Cllr. Angela Fraser is the Chairman of Surrey SCC. She has in the past battled unsuccessfully to persuade Councillors to get through the business at a quick enough lick to finish by lunchtime - 12.45 on the dot. She likes a long lunch, and a selection of Councillors are normally invitated to take a drink with her before eating. After that, usually the rest of the agenda is quickly despatched, not least because a significant number of Councillors have left.

On Tuesday, however, she took everything at a relaxed pace. It was as if she knew I had to get back to Woking for an urgent dental appointment … but no, I must not get paranoid …

 Unison petition

Angela even allowed Colin Caswell, representing Unison, to hand her a petition from Unison about staff mileage rates (there’s no provision in the Constitution for petitions to be presented at Full Council in the normal way.)

You can read about the protest here - it involved a Car Convoy to stop traffic, but I’d arrived quite early by train and bus and was only reminded about this by the number of staff taking up the chairs at the back of the Chamber and in the public gallery.

Iceland Statement

Nick Skellett, the Council Leader, made a statement about the £20M Surrey has on deposit with Icelandic banks - £10M each with Landsbanki and Glitnir.

This is out of £350M in deposits, which are still earning enough between them to keep interest income on budget this year, so ‘there are no short-term implications for front line services or jobs … ‘.

He was asked about why the Council has so much invested money. The answer was in terms of adding to the council’s ‘worth’ of £100-£200M, largely in terms of property, to balance long-term borrowings of £500M. He said it is also ‘just the nature of the business’ that large sums of money have to be kept in reserve for later use - for example, the £60m held for schools in school balances.

In terms of the effect on Council Tax, he said ‘I think we’ll have to wait and see there  … I think the UK Government is going to do something about that [in term of frozen assets, so there’s a] … good chance of getting something back.’

The Liberal Democrat group took the view that when the deposits were made the banks’ credit ratings were the best available, and that criticism based solely on the benefit of hindsight would not be fair or useful.

Questions

… as usual brought out a number of interesting issues: how and why SCC got its money out of HBOS just before the Lloyds merger was announced; about difficulties with road adoption on new estates in Epsom mean they are even less far advanced than in Knaphill’s Brookwood Hospital Estate; late applications for school places; which roads get routine tree maintenance; and too much else to report right now …

 Motions

There were four motions to pick over:

1. Ours, about last year’s £58M underspend of capital, which got amended to become an appreciation of how nicely a small proportion of this had found its way into transport. See the Surrey Libdem Website here 

2. Theirs. A congratulatory motion about the Olympic Games and Surrey being ‘determined to play as full a part as possible in the 2012 Olympics.’ One of those motions you can’t vote against, and we didn’t try amend it. Even without opposition, we still managed to spend getting on for an hour talking about it, before and after the hour and a quarter lunch break.

3. Theirs. A motion regretting the ongoing illness of the Chair of the Stronger and Safer Committee, and appointing a Conservative to the post in his absence, over the head of the Vice Chair, Dave Goodwin, a Libdem Councillor. There was no point arguing against a political reality, but Jean Smith, from the Residents Association, was gracious enough to say what a good job Dave had been doing as Acting Chair.

4. Theirs. Another congratulatory motion about Cycle Woking, which I tried to amend to get a stronger assurance that the money used for this would not be allowed to compromise road repairs and needed road schemes, though I still supported the overall sentiment.  

The response to this seemed to me to clearly indicate that the responsibility for Cycle Woking stays very much with us in Woking. The Executive Member did not want to ‘fetter the discretion of the Local Committee,’ and was sure that ‘this project will not swallow money up’ or take money from other projects, unless that was what we ‘wanted at the time.’  Nick Skellett, the Leader of the Council, said much the same - we have to ‘decide locally in the Committee what you want to do …[it should be] debated locally rather than us give you a direction.’

This is fine, but I would have liked the recognition that Cycle Woking is a big extra commitment for our Highways team, and Woking needs a fairer share of highways money to implement it.

 A Mayor of Surrey?

A final item of interest, which will be voted on in a special meeting on 9th December, was whether we should have a mayor, or a strengthened Leader, in Surrey. There was an on-line consultation hidden in Hitchhikers-guide style on the Surrey Website that came out with 87 preferences for a Mayor and 47 for the Leader and Cabinet model.  Not much of a steer, from a population of something like 1M.