Even when I’m doing my best to pay attention, it’s quite hard to keep track of exactly what’s going on even in the corner of County Hall I know.

At the Children and Familes Committee yesterday Jim Leivers, Interim Head of Children’s Service, confirmed that the Secretary of State was issuing a Notice to Improve, and said it would be issued that day. The ‘Notice’ makes explicit what she expects Surrey to do over the next 18 months to two years.

(This is all quite heavy stuff. I understand that with such a dire Joint Area Review report the Government did have the option to come in and take over chunks of running Surrey services instead of leaving it to SCC and the PCT to put their own houses in order.)

There will be an ‘Improvement Board’ with a Chair independent of the ‘lead agencies’, ie SCC and the Surrey Primary Care Trust.

In Surrey, the Executive is the equivalent of the Gordon Brown’s cabinet and is in charge of what happens. Scrutiny will happen both through the select committees,  and through a   Member Task Group meeting more frequently. There are two Councillors on this group who aren’t Conservatives, and I’m the Libdem nomination. It’s not a public meeting (it doesn’t look as if the ’Improvement Board’ will meet in public, either) so I can’t report back on it, but there will be public documents and information to which I can draw your attention. 

So - look at the now-published Action Plan and the first recommendation, for immediate action. It reads ’Ensure that an appropriate way is found for the successful dissemination of the findings of this report to children and young people in the area’.

A central plank in the plan for doing this can be found here:

It is a version of the report, intended for Young People. The preface, fronted by Dorothy Mitchell, one of the Exectuive members,  says ‘This document has been written by young people, for young people.’

Read for yourself and weep, if you believe that the young people of Surrey are already into writing such watered-down, minimally critical, blandly bureaucratic material, unless they are being heavily directed by their elders.

One consolation is that young people are unlikely to find this document. This was the route through the menus on the web site I eventually followed, knowing that the document was there:

About your council - How the Council works - Our Performance - Joint Area Review of Services for Children.

 - and it is only at the bottom of this page you find the link to it. Even putting ‘Young Persons Jar’ in the search box does not turn it up in the first ten results, and after that re I at least lose the will to search further.

This is action 1 of 22 in the Action Plan, most of them far weightier - number 8, ‘For immediate Action’ is a real tester: ‘Ensure that sufficient resources are allocated to deliver comprehensive health services, including school nurses, midwives and Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services (CAMHS) which are able to meet demand at all levels of service.’

If my involvement in any way helped us to a point where this was fully the case, I would feel that by itself went a long way to justify my last five years as a Councillor. The actions under (8) do look a lot more far-reaching and demanding than the actions under (1), but the contrast between the intention and reality of (1) is both comic and deeply worrying.