well as the more obvious post-sixteen or post-eighteen pre-university placements.

 The response was positive. A good idea. There is even a Future Jobs Fund of £2.25M that he could probably use …

Generally being part of a scruting committee feels like having one finger on an Ouija board - influence, but no ability to move things in any specific direction.  This time I might, perhaps, have directly ‘made a difference’. Wow.

To quote Eliot’s Waste Land, though in a rather different context, ‘Well now that’s done, and I’m glad it’s over.’

In the budget itself, there were no surprises. The depressing, restrictive catalogue of cuts went through as inevitably as we knew it would. The speech was given by David Hodge, the Deputy Leader, because Andrew Povey, the Leader has an interest in a company providing social care that might be seen as a ‘prejudicial’ conflict of interest. The party leaders stood and spoke, though with only one  Councillor now, Victor Agarwal, Labour  is not a ‘group’ and so had to speak as an ordinary member of the Council. You can see the whole proceedings on the internet on the SCC website, through selecting webcasts here. 

It’s very cleverly done -quick cuts to appropriate close-ups, clear sound, and our names are all displayed above the pictures when we’re speaking.  But it’s still a long meeting with no car chases on-screen.

School Special Bus Reprieve

As you can see earlier on this website, the consultation with schools about cuts in School Special Buses ended in January, but many schools and parents seem to be unaware that they could lose the services that their children rely on.

Various Councillors - myself included - asked a question in Full Council and/or had been busy behind the scenes to point out how little engagement there has been with parents and schools in this consultation.  Beyond failures of consultation, there has also been concern about fairness - that not all school bus services were being considered together, particularly the ‘denominational’ transport Surrey provides for children whose parents have opted for Church schools.

At the meeting, Ian Lake, the Cabinet member for Transport, announced that the School Special Bus Services in phase 1 will be allowed to run an extra year, until September 2011, before changes are made. The extra year will give more time for Surrey to look at the whole picture, and also for schools to work with Surrey and parents to see whether other ways of getting children to school can be developed that don’t involve this service in its present form. It also means schools in phases 2 and 3 will be consulted on the principle of cuts, even though phase 3 schools will not be affected until 2012.

The amount of public concern among the schools that had taken this on board was, I think, what has moved huge and damaging cuts from ‘pretty well certain’ to my current belief that it is ’most likely a big reduction.’

So the message is, if you rely on a school bus, unless you are sure provision will be made for you because your child has a special need that requires transport or because your child is beyond the distance limits for walking to the nearest school, make sure the school, the Governors, and the PTA are responding the way you would want to Surrey’s consultation. Also think about what you could do, perhaps in conjunction with other parents, if the present bus didn’t run any more.

Risks

Achieving this budget is going to be difficult. Officers have used a ‘red, amber, green’ system for savings, depending on how possible they are going to be. Far too few of them are green for there to be great assurance of success. The report from the Head of Finance says ‘the proposed budget includes £60.2M of savings and service reductions for 2010/11. Detailed risk analysis … shows that £47.3M of required reductions … are at a significant risk.’  Failure means ‘remedial action’ with ‘alternative budget reductions’. To achieve these ’efficiencies and service reductions and clear planning, management and monitoring arrangements are need to ensure savings are delivered within the required timescale.’

As the younger folks say, ‘we’re doomed’.

But let’s attempt to be optimistic.

In my opinion, this budget and others like it around the country are over-cutting the money going into public services. This money doesn’t just do good and useful things, like preserving the infrastructure or educating children - all needed to create wealth in the future. It also keeps a lot of people doing useful work. Unemployment is total waste and worstens deflationary pressure, as unemployed people have less money to spend and to pay in taxes.

If by some miracle we were to get a sensible Government by next Autumn, it won’t overcut spending on local services. The full unpleasantness of this budget doesn’t have to be realised. 

There were dramatic happenings at Woking Local Committee last Wednesday - or it would have been dramatic, if the whole meeting hadn’t spread itself out into a slightly chaotic slow-motion marathon, partly because the Councillors had been exhausted by multiple pre-meetings. Amazingly, quite a few members of the public stayed and watched until the end. At least there was coffee provided.

• Paper on Cycle Woking

Will Forster, Councillor for South Woking, has written about this on his website (here) so I won’t duplicate in this report.

These are my headings - skip down to read what interests you …

• Youth Plan NOT welcomed
• Soft words and little prospect of action on Brewery Road, Five Oaks Road, and Black Horse Road petitions
• Slow progress with road markings in Knaphill, while new parking restrictions planned
• Oaktree School goes forward for Climate Change Fund Bid

Plan for Youth Services NOT welcomed

Garath Symonds, one of the Assistant Directors working to the Director of Childrens Services and in charge of Services for Young People, came to the Committee to present his paper on the ‘local delivery plan’, asking us to agree:

i. That it forms ‘a robust basis for supporting young people in the Borough 2010-2011′

ii. That ‘the vision for future years is something to which the Local Committee can offer in-principle support’.

 The trouble was, we couldn’t find any plans in the document for 2010/11 (this year) to consider, let alone consider  ’robust’. There was a description of what had happened last year. Then there were aspirations for 2011/12, by the end of which time we’re supposed to have ‘integrated, preventative, targeted, local, and value for money services’ bringing us closer to realising the County Council’s aim ’to have outstanding services for young people comparable to anywhere in the world’ as the result of services that have been changed ‘in a transformational way.’ This would involve Local Committees choosing where resources went, from a ‘menu’ of services, and also partnership work and consultation with other organisations, including for example Woking Youth Council.

Nobody was happy with this paper. Only County Councillors could vote at the end, but Borough Councillor were welcomed into the discussion. Almost every member of the committee expressed their discontent: it was an aspiration, it was full of management speak, bringing it to this Committee wasn’t really enough, it ought to go to the Local Strategic Partnership, only the YMCA in Woking seemed able to act effectively … 

I said my piece: I had heard that morning we are getting a new Youth Worker in charge at Lakers, which was good news, but their work and all the work throughout the Borough would be put at risk by the planned cuts in the County budget (see posting below), especially the loss of the Youth Development Officer at this crucial time. This could not be a ‘robust plan’ - how could it be made to work with resources being pulled out before new arrangements were in place? 

Garath said that the cuts in sessional work etce wouldn’t happen after all, but confirmed  the staff cuts would. He talked about cutting back on administration and ‘protecting front line staff’.

I pointed out that our Youth Developement Officers are qualified Youth Workers, and that in Woking one of the things the YDO covered was supporting the Youth Council. If he was being made redundant, for example how could the consultation talked about happen?

Well, no, came the reply, of course we didn’t want to lose hard to recruit Youth Workers. It wouldn’t necessarily be a matter of redundancy …

I am sorry if I have not represented other Councillors’ views as thoroughly as sometimes. I felt strongly enough about this that my note taking was more imperfect than usual.

However at the end the strenth of their feelings was shown by the way the vote went. The aspirations at (ii) were supported, but the approval wanted for the plan at (i ) was turned down on a unanimous vote of all the County Councillors. 

Politely Doomed Petitions

There were three petitions to the Committee, all to do with road safety and residents demands for traffic calming / control. They concerned the junction of Saunders Lane, Blackhorse Road, and Heath House Road; Brewery Road; and the point on the Hermitage Road where children cross to go to St. Hugh of Lincoln School.

The first two are already on the Local Transport Plan list, which came up for consideration again in this meeting. If you look back on this website, you’ll see there’s already been a lot of work and talk gone into prioritising schemes - most of which regularly provoke the comment ‘if something isn’t done about this a child is going to get killed …’

But, as we were warned in this meeting - and as looks only too likely to be confirmed in tomorrow’ Budget Meeting at Full Council - there will probably be no money at all for any of it. Yes, the entire budget taken away.

You could argue that road surfaces and potholes should rightly be the priority right now, but such a sudden change means a great deal of work will at best be shelved, and at worst be wasted, and a lot of residents who have waited for their turn for their scheme to come up the list may well feel bitter, even betrayed.

Knaphill Road Markings and new parking restrictions

I’d asked for an update on the most egregiously outstanding failures to change / renew road markings in Knaphill, and some of these were also the subject of questions from the public in the open part of the meeting.

In short -

The order had gone in to contractors for the zebra crossings in the Broadway and the High Street at Knaphill to have their paint renewed so that the restrictions around them can at least in theory be enforced by the police. Weather conditions allowing, they were supposed to have started last week.

Warbury Lane - road markings as above; Surrey is waiting for a costing for the maintenance of signs and bollards, and to cut back the vegetation. They deliberately decided to wait until after the road markings had been done to complete the bollards.

The parking bay in the wrong place across the entry to a house, where the road order was completed years ago but the paint never changed - DONE! HURRAH! - I had one happy e-mail from a very long-suffering resident …

We also gave the go-ahead to a number of changes or additions to parking restrictions in the Borough.

In Knaphill this included double yellow  lines at the junction of the Broadway and the Bagshot Road, and some double yellows at the foot of Beechwood Road, to improve the sightline to the right as you drive down.

The lines in Beechwood Road may be a small improvement to safety, but not much of a consolation for the slowness of progress on traffic calming - but at least the next stage there is ‘consultation’, which may yet squeeze in this year despite the Local Transport budget cut, since it is ‘revenue based not chargable to budget’. 

We had assigned a budget to painting the lines for these new parking restrictions, which will almost certainly now be cut along with the schemes, as above. But apparently there is probably going to be some money in the CPZ pot which will cover it.

I hope they can get it organised. Not to mention that after this winter there are very many more road markings now so nearly faded out that they are ceasing to function.

Oaktree School supported to go forward for climate change bid

One of the new Leader’s spiffing wheezes   innovations is a pot of £50,000 for local committees to ‘bid into’ asking for support for ground-breaking schemes towards sustainability and preventing climate change.

Oaktree School has a very ambitious project for a new classroom with energy saving and generation built in from the start, including a heat pump system to collect heat from the ground. £10,000 is the biggest bite of this cherry available, and we were very happy to recommend the Climate Change Fund help support the school’s initiative. I’ll report back whether anything comes of this bid in due course.

WARNING Scenes in this trailer may not make the final cut, but are based on published information. Some readers may find the information contained in this post disturbing.  

Big Close Up:

Woking’s Youth Development Service. The Youth Development Officer, responsible for organising provision in Woking, faces redundancy. So does his immediate boss, the Service Manager for West Surrey.  They face cuts to sessional budgets, bought-in activities for young people, and administrative support.

Surrey’s Woking Local Committee being asked to agree that the Local Delivery Plan for Services for Young People ’forms a robust basis for supporting young people in the Borough 2010/11′.

Pull out to show:

School Special buses taking children to local schools from places like Worpleston, Pyrford and Bisley under review.

A knife poised over local road schemes. Road surfaces continue to deteriorate unchecked. The chances for a controlled crossing outside Sythwood School in the next five years are heading towards zero.

Cut to group shot of Surrey’s Children, Schools and Families Directorate under fire. There are three figures: Schools and Learning; Children and Safeguarding; Services for Young People 

Across the Directorate this current year’s expected spend of £160.4M falls to a budget of £154.7M in 2010/11.

It falls again steadily in the following years to reach £138.4M in 2013/14.

There is upward pressure on all three service areas. More school age-children means provision has to be expanded. Improvements to ’safeguarding’ children are still needed after the Childrens’ Service was disgraced and found inadequate, nearly two years ago now. There are more children in the care system, more care packages are needed, more placements for children in care.

Schools take a £1,465,000 hit in the area of Special Educational Needs.

£400,000 to be taken from Educational Psychologist staffing.

SEN transport has to save £1,500,000 by continuing to squeeze numbers considered entitled, and by and using mini-buses and group transport to replace individual taxis and escorts wherever possible.

Children’s Services:

 - found inadequate just over a year ago - cuts back on a range of services. This includes: £676,000 net out of respite care. £1,000,000 less in voluntary sector support grants. £100,000 less into the shared budget with the PCT for CAMHS, the mental health service for children and adolescents.

Services for Young People - £1,014,000 budget reduction overall.

All 11 Youth Development Officers and both Service Managers senior to them (13 posts) are to be replaced by four operations managers. as featured above. Sessional budget reduced by £365,000, activity from outside providers reduced by £24,000, and £75,000 taken from administrative support.

Youth Justice loses £140,000; Inclusion Service lose £478,000.

The Big Picture 

In the background looms the threat of a Conservative government stalling Britain’s slowly adapting and recovering economy by over-enthusiastically cutting back on public service spending.  

Surrey County Council won’t know until next Autumn how much money whatever government is in power will let it have in 2011/12. But the assumption being made by Officers and Conservative polititians is that by 2013/14 overall income will fall from this year’s £662M to £660.2M.

£2M down - not too bad, at first glance. Stay as you are, maybe sell off a couple of childrens’ homes. Sorted.

But there is an enormous increase from now to then in ‘Central Income and Expenditure’, from £-11M this year climbing steadily to £42.7M in 2013/14. This increase appears solid and necessary: pensions, ‘invest to save’ capital, redundancy payments, a (small-ish) contingency fund in case some of the required savings can’t be made.

To make up for it, the budgets for every service area have been shrunk like clothes in too hot a wash.  

Even more dramatically, their wearers - the needs covered by these budgets - get bigger and bigger. 

Real and reasonable need is growing fast - more older people requiring care; Surrey’s infrastructure, especially roads, inadequate for increased numbers of people, heavier use, and changing weather patterns; increasing landfill tax.

There is also serious bureacratic obesity, and failure to keep in trim by using new technology effectively. There are in too many managers in proportion to staff ‘on the ground’; failures to recruit and retain essential workers instead of paying for agency staff; and amazingly poor project management.

Andrew Povey (the ’strong leader’) didn’t have to commit himself to only a 2.5 rise in Council Tax. He didn’t have to go with such severe assumptions about falling revenue funding in future years. Following internal revolution in the Tory group, he is heir to the previous administration which failed to make the reforms now promised.

Dr. Povey stands poised with a knife.  

If you or your child depend on a school bus to get to school, check here now whether it’s under threat.

 If you don’t want to lose it, respond to Surrey County Council’s consultation before the end of January, and persuade as many other parents as you can to do the same.

Tell your County Councillor your objections. You can find out who they are here.

Examples of buses concerned in Woking:

• 690 from Worplesdon, Pirbright, and Brookwood to Winston Churchill, St. John the Baptist, and Woking College.
• 664 from Barnsbury and Mayford to Bishop David Brown
• 837 Pyrford and West Byfleet to Fullbrook

 Included in phase two, where according to the SCC website consultation will take place next year, are buses from Chobham and Knaphill to Collingwood College. Their website is saying:

“Although the College is not involved in the bus review until Phase 2 in 2011, the County Council is arguing that, if Phase 1 proceeds, other phases will follow by default. This makes it essential that parents of all students using the services affected and, for that matter, anyone who commutes to work by car, should respond to the consultation.”

They also say:

“We understand that the Surrey consultation email address busreview@surreycc.gov.uk will now accept entries from respondents not in Phase 1. It does not matter that the Surrey Heath services are not listed in the drop down box, [on the SCC website] which can be left blank. Children may also fill in the questionnaires and we would encourage them to do so.”

Other schools seem to have been slower off the mark, but it is important to shout out if losing these school bus services is going to hurt you.

I will try to clarify how important it is for phase 2 and 3 schools to respond now, and post further information as I get it.

The gap between my last post and this demands apologies, which I willingly offer. There were reasons as well:

Christmas and various family demands.

Then the fact that we don’t have a full Council meeting until the budget meeting in February, when in the past there has been a January meeting for the standard sort of business. Therefore not so much instantly demanding to be written about.

Then the snow, which led to a number of meetings being cancelled - and, as it happened, the meetings that did survive were not the meetings held in public, but the kind that you can’t report on directly: a Local Committee ride around the Borough looking at sites for potential road schemes; two ’informal’ Local Committee meetings; a ‘workshop’ for the ‘Woking Partnership’; a ‘Seminar’ on Surrey Highways involving discussion with Officers; training on Equalities and Diversity.  

That these events happen is not a secret, though you’d be unlikely to find out about them without looking very closely at forward planning documents. Sometimes much of the information given to Councillors at them is already in the public domain; sometimes it is very controversial, confidential, and subject to change.  

This makes them hard to write about. In a public meeting  everything  produced for that meeting and everything said, unless put into ‘part 2′ and declared confidential, is automatically available for quotation. This is not the case with private or informal meetings.

I’m very soft when it comes to wanting to play it safe and not say anything that might get me into trouble with the Standards Board - so I much prefer meetings in public where everything is open. Ideally where other people either don’t mind or seem to forget that this is the case, even if no members of the public happen to be there, and so speak freely.

Looming Cuts

Many of the discussions going on have been around the budget for 2010 / 2011. The Conservatives have committed themselves to a rigid 2.5% maximum rise in Council Tax, and Officers are working on the assumption of the same or less in following years. Assumptions are also being made about severely lowered Government funding in the next four years, leading to plans that are extra tough for 2010 / 2011 in preparation for even more cuts afterwards.

Everything not ‘essential’ - broadly everything the Council does not have a statutory duty to provide - is at risk. You may consider it ‘essential’ that your child’s school bus continues to run, but the Council’s duties are quite limited - very broadly, to providing free transport to the nearest appropriate school if that it more than ‘walking distance’, two miles for a child under eight, three miles for a child over eight.  (You can see Surrey’s current policies here , and also see and respond to proposals to cut school bus services here. )

We were told before Christmas, at the Schools and Learning Committee, that the Children, Schools and Families Directorate faces an actual fall in spending over the next four years from £156M to £135M, which with expected increases in costs leaves a budget hole of £29M.

The Director concerned, Andy Roberts, was amazingly  up-beat about this: ‘Twenty-nine million is not an unrealistic figure … you can’t salami-slice the way we do our business - you have to re-design it.’ He looked forward to ‘an opportunity to say, what sort of services do we want for the children and young people of Surrey?’ and suggested that if he was handed the cash personally to buy services for the children of Surrey, he could spend it well and still ‘go home at the end of it with a million’.

Although jokingly said, this was hardly a ringing endorsement of previous Conservative policies at County Hall, or of the efficiency with which Surrey has run its services under their control.  

Sadly, what I’ve seen and heard since then - but cannot quote for the reasons given above - gives me an increasing sense of deja vue, back to the slash-and-burn of the Business Delivery Review.

Grit/Salt Bins

Lessons did seem to have been learned from last February’s snow. As a stream of e-mails from Kingston informed me, Surrey had increased its supplies of salt so that we had nine thousand tonnes stockpiled. Six thousand were used over the Christmas and New Year period alone, although we’d usually get through a whole winter on this amount. With the snow falls in January new stocks were expected from abroad, but supplies were being co-ordinated across the country. In Surrey priority was given to A roads, access to hospital Accident and Emergency departments, paths in the centre of towns and access to secondary schools for important exams.

A number of people contacted me about extra grit bins for particularly icy spots - for example, Arethur’s Bridge, used by a great many pedestrians.

I’m making note of suggestions to pass on, but there’s also a list of salt bin locations in Woking on the SCC website here, or if you’re in another part of Surrey use this link. You’ll also find on these pages a link to the form to request a new bin.

Discussion of salt/grit is likely to get levered into the Budget Meeting in February, not least because there will still be Members Questions, and I’ll report back anything of interest then. 

‘Suretime’ (again)

Although generally the  buses here ran well in the snow, I’ve had several people contact me because of their on-going frustration with the lack of reliability shown by this potentially brilliant system. These are not teething pains - it’s been going on for years. And now the sign at Cawsey Way, which both John Doran (then County Councillor for Horsell) and I both metaphorically stamped around over because it did not work for so long, is again out of action.

There could be a number of reasons for the failure, including the equipment not being used properly. The most useful complaints give some precise details. offering a better chance to track the cause of failure. You can contact SCC direct through the website or on 0300 200 1003.  Alternatively e-mail me at the address to the right of this posting and I will forward comments and complaints to the Passenger Transport Group at County Hall which deals with the various contractors.

For years the leadership of Surrey County Council has been working towards building at least one mass-burn energy from waste incinerator in Surrey. At Capel, Trumps Farm, and other places, possible sites have at one time or another been identified, evoking enormous hostility from from local pressure groups.

Forget it. Forget the forests of trees cut down for reports and committee papers, the impassioned arguments, the entire waste of time and effort. ‘We are scrapping plans for any EfW incinerators in Surrey,’ the Leader of Surrey County Council, Andrew Povey, announced to the press yesterday, even before he told the Council. ‘Today I will be instructing that planning applications for incinerators at Capel and Trumps Farm be withdrawn.’ 

We had heard rumours of an until-then embargoed press release, but had to wait for the Leader’s Statement at Council yesterday to learn how far the new Conservative leadership has come round to the way of thinking Liberal Democrats on Surrey County Council have been putting forward for at least the last five years.

• Landfill is ‘destructive to our landscape and environment’, costs Surrey £7 million a year,  and these costs threaten to rise to £13m in 2013.
• ‘We should have available to us a flexible range’ of technologies. The new proposals include an anaerobic digester and a gasifier, on the same site. This could power 10,000 homes.
• Looking to the future, Surrey needs to be aware of new recycling opportunities and needs, for example with the mercury in  ’low energy light bulbs … we really don’t want them in the waste stream at all.’ (Lynne Hack)
• The current 40% to 50% recycling rate across Surrey is a ‘fantastic result’ but ‘we can do a lot better’. Surrey will have a target of 70% recycling by 2013, which will ‘take us into World Class’*

 The ‘vision’ we were given was of an ‘eco park’ where there is already a waste management facility at Charlton Lane in Shepperton. The anaerobic digestor will take 40,000 tonnes and the gasifier 60,000 tonnes. The ‘eco-park’ would also contain an ‘innovation centre’ working on new technologies, and an ‘education centre open to all’.

So what’s the catch? 

Lynne Hack, the Cabinet Member for the environment, reckons that residents in the Charlton Lane area will be better off. She said the gasifier would fit entirely on the footprint of the existing shed-like waste transfer station, so that local residents will have a ‘very much better looking shed’ than they have now.

She also said, in response to questions from Liberal Democrat Caroline Nichols (Lower Sunbury and Halliford, which contains Charlton Lane)  that the already dodgy air-quality would not be threatened by increased traffic movements. ‘We believe the number of lorry movements will be less’ because waste will be treated on site and not brought out as well as in. She added that there would be separate entrances for cars going into the recycling centre, and seemed unconcerned about plans currently being developed for gravel - ‘ we have no plans for gravel recycling in this facility, there wouldn’t be room for that’.

Caroline Nichols and our other Liberal Democrat County Councillor from that area, Ian Beardsmore (Sunbury Common and Ashford Common), are far from reassured.

Can it be a co-incidence (as conspiracy theorists tend to say) that the areas of Surrey with high property values and Conservative voters - Trumps Farm, very close to Chobham and to Wentworth golf course, Capel in the well-heeled south of the County; the apparently untouchable Wisley - now seem to be off the hook? While the relatively crowded and unscenic Shepperton is the recipient of these new facilities intended to take Surrey’s waste?

And even if recycling rates do go up as planned, and waste is also minimised, what will happen to the rest of the 270,000 tonnes that would have been handled by the originally proposed incinerators?

After that, what about the risk of Surrey having to pay back to the Government the money we’ve already had for a PFI project to built EfW incinerators? Dr. Povey says DEFRA is happy that ‘this will be a quite considerably cheaper [solution] than where we were before’ and he has had a ‘letter of comfort’ from DEFRA.  

 I don’t know what that means.  I don’t know the answers to the questions that this brief statement leaves open about the hugely changed, multi-million-pound plans for waste in Surrey. My current lack of comprehension is not very important - but there is an Economy and Environment Committee, which I’m not on, whose members should be kept up to date on these issues so that they can ask the right questions and tease out implications. But the Environment and Economy Committee have been left largely in the dark while the Leader and Cabinet made this huge policy U-turn.  

Street Lighting

There were other things that happened during this meeting - most notably the announcement that the 25-year lighting PFI contract for Surrey with Skanska Laing (Surrey Lighting Services) has now been signed, and will come into effect on the 1st of March.

Woking is in the first phase to have new lights that can be controlled in a more sophisticated way from the central control room at Merrow, near Guildford. 

Renewing all Surrey’s street lights, as intended, is going to be a huge operation. There’s a lot of room for muddle and confusion. But let’s be optimistic, and hope for the promised new ‘bright white lights’ that will save energy, and a maintenance contract that does not leave us with columns unlit for months on end.

And there was more … we went on all morning and into the afternoon … but my fingers are now failing me ….     

*according to my tally, Dr. Povey used ‘world class’ six times in his statement, and it was used by other Councillors 11 times in the rest of the meeting. 

- I find it hard to comprehend just how much time has raced by since I last put a posting here. Things have been happening nevertheless - ‘casework’ where I’m trying to help at the interface between Surrey County Councils services and the residents using them; continuing to nag away at officers about faults in the Knaphill in Goldsworth West roads (the white line painting that has been deferred for months dragging on towards years); and the usual range of formal and informal meetings.

The Children and Families Committee meeting on the 25th November was taken up with on-going issues around how the committee is supposed to monitor performance and - more significantly in practical terms - how the senior management team is setting about improving the quality of work for vulnerable children.

For example, all managers are now required to check a certain  number of files selected randomly each month, working through an ‘eight page pro-forma’ to check the file and come to a ‘professional judgement’.

Caroline Budden, the new Assistant Director of Children’s Services, described how she goes ‘to the office where the file is … I think it’s important for the staff to see me.’  Much of the checking she does is ’number crunching’, but with some qualitative  judgements at the end, which can be difficult to make. To illustrate, she outlined two files recently reviewed, one concerning a toddler on a Child Protection Plan, the other a Looked After child.

The first left her in some doubt about whether the child was safe, and she ‘entered into dialogue’ with the manager. She ended up ‘reassured that they did know what was going on’.

In the second, she said ’I had a real feel for the girl in the case … she had a voice and it was being heard’ but ‘the plan was not good enough’, although much of ‘what they were actually doing’ was good.

Her conclusion was: ‘what they illustrate is that the practise is getting better on the ground’ but, as the paper she was talking to concluded,  there is further to go ‘to ensure that the quality of practise is comparable with high performing services.’

The other item I found particularly interesting covered the measures now being taken to recruit social workers. This includes bursaries for training from both the Government and the County, and there’s a run-down in Appendix 2 of item 10.

Schools and Learning- 2 December - started with a petition asking that Surrey should have a policy on Elective Home Education, ‘drawn up in consultation with local home educators and in line with existing law and guidelines’.

The answer was that we have a draft policy, but there may be changes to legislation soon that mean it has to be revised. Members of the Committee had this policy sent to them by e-mail, and I was told it would form part of the official committee papers, but cannot find it on the website now. I will follow this up.

 It seemed to me a policy that balanced the freedom of parents to educate their children at home with the need to ensure the children’s right to an education is met. But the devil is always in the detail, and home educators may well have points they want to make about it. This is a contentious area, and the committee will be coming back to it.

Then there was a detailed piece of work in the review by the Special Educational Needs Transport Task  Group. This is another area where it’s easy to waste money if services are not provided flexibly and intelligently - but because of the nature of the needs being met, it’s important to find genuine efficiencies and better ways of doing things, not to make de facto cuts by redefining them so as to reduce entitlement. 

Then there were reports on two huge pieces of work, in the Surrey 14-19 plan 2010 - 17 and the report on Surrey schools’ performance in the early years and primary phase.   

Both topics are too big to summarise here. Surrey will be taking on the responsibilities - and some of the staff of the Learning and Skills Council from 1st April; we’re facing the ’raising of the participation age’ from 16 to 18 over the next few years; recession is reducing work opportunities, especially for young people. The plan is still a work in progress, with details not at all worked out. As far as I can see, this plan is a gallant attempt to rope chaos into some sort of order.

Surrey schools are, as you would expect, doing quite well, though there is detail to mull over to see where some groups of children may be improving, but the gap between them and their peers keeps on widening.

But I’ll leave you with a ’fancy that!’ paragraph in the section on ethnicity that shows  how important it is to question statistics closely when there are small and/or skewed samples involved: ‘At the end of KS2 the group with the highest proportion of pupils attaining level 4 in both English and maths is children of Chinese origin. Children of mixed heritage are the next highest performing group followed by children of any white origin. Black and Asian children perform the least well and are between 9 and 19 points behind the best performing group in each subject.’

And finally - the ban on alcohol or drinking alcohol during working hours is coming into force in Surrey County Council, bringing it in line with large public companies. But with the exquisite timing we have come to expect from the political leadership at SCC, just before Christmas. 

Residents often say they’d like to see more police on the street, enforcing the law. This morning, at the end of the Broadway in Knaphill, there were plenty - this is only a couple of them, there were another pair on the other side of the Bagshot Road, while round the corner in the car park of a local business were a number more, plus a contingent from the fire service, road safety officers from Surrey County Council, and several large trailers.

 They were there for the morning, as part of the joint DriveSMART campaign between SCC and the police against anti-social driving.

The idea was to catch motorist indulging in dangerous or anti-social driving, such as speeding, using a mobile phone while driving, or not wearing a seat belt. Instead of then imposing a penalty, drivers were offered ’where appropriate’ (which seemed to be for the sort of  action or oversight a lot of people are guilty of simply through thoughtlessness) a quick spot of road safety education. 

While I was there, the traffic was moving slowly, and the plain-clothes ’spotter’ in advance of the uniformed police was mainly picking up common offences as not wearing a seat-belt or talking on a mobile phone while driving.

 I was impressed by the courteous (but firm) and uncondescending approach of the Officers giving this training, which consisted of a quiz geared up to offence concerned and a suitable short video. The video I saw had also been shown on television, and culminated in an unbelted teenager in the back seat of a car being thrown forward and killing the driver, his mother. 

Did you know that a box of tissues on the back parcel shelf of a car in an accident can have the impact of a house brick? That most of the cuts and injuries you see in pictures of road accident victims are caused by items such as loose change in the car?

Were you aware that you’re not allowed to use a hand-held mobile ‘phone or be over the alcohol limit yourself  if you’re supervising a learner?

I wasn’t, and I went away more thoughtfully after sitting in on a session.

Before the last election it was clear that there were going to be bus cuts this year, and Liberal Democrats alerted residents to this. Unfortunately if you accept the way public transport is currently provided and resist increases to taxation or making serious approaches to reducing the number of private cars on the roads, I’m afraid this is now looking inevitable.  

Surrey County Council is ‘responsible’ for buses only in so far as residents are willing to see public money spent supporting them. About half of all bus journeys in Surrey are on services subsidised by the County Council; the rest are provided commercially and are not under Surrey’s control.   Since 2001 the cost of bus subsidies in Surrey has gone up from £4 million £11 million. This is because costs have risen faster than inflation making increasing numbers of services unprofitable, and the companies concerned will not run them without this.At the same time, Surrey is anticipating significantly large reductions in central funding - see my posting below, from the 7th of November. 

The Surrey Bus Review  

Rather than go on with piecemeal adjustments, Surrey County Council is looking at the network as a whole in a major shake-up. They say the idea is to ‘focus our investment on the areas or travel opportunities where it is needed the most.’ School services are also being reviewed.  

Plans are being made in three phases by area, over three years. Woking gets split between the first two phases. The first covers north Surrey, with Elmbridge, Runnymede, and Spelthorne, but also including the east of Woking. Reigate and Banstead are also tackled this year. Although phase 1 doesn’t cover buses running through Knaphill and GoldsworthPark, the review will affect in many of in this area, with changes to routes such as the 446 from Morrisons and Woking Town Centre to St. Peter’s Hospital.  

Speak up now if you disagree   Outline Proposals are on the Surrey County Council website at www.surreycc.gov.uk/busreview . There are before and after maps of the routes concerned on the website, along with details of changes. Alternatively you can telephone on 03456 009009 to ask for more information, and there’ll be a ‘surgery’ session at Woking Library on the 7^th of December from 10am to 2pm.   Public consultation will go on to the 31^st of January.  Decisions should be made in March, new routes published in June, and the changes come into effect from September. Our turn in the west of Woking will come the following year along with Surrey Heath, in the second phase, with the same pattern of consultation and changes made for September 2011. Tandridge, at the other end of Surrey, gets the treatment then as well.  The third year is Epsom, Mole Valley, and Waverley. There was some tough talking in the papers going to Surrey County Council’s Cabinet, recommending ‘a focus on people’s needs for travel rather than their “wants”’, and saying ‘people should take responsibility for their own travel planning.’ I have no further information for the moment, but suspect bus cuts will be a major issue in the coming year.

Good news on the 91 bus        

In contrast, from tomorrow there’s a new Sunday timetable for the  91 bus, which gives us a half-hourly daytime service between Knaphill, Goldsworth Park,and Woking town centre, instead of the present once-an-hour service. The 91 is sufficiently well used that it doesn’t attract anything to much to speak of by way of a subsidy. (Information about exactly how much or how little extra service Surrey buys for each route is not immediately available.) This improvement is Arriva’s decision, made on commercial grounds. We just have to hope that enough people go on using it for it to pay its way.   Surrey and Woking do however contribute to a Quality Bus Partnership Agreement to improve bus stops and provide ‘Suretime’ information. (Complaints about that are another issue again - I think it’s a bit better than it was, but not back to being as good as before it was given to a different contractor and ‘improved’.)    

IMHO: Better ways forward     

Examining and rationalising bus services to make sure subsidies give us the best value for money is good and necessary; but doing it in the context of huge cuts in spending is going to be bad, and risk throwing more traffic on roads that are already too crowded. Making it more difficult to use public transport means some people will find their lives more constrained.

Free bus travel for the over-60s has opened up and enriched the lives of many older people, and at the same time brought money into the bus companies to support daytime services. Perhaps the same principle should be extended more widely into bus services? Let’s have free off-peak travel for under-16s, cheap fares for students and the unemployed, and a range of travel cards of the sort you can get to reduce the cost of regular train travel. 

Yes, it would be expensive. My own preference in response would be to put up the cost of petrol and diesel at the pumps with an increase in fuel tax as large as necessary.There would be ways of compensating those genuinely disadvantaged by such a change - perhaps the severe disabled, those living more than a certain distance from a regular bus service, and so on could be exempt from fuel tax altogether. Car pools and community transport could also be wholly or partially exempt. And under such a regime bus services should expand with the increased demand for them that free or cheap fares would bring, so that fewer people needed special arrangements. 

Unfortunately no ambitious politician will offer this. The ’fuel escalator’ was broken by protests. It will take an immense change in public opinion for it to happen. But sometimes immense changes can happen in relatively short periods.