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.

If by any chance you’ve dropped in looking for last night’s Local Committee meeting, I’ll get to that tomorrow! I sometimes think it would be better to blog quickly rather than give a neat account - I’ve  rather missed the boat now to tell you about Full Council on 13th October.  Fortunately Peter Lambell (here) has written about the Conservatives refusal even to debate the 10:10 campaign, which would have committed Surrey to reducing its own CO2 emissions by 10% in 2010, while Will Forster has written here about the part of the ‘Leader’s Report’ saying Surrey staff shouldn’t expect a pay-rise this year.(Povey: ‘SCC will do its utmost to avoid redundancy … pay freeze for at least one year … jobs are more important than minimal rises in pay …’ ) He’s also covered the three motions that were put in to debate where we should go with the Frater report. No prizes for guessing which party put in the one that got passed.

So that just leaves me with some of the fun bits -

Value for money? - barely, and that’s official

It felt as if there was a neat irony in Dr. Povey near the start of the meeting and at the top of his report saying ‘This administration will be about value for money for the people of Surrey’, and the information that the External Auditor, working in the Audit Commission’s framework, gave Surrey County Council only a 2 (meeting minimal requirements) for Managing finances, Governing the business, and managing resources, with only a 1 (a fail) for the ‘good governance sub-theme’.  

This was in the Annual Governance Statement from the Audit and Governance Committee, which came last but one on the agenda, when numbers had thinned out and enthusiasm for debate been blunted by the lunch.

The Basingstoke Canal and fears of failure

This isn’t really a fun bit. I have been alarmed for some time as a member of the Joint Managment Committtee of the Basingstoke Canal how often we hear about dangers that seem to be accepted as a fact of life that we just have a little moan about, but don’t make too much fuss. At the last meeting the Canal Director said in reply to a question on his report about risks of harm to people and property of the sort that would come about through a canal breach that ‘we are now moving into unacceptable areas’, and I quoted this in a question to to the Cabinet Member. Her reply pointed out that a major survey of the canal’s condition will come to the two councils that own it, Surrey and Hampshire, ‘early in 2010′, and that in the past these Councils have paid for major structural repairs out of their capital budgets, rather than expecting the Canal’s annual budget to cover it. She would not be drawn on whether Surrey would draw on its capital reserves if necessary to fund repair, but spoke of ways of letting the canal earn money.

However I think the second depends on the first - there are a lot of canal enthusiasts who would pay to use the canal if it could be opened frequently and predictably. There would also be benefits to the local economy. But this needs the investment to start with - and leaving the canal literally to rot isn’t really an option, given the dangers involved, the function it fulfils for drainage, and its status as an SSSI 

Stars of the small screen next …

“Technicalities permitting”, Dr. Povey says we’ll have webcasting of all County Council meetings next January. Whether this means Committees as well, I don’t know.  So when watching Parliament becomes too exciting you can turn to nice, cosy SCC for entertainment. I’ll have to be even more careful to get my quotes right, with everything on the record. And you’ll be able to check out whether you’re getting value for money from the Chairman and Vice Chairman’s dress allowances.

No more alcohol during working hours

Some good news on the not-wasting-taxpayers-money-on-perks front: SCC is going to follow the example of most large business organisations in the 21st century and not allow alcohol during working hours.

I checked with a Cabinet member later on, and yes, this does mean no more wine at formal County Council lunches, and no more sherry with the Chairman even for the select few.

Gosh! maybe this administration really is different!

Schools and Learning - 15th October

I’ve already written about the Sschool Organisation Plan (see posting lower down)  but I took the opportunity to ask PJ Wilkinson, the lead Officer, about Kingfield school in South Woking.The recommendation to make this infant school inito a through primary school, going on to year 6, still depends on ’significant extra funding’ which has not been finally agreed. Mr. Wilkinson said he would be advising parents that they must fill in applications for other schools, but he will be getting back in touch with them later in the year if the option of staying on at Kingfield is going to be available.

Clearly the whole situation needs to be resolved before places are finally allocated, and after the meeting I heard that at least one local school that normally takes children from Kingfield is concerned about what its numbers will look like - but since the problem stems from a need for extra school places, this should be resolvable.

The Committee also had to recommend to the Cabinet what admissions criteria should go out to consultation for the year 2010/11. We duly agreed pretty much the same criteria as last year, except with a loosening of the sibling criterion so that an older sibling, not just a younger sibling, can get priority if they already have a brother or sister in a school.This is expected to have the most effect on families moving into a new area.  

There was also a very good and full account of the Special Needs Strategy, which you might like to look at if you have a particular interest in the subject. 

Children and Families Committee - 21 October

This week’s Children and Families committee had a less heavy agenda than I remember for a long time - and, perversely, was less well attended with a sufficient number of members simply not turning up that even the table in the relatively small Committee Room C felt over-large. It was still a worthwhile meeting, with what I thought was a significant report from the Surrey Children’s Services Improvement Board. For the first time since last spring it was possible for someone outside senior management or the ruling party to a systematic run-down on what progress was being made on the issues that had been brought into sharp focus at that time. I found tracking appendix 3 (the improvement notice report) against Appendix 2 (the text of the improvement notice) particularly interesting. But at the committee meeting there was a surprising reluctance on the part of the Officer presenting the SCC report to agree that the Committee should regularly see the Improvement Board reports, even though to some extent the Improvement Board is doing the job of scrutiny that otherwise would have to be covered by this Committee.

The prevarication was such that I’m still not sure we’ll get them. But as was pointed out to me by another Officer after the meeting, there’s always the Freedom of Information act. Which is OK when you know what you don’t know.

One member of the Committee present and making a serious contribution to the discussion was Nick Skellett, Leader of the Council up until last year, and the person to whom the Improvement Notice was originally addressed. I think it’s rather brave and determined of him to have joined this Committee, and look forward to hearing what he says - especially if he proves to be a bit of a gamekeeper turned poacher when it comes to asking knowledgable questions.

This Tuesday’s meeting of the Local Committee was held especially to approve the plan and Programme for Woking that Surrey County Council has to submit to Cycling England to get hold of the £1.8M awarded to Woking, as one of ten towns emerging successful from bidding for the title ‘Cycling Town’.

Money

We don’t just get handed the money - it has to be matched by an equal amount raised from other sources. Given the general state of Surrey’s roads, the huge sums of money needed to repair them, and the cuts we are actually seeing Surrey County Council making in planned spending on Woking, it would be unwise to rely on County Hall handing over that sort of sum of money simply because this is a good, ecologically sound idea.

Contributions to matched funding will come from ’section 106 and section 27B’ money paid by developers and negotiated when planning permission is given; plus money squeezed from Woking’s ‘local allocation’, used for local road schemes - improvements such a controlled pedestrian crossings.

The paper to the committee says the ‘programme will need to be reviewed on an annual basis and the Local Committee for Woking decide on the priority given to the elements of work included within the Woking Cycling Town against other Integrated Transport schemes which are funded using the Local Transport Plan devolved budget.’

I think this message from the Local Highways Manager roughly translates as: ’Look, there’s a great two-for-one offer here but you guys on the Local Committee are going to have to fight out between you what gets dropped while we grab it.’ With the unspoken extra thought: ‘Unless you can get your Dad (ie County Hall) to stump up some more.’

(If you see the Developers as rich uncles, they’re less rich than they used to be … )   

But for the moment Surrey, in partnership with Woking, is going forward with a ’we’ll make it happen’ approach, which I find I have to applaud - this really is going to be a great improvement, and a practical contribution to reducing traffic congestion and sparing the environment.

The six essentials    

• Improving existing routes
• Making the Basingstoke Canal path a great route through the Borough with good links off it, including ways to and through the town centre, with a way of riding from the Canal to the station through the centre of the town.
• A better North / South route that will join up with National Cycle routes at Chertsey and Guildford.
• More bike parking, especially at stations. 
• Encouragement for people to cycle more.
• Links with schools

The Fancy Bits

There’ll be better signing. The trails will be named after planets and their moons. (Other towns have been looked at to see how they do things, and themes are common.) Lighting is currently not on the plans, but is recognised as being highly desirable, at least for the heavier use parts of the canal path near the centre of Woking.

I asked whether we mightn’t have some sculpture, as I’ve seen on some trails? This hasn’t been thought of yet, but the bridges will all be clearly named, so that they can be used as landmarks.

What it means for Knaphill and Goldsworth West

Although strictly only the stretch of towpath from Hermitage Bridge to Brookwood is in Knaphill, this is a significant route, as I saw when I bicycled it at the end of the school day last Monday. A number of children from the Winston Churchill school walk down along the Hermitage Road, cross fast-moving traffic, and then walk along the muddy and difficult path to the north of the canal, through the Country Park. Some primary school children also go in the opposite direction, from Brookwood school back towards Knaphill.

This route, on the same side as the Brookwood Hospital Estate, is broader than the towpath on the South side, but anyone using the Canal as a through route would have to cross the canal to change sides at the Hermitage Bridge, which has a very narrow path.  So the current intention is to provide an extra footbridge over the canal, so that pedestrians can avoid the crossing on the Hermitage Bridge, and then use the North side up to the bridge at Brookwood Crossroads.

Unfortunately that will make the rather splendid wheelchair-friendly ramp down to the southern path (itself currently impassable to wheelchairs) redundant. But I think it’s probably the right decision, given the number of people who will be able to access the northern path relatively easily.

As I understand it, the surface should be as good as the currently existing stretch from Woking Town Centre to Kiln Bridge. (The next section, to Hermitage Bridge, isn’t quite finished but should also come up to that standard.)

A good, safe pedestrian and cycling  route into St. Johns  or indeed all the way to Woking, will be a real benefit, for all ages.  One of the big problems for young or less well off people on the Hospital Estate is how to get off it - buses are expensive, parents not always available to drive.  And the more people who use the path, the safer even nervous people should feel it is to use.

(Which is not to guarantee there will be no problems - for example, motor cycles are going to have to be deterred from using the track, for everybody’s sake.)

So eventually, if we can get this section properly sorted out for Knaphill (including the new Hermitage Bridge) plus improvements and even some extensions to existing bike routes through Knaphill, I think we’ll be doing quite well. 

The improved routes into and out of Woking and will be good for Goldsworth West too, and its likely the whole of Goldsworth park will be targetted quite early on for ‘personalised travel planning’. What this’ll be I don’t know; I trust it will be a benefit and not a nuisance.

The launch will be this coming Monday, 22nd September, from 10.00am to 4.00pm at The Lightbox. I hope it doesn’t rain, so that I can get there comfortably by bike!

In my part of Woking, appreciating the Basingstoke Canal and wanting to see it well cared for and used is, in political jargon, ‘motherhood and apple pie’. Like good food or family loyalty people are automatically in favour of it, and don’t want anything to spoil it.

Yesterday’s meeting of the Basingstoke Canal Joint Management Committee showed, albeit in a civilised, polite manner, the clash of interests underlying any decisions made about its management.

I’m one of the four Committee members representing Surrey County Council.  There are another four from Hampshire, which is a joint owner of the Canal with Surrey County Council. Then there are Councillors from the Boroughs and Districts it runs through, from the Surrey and Hampshire Canal Society, and from Natural England.

I won’t give a blow-by-blow account of the whole meeting, just some highlights from the report by Ian Brown, the Canal Director.

Risk

I’ve put this first because, being a risk-averse person myself, the heading ‘Risk Management ‘ and the words ‘the canal now represents a significant increased risk to the joint owners with certain critical areas going from amber to red condition’ attracted my attention.

It’s ‘interesting’ to note that owning the Canal is not a barrel of laughs for either Surrey or Hampshire - as was noted rather ruefully by the Chairman, a member of Surrey County Council’s (overwhelmingly Conservative) Executive, when he said that for both Hampshire and Surrey the Basingstoke Canal carried the highest of any ‘corporate risk’.

A major contributing factor to rating risk highly is the serious potential consequences of a canal breach. ‘Mitigation’ in this case means vigilance, monitoring the state of the canal and, for example, removing trees that have reached the point where they ‘are directly damaging or threatening the integrity of the canal bank side.’

The ‘amber to red’ comment refers to staffing level problems. In answer to my question about the nature of the risk, I was told that though a ‘number of embankments and cuttings’ give concern, the risk is well controlled and we are ‘not expecting a major, major disaster’ - though it will be good when there can be more assurance after a full condition survey, which unfortunately won’t be completed until 2010.

In the meantime Ian Brown said that ‘if I’m woken up by rain and high winds then I do worry - especially with the tree cover,’ but he has a ‘very good team’. In June last year, when there was a problem with a collapsed culvert, rangers were on the spot within half and hour and the problem was being brought under control within two hours.

Trees - too much of a good thing?

Discussion of the Conservation Management Plan, which should be finalised and submitted for approval next October, inevitably led to questions about tree-cutting, and trees felled in St. Johns to considerable outcry in the local papers. Ian Brown said there were ‘just three trees  … we take tree management very, very seriously … the three trees in St. Johns were three out of nearly six hundred.’ There had been a ’significant risk to the structure of the canal’ , which is only constructed of green sand, with the ‘windmill effect’ of full-grown trees. ‘

He said that there was also generally a need to let in more light for ‘flora’, especially the marginal and sub-aquatic plants that are important to the canal’s SSSI status. The SSSI’s condition is currently assessed as ‘unfavourable’ and needs to be brought into ‘unfavourable, recovering’ and , ideally, to ’favourable’ .

There is also evidence that encroaching mature trees badly affect the water levels in the canal, which is bad for boat-users, wildlife, and the structural integrity of the canal itself. 

It’s one of those paradoxes that trying to ’save’ trees along the canal does no favours to ‘nature’.

Navigation v. nature?

Similarly it can sometimes seem that there is a conflict when boats passing along the canal and the work necessary to make this possible arapparently disturb wildlife and destroy some of the vegetation - but only this disturbance and destruction allows the canal and the SSSI to continue to exist. ‘In the short-term, channel vegetation owes its diversity and conservation interest in part to the disturbance regimes sustained by low density boat traffic and/or vegetation control’; while in the longer term, without dredging the canal would silt up leading to ‘extinction of the waterway and its aquatic communities.’

Navigation v. British Rail?

Canal users have been considerably put out by the length of time it has taken for the old iron and steel railway bridge at Ash Vale to be replaced. The canal has had to be closed at that point, preventing boat-owners on the Hampshire side coming down to the Wey navigation. According to members of the public asking questions and commenting at the meeting, this has caused upset and indignation. The Canal Director explained at some length the complexity of the work in engineering terms. Early approachs had not worked as well as hoped, but ’at the end of the day, the job had to be done’. The bridge had reached a point where safety was the issue and a complete replacement the only realistic option.

The current hope is that the work will be finished by the end of June.

Improvement v. neglect?

The project to improve the Canal towpath, bringing it back closer to its original width and providing a better east-west route not only for cyclists but also for parents with push-chairs and for the disabled in wheelchairs, is going ahead. The first stretch, from Kiln Bridge in St. John’s to Monument bridge in Woking, is now supposed to start by the end of this month,  going on through May. The surface will be tar and chip.

Formal planning permission has been gained from Woking. It was unfortunate there had been ’bad press’ in the local papers.  ‘Rest assured, we are not going to destroy the habitat,’ Ian Brown said.

Potential bad behaviour of cyclists was the concern of one member of the public, who seemed to expect old people frequently to have their bones broken or children to be knocked into the canal and drowned. Ian Brown said that if necessary physical barriers would be put up to reduce cycling at speed; and that there were bye-laws and the authority would be prepared to ‘make an example’.

A more temperate questioner asked whether a risk analysis had been carried out - ‘Yes, Sustrans did a risk analysis … cycling must be self-policing … only a very very small minority [cause problems]’

‘Could a bell be made compulsory?’ a member of the Committee asked.

No commitment to that, but ‘there will be close monitoring’. And not only of cyclists - there’s ‘also a problem with dog-walkers’.

Personally, I am very much looking forward to using the new track to as part of my journey to Kingston for Council meetings, if only the stretch of it taking me into Woking to catch the train. 

  

The work being started on the tow path between St. John’s and Woking is routine maintenance. Three dead trees are being taken out and dead wood pruned out of another six trees. The lovely row of oaks is not being rooted out.

Between Kiln Bridge and Parley Drive two sections of the bank are going to be restored where they have eroded in the past and narrowed the tow path.

The application for planning permission to widen and improve the tow path more generally has not yet been decided. If it is allowed, the present maintenance work may overlap with these changes, but it is not pre-empting the planning process.