It's Time to Fix Surrey’s Finances

Change is urgently needed in the administration of Surrey.

Over the last four years, the Conservatives running Surrey County Council have

• provided poor services for residents
• wasted millions of pounds of Council Taxpayers money
• produced continual spin claiming that the council is "outstanding" when plainly it is not.

The outcome has been the demotion of the Council by the Audit Commission from a 4 Star council in 2005 to a 1 Star council in 2008.  

Bad decisions

Some of the decisions have been simply disastrous. The Conservatives pushed through a "business development" review that cut council services in areas including Highways, Libraries and Youth Centres.

But most of the decisions based on this review had to be reversed - and the jobs lost through redundancies had to be re-instated.  The result?  The £1.5 million spent on fees for consultants and the £4 million spent on redundancies were both wasted.

Highways staff cuts led to chaos

This review removed so many staff from the highways department, that there were too few people left to run the service, and 35 more highways officers subsequently had to be recruited.

The review damaged services and staff morale and failed to tackle the real problems facing the council, which still remain unresolved to this day.

A catalogue of failure

Over the past four years the Surrey County Council Conservative administration have:

• wasted money on consultants and external advisers in a failed move of County Hall from Kingston to Woking, having changed its mind at the last minute
• failed to manage the workforce properly resulting in over-reliance on agency staff and consultants. In the last nine months of 2008, the council spent £4 million on consultants and £10.5 million on agency staff
• wasted money on producing a flawed Waste Plan that has failed to provide waste facilities on time and that has been partly thrown out by the High Court. This means that the council will have to spend more money on Landfill Tax
• failed to update IT systems to ensure that they are fit for purpose. This means that for social care where IT systems are outdated and incompatible, money is being wasted as the service is not being run efficiently
• failed to reduce costly out of County placements for children with special needs or social care. This has resulted in a cost of £37.4 million in the first ten months of 2008/09. Poor decisions have resulted in Council Taxpayers money being wasted
• failed to manage the Highways contract that has resulted in overcharging and poor quality repairs. Another consequence is numerous potholes and an increase by two and a half in the number of claims by members of the public from 518 in 2006 to 1289 in 2008/09
• failed to establish the transport co-ordination centre on time. This was needed to improve the co-ordination of public transport and home to school transport so that it runs efficiently and is good value for money. The delay has delayed efficiency improvements and thus wasted money
• failed to open new respite care facilities on time. This inefficiency has delayed service improvements for Surrey residents and this inefficiency has provided poor value for money. failed to manage the budget properly, resulting in a £14 million overspend on the Children's Services budget which has put pressure on other services
• failed to improve the energy efficiency of council buildings, resulting in money being wasted on higher energy bills than necessary. Having misguidedly removed the post of Energy Manager under the "business development review", they recently reinstated the post.

The Conservatives have delivered Children's Services judged by Ofsted to be inadequate. Surrey was amongst only a handful of councils similarly rated, which included Haringey.

All in all this is a catalogue of poor decision-making that has resulted in millions of pounds of Council Taxpayers money being wasted and poor services for Surrey residents.

How to make Surrey more caring and effective...

The Liberal Democrats have been working hard to pull the Conservative administration back on track. See the Surrey Lib Dem Record of Action and Success 2005-2009

For more about making Surrey County Council competent and caring over the coming four years, see the Liberal Democrat programme of action for Surrey 2009-2013