Guildford Constituency Labour Party It's time for Labour in Guildford
Brian Creese
The government has announced the most fundamental reorganisation of local government in decades.
Surrey is currently a 2-tier system (sometimes 3-tier system if you have a parish council) with responsibilities divided between them. County Council is responsible for education, roads (apart from national highways such as the A3), social services, fire brigade, etc, while the Borough is responsible for planning, refuse/recycling, crematorium, parks and so on.
As anyone who has canvassed for local elections will know, no resident has a clue who is responsible for what. The cliché is that we are assailed with complaints about potholes when campaigning for GBC elections – but potholes are a county council responsibilities. Parking is another difficult area with one tier being responsible for on street parking and the other for car parks… which is quite insane. Recycling trucks are local, the recycling sites are County, and so on. Understandably, voters are very vague about what they are voting for.
In practice it should be clear to the professionals who does what. But in the real world there are plenty of grey areas where this is it is not clear. All the different councils – and often other national agencies – can spend years arguing about who is responsible for what. It is very inefficient and wasteful. The most obvious recent local example is the tumbling weir.
For the resident who complains and is told no, it is not that councillor who is responsible but a different one, it understandably builds a view that the whole system doesn’t work.
Surrey currently has 11 borough councils and a County Council. This means there are 12 council offices, 12 sets of administration staff, 12 sets of senior officers – and although there is now some sharing, such as between Guildford and Waverley – at least 9 CEOs on 5 figure salaries. Add to that around 50 councillors per council and you can see that Surrey’s democracy does not come cheap.
The government is proposing a new system for Surrey of one or more unitary councils. Quite simply this means one council is responsible for all areas under local control. There will be one set of councillors to represent you and there is no hiding place. Councils can’t pass the buck and residents will know where they stand. Operation should be more efficient and without so many separate sets of staff and premises, costs will be lower.
In the past two County Council elections Guildford Labour has supported reorganisation into 3 unitaries. The Tories are desperately hoping to keep Surrey as one mega-unitary – which they think offers them the best chance of hanging onto power – and there is a pragmatic move toward two unitaries as a cheaper and easier change.
While the move toward unitaries is not up for discussion, the timescale is. In January the Tories on the County Council pushed through agreement to go for ‘priority’ status, meaning they want to be in the first wave of reorganisations. This means they have to agree a proposal by mid March and will necessitate cancelling the May elections. If the government accepts their application the County Council has to reach a ‘broad consensus’ in the next few weeks as to how they want reorganisation to go forwards.
At this time nothing has been agreed, but the timescale is tight. I will be update this site as soon as there is more news on this development.
