Tuesday’s Full Council seemed to me a rather low-key affair, with few decisions - the Independent Panel’s paper on Member’s Allowances was sent back to Committee for lack of coherent recommendations on what should be accepted from it, and a number of rather old-fasioned Public Library Byelaws were approved, most of them still allowing library staff to use their good sense. As often, some of the answers to questions were the most interesting.

 1. Is failure to pay at the root of Knaphill’s problem’s with EDF?

Despite suspicions voiced to me, the answer seems to be ‘no’, at least not failure to pay past invoices. The Executive Member for Transport said:

“The Shared Service Centre records show only one overdue invoice, which unfortunately didn’t reach Surrey and Highways. We are investigating further and will pay as soon as possible. There are no disputed invoices and no work on hold awaiting payment.”

2 What’s up with ‘Suretime’, Surrey’s real-time bus information centre?

Lib Dem Councillor John Doran asked about the six months since the system was turned off, when if would be on again, and how much it was costing.

The answer was that a company called ‘Trapeze’ took over supplying the system in January, planned to upgrade it, had ‘unforeseen delays of four to six weeks’ which then were exacerbated by ‘the system inherited from the previous system supplier being inherited in a worse state … than anticipated.’

It’s now expected that most of the network in Guildford and Woking will be ‘live’ by the end of June. Surrey has paid £406,000 for the upgrade with another £115,000 to come, but ‘we have not made the quarterly payments of £45,000 … for maintenance for Jan 08 -Mar 08 and April 08 - June 08 … ‘

- So we can’t quite console ourselves that the upgrade is paying for itself in saved maintenance. And I, for one, would like to see the system back again to put some assurance into waiting at the bus stop.

3. How many Surrey secondary schools are on the Government’s National Challenge Initiative hit-list?

The ex-Executive Member for Education asked this in a more formal way. The answer is four. They weren’t named in the answer, but they are Christ’s College, De Stafford, Jubilee High, and Broadwater.  A potential fifth is Bishop David Brown. I’ll quote the last paragraph of the answer from Peter Martin, new Executive Member, in full:

“There is debate as to whether Bishop David Brown School in Sheerwater should be included in the list.  As it scored 30% 5 A*-C including Maths and English last year it should not have appeared.   It also scored a very credible 1007 for contextual value added.   This school was placed in special measures in 2003.  The current Head was appointed in January 2005.  The school was removed from special measures in November 2006 and gained a good judgement from Ofsted in November 2007.   Head Teacher Stuart Shephard feels that the Secretary of State’s announcement “has probably set us back two years in our vision of regaining community confidence”.   I sincerely hope that this is not the case.   I regret that the Government has not contributed to the good work that we are doing to improve educational standards either in this school or in Surrey more generally”

This followed up discussions in the Schools and Learning Committee the week before, when it was commented that each of these schools are well supported in their own local communities. Complacency is certainly not required - the County’s ‘Asip’ programme, giving extra support from a number of ‘critical friends’ to such schools also keeps challenging them, and is not an entirely comfortable programme to be on - and I sympathised with the Head Teacher on the Committee who said: ‘I wish [inspectors] would come up with an indicator of happiness of children, enjoyment of children.’

Going Through The Motions …

  There were three this time. The Conservatives on Foot and Mouth; Libdems on local democracy; and a back-bench Conservative motion on the new ‘Member/Officer’ protocol which was taken back for more work.

Foot and Mouth - we all agreed unanimously that Trading Standards did a great job last summer, that the Government should make it practical for Surrey to prosecute the responsible organisations, and there should be tougher fines. The current figure of £5,000 and/or 6 months in prison was ‘totally inedequate’.

Liberal Democrat Colin Taylor put forward a motion pointing out that the Community Survey showed only 30% of respondents thought they could have any influence, and only 16% had ever heard of Surrey’s Local Committees. That was fine. The second part of the motion asked for change, including the right for Surrey residents to petition Full Council. We’ve asked for this before without success, so it was no surprise when our motion was amended to exclude it, and then passed while we felt compelled to oppose it. 

The Conservatives argued that the public are better off as they are, bringing their petitions, for example on School Admissions, to the Exectutive where the decisions are made. If this is the case, that petitions should go to the decision making body, then what are we doing in Full Council at all? OK, much is delegated, and the massive Conservative majority means that what isn’t delegated is actually decided behind closed doors by the ruling party … but using this as an argument seemed very dismissive!

I didn’t get a chance to say so because the Chairman (Angela Fraser, Conservative) decided that after the Conservative changes to our motion had been passed, she would not allow any more debate on the motion as it then stood. John Doran, seconder of the original motion, was allowed the chance to stand up and say why he now urged everyone not  to vote for the motion. Then that was that.

Angela had said we would break for lunch at 12.45, and we did, though when we came back at 2.00 we took about a quarter of an hour to get through the remaining business. Pre-lunch drinks in the Chairman’s Office were a choice of a nice white wine (I don’t think it was champagne, but something like) or a very pleasant elderflower drink. This is the first time I have been in these rooms (I think we get invited in turn). The dark panelling, silky Indian carpet, old furniture, portrait of the Queen, and massive arrangement of flowers made it like one of the richer family rooms in a National Trust stately home.  Lunch, you may be pleased to hear, was the normal buffet in the ‘mess’.

One possibly interesting note on Campus Woking -  Surrey’s response to the Government White Paper on ‘Raising Expectations’ and the future of the work done by the Learning and Skills Council was featured in the Executive Report for information. I stood to ask Peter Martin, the Executive Member who took over from Andrew Crisp this May, how Campus Woking fitted in, since it surely had to be an important plank in the County’s strategy with regard to the 14 - 19 agenda. Weren’t they supposed to be coming back with proposals more or less right now … ?

Reader, I got no answer. He did not appear to have more than the politest, nodding acquaintance with the ‘Campus Woking’ concept. He said he would let me know. After the meeting I assured him that people in Woking would really like to hear how plans were going, and he said he would get something to me in writing about it when he had found out himself.