It has been rumoured in the press that Surrey County Council is considering moving out of County Hall in Kingston.

There’s nothing wrong about that – Kingston is not in Surrey and County Hall is expensive to run.  However, a major and potential expensive relocation during a recession doesn’t sound sensible either.  Especially since the discussion has been about the Council moving out of County Hall in Kingston to another complex, still outside Surrey namely to Farnborough.

So at the last Full County Council meeting, I asked the Leader of the Council if the Council has, at any level, discussed or considered relocating out of County Hall recently.  I assumed his answer would be – no of course not, we aren’t that stupid. Or don’t believe all you read in press, something along those lines – but his response was dismissive and avoided answering the question:

We continually review our office portfolio as part of the council’s ‘Making a Difference’ programme.  I would like to congratulate the Strategic Director, Julie Fisher and her team for all the work they have done to rationalise our office portfolio.  Mrs Fisher’s team has moved over 2,000 staff over the last 12 months and have co-located our Adult Social Care staff with Districts and Boroughs to better integrate our services with partners saving the Council over £3million a year.

Although I cannot see the Council moving out of it’s current home any time soon – partly because finding a buyer from County Hall is going to be difficult – if the Leader of the Council won’t rule it out, neither will I.  So watch this watch this space.

The Coalition Government has awarded Surrey County Council £3.9 million to encourage sustainable transport and economic growth – and might grant Surrey a further £16 million in June as part of their Local Sustainable Transport Fund.

With elections to Woking Borough Council on May 3rd, I am currently very busy campaigning for Lib Dem colleagues.  So I’m in a partisan frame of mind for obvious reasons, however, putting aside the election for a moment – the Local Sustainable Transport Fund is a good example of cross-party working both nationally and locally.  Norman Baker, the Lib Dem in the Department of Transport leads on this in Westminster and Whitehall – and in Surrey, the plans are being put together by a task group of councillors from both parties.

We already have Drive Smart and Park Smart to tackle anti-social driving and parking respectively, now this Government grant will step up a Travel Smart programme to get the financial and environmental costs of travel down.

The County Council wants to hear from residents about how travelling around Surrey could be improved.  For more information on the consultation please go here to give your views - there will be exhibitions in key county towns and the Council have a ‘survey monkey’ survey for residents to complete.

Although plans are at an early stage, we know that the Government grant will be divided between the Guildford, Redhill & Reigate and Woking Boroughs.  In Woking, the Council looks set use the grant to support a new access road to Sheerwater through the Monument Way East Industrial Estate, several new cycle routes across Woking, better information on bus services and giving buses priority at junctions, new crossings at key locations and a three year programme of community grants in Sheerwater and Maybury.

On 26th April, it was announced that the final stage of the Tour of Britain cycle race will be held in Surrey and will travel through South Woking.

The race will take place on Sunday 16th September 2012, starting in Priory Park in Reigate and finishing on Guildford High Street.  The event will also travel along New Lane, Westfield Road and Old Woking High Street in South Woking.

I think it is terrific for this event to be going on in our neighbourhood – but I appreciate this event will cause some disruption when it happens.  However, although it was officially announced this week – us councillors have known for sometime and have already been planning how the event will work.

The Tour of Britain will function as a rolling road closure, so traffic will be held at junctions as the cyclists and covering motorcade passes through each area.  So each closure would normally be about 15 minutes and a maximum of 30 minutes.

I want to ensure Surrey County Council as the highway authority informs residents affected of the plans – but for understandable reasons they are focusing on the Olympic cycle races in July before spending too much time on the Tour of Britain in September.

Surrey County Council and St Dunstan’s Catholic Primary School have started a consultation on plans to expand the Onslow Crescent School.

As I reported recently, Surrey needs more primary school places and the County Council has worked out that seven new classes across seven schools could meet the extra demand for places.  Three of those seven expansions are likely to be permanent expansions – one of those St Dunstan’s, hence the consultation.

St Dunstan’s Primary School is currently a two-form entry school of two classes in each year, the Council’s proposal is to increase this to three classes.  The idea is that a demountable classroom will be installed until a new building is opened on site in September 2013.

Please see the full consultation document here.  There will also be two public meetings at the School on Tuesday 8th May from 7 pm or Monday 14th May also from 7 pm in the School Hall.  Any comments should be sent to Kieran Holliday on schoolorg@surreycc.gov.uk – the consultation closes on 25th May.

Each year, the six other County Councillors on the Woking Local Committee and I have a budget of £87,750 for local good causes called Members’ Allocations.

We are meant to each have £8,250 to spend and on top of that, we share £30,000 between us for capital and one-off projects.  However, to get best value for money we pool all our allocations together, so each Councillor ‘bids’ per project for a share of the full £87,750 budget.

Based on the last annual report on Members’ Allocations, I spent the most (£18,663) closely followed by the Geoff Marlow, Conservative Councillor for The Byfleets with £18,439.  On the other end of the spectrum, Ben Carasco the Conservative Councillor for Horsell only spent £2,163.

Anyway – at the last Local Committee of this municipal year, us Councillors agreed how to spend the remaining £38,000 of Members’ Allocation money.  If we don’t spend the full amount in time - County Hall will take it away from us.

I was able to get £3,455 for refurbishing the kitchen in the Children’s Centre at the Old Woking Community Centre, £2,826 for helping the Mayford Hall Bowling Club to repair the wall alongside their bowling green as it was unsafe and £1,934 to fund a Woking Football Club project so they can run free football training and coaching sessions for young people in Barnsbury and Westfield.

All three Lib Dem County Councillors in Woking sponsored a £5,082 bursary for looked after children, and the Committee agreed that the remaining £10,000 should go to the Woking Hospice to help with the refurbishment of their ten in-patient rooms.

The Surrey County Council plan to replace librarians with volunteers in 10 branch libraries was ruled unlawful by the High Court today.

Although decisions to close libraries and whether to use librarians or volunteers is and should be a political rather than legal one, the Court said the Council “failed to have due regard to the equality issues” in their decision which they are required to do under the Equality Act 2010.

So what happens next?  Well, the High Court still needs to decide whether or not to quash the Council’s decision.  If they do quash the decision, the County Council will have to start all over again – however if the decision is not quashed, I imagine the policy will go back to the Cabinet with a new and correct Equality Impact Assessment that clearly wasn’t done the first time around.

On Thursday last week, I attended the official opening of the Hoe Valley Scheme  - since the £44 million partnership project between the Environment Agency and Woking Borough Council is almost complete.

The project has protected hundreds of homes in South Woking and Westfield Primary School from flooding, improved the highway infrastructure, cleaned up a contaminated tip and built two state-of-the-art community buildings in Goldsworth Park and Woking Park.  Despite issues in replacing the Elm Bridge, the Scheme as a whole looks set to be delivered on time and under budget.

For many years, the Borough Council wanted to regenerate the Hoe Valley area and reduce flooding in the area – however it was only when the Environment Agency stated that the former Westfield tip needed to be cleaned up did the project run by the Council’s agenda.  The Conservative Council Group was deeply divided over what to do, with the then Leader, Deputy Leader and Housing Lead losing their jobs as a result.  The current Conservative Leader of the Council who led the Hoe Valley opening ceremony last week, also yet the coup against the previous Tory Executive (since they were considering the Hoe Valley Scheme) and didn’t support it originally.

However, thanks to Lib Dem pressure the opportunity was not missed – all Lib Dems Councillors and enough Conservatives had a majority to win the vote.  Cross party working has been critical to this work, as the Hoe Valley Oversight Panel has been chaired by the Lib Dem Group Leader.

Although official ceremony took place around the above marker in between Kingfield Road and Woking Park, I feel one of the main legacies of the scheme will be the new Hoe Valley Park.  It has excellent paths and cycle ways, new play areas, balancing ponds and much more.  Though, the Park is nice in the sunshine will really need some rain to get the greenery growing.

The main reason why some Conservative Councillors and equally some residents had concerns was over the cost of the scheme – at £44 million.  Part of the funding was from the Environment Agency, which if the Council hadn’t acted when it did that money would have been lost.  The remaining is coming from the Council selling land it has, but that it no longer needs.

The house on White Rose Lane, between Ockenden Road and Woking Park will be sold to a residential developer as part of this – and the Council will also be selling the land where the former community groups and tip were on Westfield Avenue, to a developer to built just over 150 homes.

During Tuesday’s Full Surrey County Council meeting, the Lib Dem Group attempted to get the Conservative administration to accept that a safety net of adult care homes for Surrey’s most vulnerable should continue to be run by the County Council.

We proposed the following motion to try and set Council policy on care homes:

This Council agrees that owing to an ageing population, a large number of older people will need care and support, and that:

- More support should be provided to enable Surrey’s older people to live in their own homes for as long as possible

- Older people with high or complex needs require support in residential care homes and these should continue to be provided directly by the County Council.  This would guarantee that a number of high quality places will be maintained given the instability within the private home care sector.

However, the Conservatives amended the motion (the last paragraph in particular was changed completely) to let the Council put all of it’s adult care homes out to be privately run.  The Tories having a big majority at County Hall, easily won the vote.

Although that was disappointing, what really worried me was what the Cabinet Member for Adult Social Care said in the debate.  He clearly said that behind closed doors he and others were considering the County Council not running any of it’s own adult care homes in the future.

I think the existing way the Council has access to a mix of homes run by the Council themselves and private care homes is right, any U-turn on that would be difficult and expensive to reverse if – or when, it doesn’t work out.

The Council should not put all it’s eggs in the private sector basket, especially since I can imagine the private sector would try to avoid those people with high or complex needs.

Nationally – we are about to have a very important and difficult conservation about how to fund adult social care, however locally Surrey shouldn’t decide things closed doors now that could easily be considered wrong by what is going on in Westminster.

Surrey County Council has today approved plans to expand several Primary Schools in Woking Borough, as well as many more across the county to meet the growing demand for school places.

In Woking Borough alone, two hundred more children have asked to start at reception this September than did last year.  To meet this demand, the Council is proposing to add one extra reception class each to seven Primary Schools.

St Johns, Sythwood, The Marist (in West Byfleet) and Pyrford C of E Primary Schools will expand temporarily, when a demountable classroom is installed in their grounds.  I am concerned about a possible lack of provision if the Surrey Planning and Regulatory Committee find any of the sites suggested unsuitable from a planning point of view and therefore refuse planning permission for the classrooms, however the Council will have to cross that problem if and when – but seeking planning permission early will help.

Goldsworth County, St Dunstans and Westfield Primary Schools are likely to be expanded permanently.  A consultation will be held about the Goldsworth and St Dunstans’ expansions – but not Westfield as it was previously a two-stage entry school.  Both Goldsworth and St Dunstans will get a demountable classroom for September, until more permanent improvements are worked out.

Locally, Westfield Primary School will take over the space currently being used by Surrey Arts – who are likely to move from the Bonsey Lane site around October.

Woking Borough Council has agreed to pay Surrey Wildlife Trust to maintain all of Westfield Common if the common land release to allow for access to the proposed Moor Lane PFI housing development is approved.

The Council’s application to use a section of common land by Westfield Way for access was rejected by a Public Inquiry in July 2010.  This paper that was approved by the Executive last night, is the Council’s way of resolving the reasons for refusal.

In exchange for using some common land by Westfield Way, new areas will be added to Westfield Common by Balfour Avenue and Willow Bank.  The Council will also pay the Wildlife Trust to maintain the whole of Westfield Common to a high standard set out in their Management Plan – namely a one off investment of £330,000 and then £30,000 a year after that.  A map of Westfield Common and the different areas of land identified can be found here.

I am not particularly happy that the Council will only maintain the common land that they are responsible for as long as they get what they want from the Public Inquiry, however this decision was made by the Conservative Executive alone, and I had not right to speak at the meeting – despite being the shadow environmental portfolio holder or one of the ward councillors.

The Public Inquiry into the Borough Council’s new submission for the exchange of common land will be held on 23rd May 2012.