Letter: This Is What Councillors Would Do if the Elections Went Ahead

Published on: 7 Feb, 2025
Updated on: 7 Feb, 2025

From George Potter

Lib Dem county and borough councillor

In response to: We Should Concentrate On Our New Devolved Council

What would councillors do if elected in May this year?

In a single question Brian Creese demonstrates, in his letter, why he, and Guildford Labour, are utterly unfit to run a whelk stall, let alone a council.

As a county councillor, since being elected in 2021 for a four-year term of office, I have been given direct responsibility to decide how around half a million pounds’ worth of public money is spent. Myself and other councillors are also, in charge of critical services like Special Educational Needs provision, social care services for vulnerable adults, children’s services, highways maintenance and much, much more.

Yes, in practice, whichever party has a majority on the council calls all the shots. But it is only by voting for their local councillor that people get to choose who they want calling the shots.

If Mr Creese and his colleagues don’t think it matters who runs special educational needs services for another year, when they are in an absolute shambles and hundreds of children with disabilities are missing school for months or even years, then that is honestly a viewpoint beneath contempt.

And that is without considering the fact that it is current councillors, none of whom were elected with a mandate on this issue, who will be deciding how reorganisation works in practice in Surrey given that final structures will have to be agreed within the next year.

Three unitaries or two? Which boundaries for the unitaries? Will services be outsourced or done in house. Will planning decisions be taken by local planning committees or by one giant super committee for half the county?

And the existing county council services, like children’s services and social care, how will they be split up between the new unitaries? Which managers and directors will be appointed to run them?

Labour clearly thinks, alongside the Conservatives, that these are trivial, non-issues which members of the public shouldn’t be allowed to have their say on.

Should we be focusing on our new “devolved” council as Mr Creese says? Yes, undoubtedly. But should the decisions be made by councillors who, like myself, haven’t been chosen by anybody to represent them on this issue? Absolutely not.

Running public services and doing the right thing for our communities is a serious business and should be taken seriously. I and my Liberal Democrat colleagues take it seriously, which is why we opposed the cancellation of these elections from the start. Because we know that governance actually matters.

Clearly to Mr Creese and the Labour party it is no more than it always has been to them; a Red Team versus Blue Team game, and the rest of us whose lives are impacted by the outcome of their game can all go to hang as far as they are concerned.

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