The somewhat flawed but very important first consultation process for the new Local Plan has concluded and the results are being analysed.

The consultation, based on the disputed requirement to build nearly 6,000 additional new houses, has, as expected, raised significant and controversial proposals and suggestions and the conclusions are awaited with great anticipation and concern.

Mole Valley Liberal Democrats have deliberately not sought to lead opinion on the proposals because of the importance of ensuring that everyone has the opportunity of freely expressing their views.

But our position remains clear with regard to our policies of protecting our market towns and rural environment from developers who would happily concrete over as large an area as possible to meet perceived housing need.

• We maintain our opposition to developments in the Green Belt on land that continues to perform the function of Green Belt and our support for the significant protected conservation areas in our main town centres which would restrict or prevent major high rise development so that our heritage can be preserved.
• We are deeply concerned about the possibility of any large scale development either in the Green Belt or beyond the Green Belt because of the potential loss of countryside and because our infrastructure of road and transport facilities is unable to cope with current demands let alone further significant development and we believe that the only time rural land should be released for development is in small scale plots for affordable housing for local residents where the proposed development is supported by the local community or for farm diversification to ensure our farms remain viable.
• We need housing development but we also need a planning system that would allow the provision of affordable and small scale development where brownfield land is available for such development rather than the current restrictions which often militate against such developments.

As Liberal Democrats, we will be looking very carefully at the outcome of the consultation and will take account of what comes forward. We will, however, be very surprised if the outcome does not support these principles.

Surrey County Council has been ordered to pay £18,400 in compensation to the family of a severely autistic child after a highly critical report from the Local Government Ombudsman.

The Ombudsman Report criticised all aspects of the County Council’s handling of the case, which concluded that there was fault by the County Council and that an injustice had taken place.

The Report makes very concerning reading. It shows that Surrey County Council failed to provide the support needed by a severely autistic child and his family in that there were multiple failures in terms of assessing the needs of the child, assessing risk, providing support when needed, delayed decision-making, and poor complaints handling.

Overall, the Report highlights systemic weaknesses in the County Council’s processes and decision-making.

As Liberal Democrats, we participate in the Improvement Board for Children’s Services and are aware that improvements have been made in the service more recently. But nevertheless, we are now calling on the County Council to assure us and residents that processes are now in place to prevent similar incidents occurring again in Surrey.

We have also requested an assurance that the County Council’s assessment, decision-making systems, processes, and support to children and families have improved so that other families get the support that they need on a timely basis.

Liberal Democrat County Councillors have condemned a decision by Surrey County Council to award a £400,000 grant to an art gallery which has £38million of funds and an income of £1.2million a year.

The Watts Gallery in Compton, Guildford, was awarded the money despite the County Council’s Chief Finance Officer warning that the County Council’s financial position is extremely serious, that the proposed expenditure has not been budgeted for, and that the gallery was already “financially viable”.

We believe that at a time of huge spending cuts in Surrey, it is quite incredible that the priority of the Conservatives is to spend hundreds of thousands of pounds on an art gallery which appears to be in good financial health and well supported.

This grant contrasts with other recent decisions taken by the Conservative administration at County Hall such as the £3.7million cut to Housing Related Support – a budget cut which affects some of the most vulnerable people in our community.

As a result of this contrast, we ask, “How on earth can the Leader of the Council look residents of sheltered housing, who are about to lose some of their warden schemes, in the face and tell them that this is a sensible use of public money?

This decision should be reversed as quickly as possible, with the money re-invested in council services to the benefit of Surrey residents.

We support the arts but we also support sheltered housing for vulnerable people even more and furthermore we suspect GF Watts would too.

Liberal Democrat County Councillors have opposed a £2.8million cut to the County Council’s Housing Related Support budget – the support the County Council gives to the county’s most vulnerable residents to support their housing needs.

Currently, Housing Related Support is a lifeline which provides help to 4,477 residents across the county. It helps people to cope and manage in their own homes, and supports those with mental health issues or people recovering from addiction with everyday tasks such as shopping, cooking and cleaning.

The support is frequently provided by the wardens in sheltered accommodation, making the provision of warden assisted accommodation financially viable. It also saves money by helping people before problems start to escalate and so preventing a more expensive support being needed further down the line.

But, under the County Council’s new proposals, all support from those who do not qualify for assistance under the Care Act (2014) will be withdrawn.

This will result in many residents being left without the vital support they need to remain in their own homes. It will also result in wardens being withdrawn from housing schemes where, with the loss of the support funding, the provision of warden assisted accommodation is no longer financially viable – with the result that the service will have to be provided by more expensive mobile teams for those who still qualify for the support.

Liberal Democrats on Surrey County Council are calling on the Conservative administration at County Hall to stop further investment in commercial property outside of Surrey and to address the scandal of empty County Council owned buildings in Surrey either through using these buildings to provide services or ensuring that they are sold or let.

The Conservative administration at County Hall has invested £199 million in commercial properties outside of Surrey whilst it has allowed properties that it owns in Surrey, such as the former Adult Education Centre in Dene Street – Dorking, to lie empty and decay.

Liberal Democrats believe that the Conservatives at County Hall need to get their priorities right, and that it is unacceptable and risky to invest huge sums of money in properties outside Surrey whilst leaving its own buildings in the county vacant, deteriorating, losing value, and prone to vandalism whilst costing taxpayers significant sums of money to secure these vacant buildings.

The County Council is not a property company and its primary role is to provide services to Surrey residents. Our message for the Conservatives at County Hall is that they need to get their house on order, to stop risking public money on commercial property investments outside Surrey and to start managing the properties that the County Council already own in Surrey and ensuring that public money is not wasted on securing vacant buildings.

Liberal Democrat Campaigner Lesley Bushnell and Liberal Democrat County Councillors have presented a 3,245 signature petition to the County Council’s Cabinet calling for the Community Recycling Centres (“CRCs”) to remain open and for the proposal to increase charges for dumping waste to be withdrawn.

The Liberal Democrats also encouraged residents to respond to the County Council’s own consultation – and 13,637 did so making it by far the largest response that the County Council has ever received to such a consultation.

In response, the Tories have watered down their proposals but most CRCs across the County will no longer be open seven days a week.

When the decision is implemented, the Dorking Tip will only be open on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday and the Cranleigh Tip will only open on Saturday, Sunday, and Monday. The Leatherhead Tip will open six days a week as it will close on a Friday.

This is a set of ill thought out proposals. CRCs are a success story – they provided residents with a helpful and convenient method of disposing of waste; they helped the County Council to improve waste collection; they made a major contribution to improving our environment; and they were a significant deterrent to fly tipping.

The closure days and withdrawal of the free daily allowance to dump DIY waste are self-defeating and unacceptable and we are fearful that this will lead to increased fly-tipping and damage to the environment.

The Liberal Democrats have launched a petition to save the Surrey Performing Arts Library and have already received strong support from Surrey residents who have reacted with dismay on hearing of the threatened closure and of the County Council’s consultation exercise which will give residents just two weeks to respond with their views on this proposal.

The Library, which is currently based near Dorking at Denbies Wine Estate, houses a truly unique collection of music, theatre, orchestral and dance materials available for public loan. It also holds a specialist Vaughan Williams collection, a permanent display which covers the life and works of Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872-1958) and which commemorates his strong links with the area where he lived and where he composed some of his most important pieces.

We believe that the Performing Arts Library is a great asset to the County. Its impact is immense: it not only benefits the many groups that use play scripts and musical scores to perform plays and orchestral works, but also benefits the audiences who enjoy the performances. Overall, it is an important part of Surrey’s musical and artistic heritage and, if we were to lose such a specialist service alongside the many dedicated and knowledgeable staff, it would be an act of great folly.

Our petition can be signed at: http://scc.lib.dm/P22S

The County Council consultation can be found at: https://www.surreysays.co.uk/libraries-service/38ff7ab4/

The Liberal Democrats have called the proposed “Traffic Management Scheme which supports the proposed oil exploration at Coldharbour “unworkable”.

We believe that Coldharbour Lane, as it is a narrow steep and winding country lane with poor sightlines, is unsuitable for large numbers of HGVs and are concerned about emergency service vehicles being able to access local residents when the road is closed and when slow convoys of HGVs are using the lane. There is also significant potential for the banks along the lane to be damaged by HGVs.

We thus believe that the Traffic Management Scheme has not been properly thought through and welcome the decision taken by the County Council’s Planning and Regulatory Committee to defer approval of the plan as this gives everyone a further opportunity to look at and consider whether a workable plan can be drafted.

The County Council will now be looking at the following points:

* whether the car park at Rykas will be available for taking convoys of HGVs en route to the site and if Rykas is not available, what the alternative would be;

* the ability for local residents to communicate when Coldharbour Lane is closed given the lack of mobile phone reception in the area (residents living on Coldharbour Lane are supposed to phone a mobile number when the road is closed to gain permission to leave but their ability to do so is questionable); and

* whether the applicant will be using stones or aluminium trackway sheeting to provide hard standing at the site as if stones are used the number of HGV movements would be considerably more.

We hope that when the County Council’s Planning and Regulatory Committee next considers the Traffic Management Scheme that they will reach the conclusion that it is unworkable and that they will reject it.

Liberal Democrat County Councillors have expressed their concern that Surrey residents may be living in “unsafe” accommodation after it was revealed that six care homes which have contracts with Surrey County Council have been rated as “Unsafe” by the Care Quality Commission.

 We recognise that the County Council does not send new residents to care homes that have received a poor rating and that it puts in place an action plan to improve care homes which have received this rating and have existing Surrey residents.

However, it should concern us all that we have Surrey residents receiving care packages paid for by the County Council who are living in accommodation which is rated as “Unsafe” by the Care Quality Commission.

We fully support the County Council’s corporate priority which sets out that residents should ‘live and age well’, but believe that it is not possible to age well in an environment that has been deemed unsafe by a national regulator.

As a result, we have called on the County Council to pro-actively work with care homes and to take immediate action to improve standards where necessary to ensure that no Surrey resident in receipt of a care package paid for by the County Council is living in a home that has been rated as unsafe.

Theresa May asked the country to elect a strong and stable government on 8 June and to avoid a coalition of chaos with Labour and the Scottish Nationalists running the country. But, instead she has given us a weak and wobbly government only kept in office through confidence and supply agreement with Ulster’s Democratic Unionist crackpots.  

In short, she is in government but not in power.

Earlier this year, Councillor Hodge, as Leader of Surrey County Council, sought more money from central government to fund local services. He also sought to enlist the 11 Surrey Conservative MPs, including four Cabinet Ministers, to help him. But they came back from Westminister with nothing, saying that there was no “magic money tree”.

Furthermore, Councillor Hodge underpinned his financial forecasts for the future with the expectation that this Council would be able to retain the business rates raised in the county next year under a pilot scheme to reform local government finance. A proposal that this Council’s Conservative Councillors were depending on but a proposal which the new Conservative government, reliant DUP support, has ditched.

And whilst Councillor Hodge and Surrey’s 11 Conservative MPs get nothing for supporting the government, the 10 DUP MPs supporting the Government have shown that the “magic money tree” denied to Surrey’s Conservative MPs really does exist. They have obtained an extra £1billion for schools, hospitals, infrastructure, and public services in Northern Ireland. In fact, just the sort of money that Surrey needs to protect its services.

This really does beg the question: If ten DUP MPs can get £1billion for supporting the government, why can Surrey’s 11 Conservative MPs not get anything for providing similar support to the government?

Similar numbers of MPs but in reality very different levels of influence over the Prime Minister. And Surrey loses out.