Letter: This Is What My Experience Tells Me

Published on: 13 Sep, 2026
Updated on: 13 Sep, 2026

Surrey is now divided into two unitary authorities east and West Surrey.

From Bernard Quoroll

former local authority CEO and former “Independent Person” at GBC

In response to: Without Audited Accounts How Can the New Council Know its Financial Position?

Conservative Branch Secretary John Murray asks me to “bring my experience to bear” on the problem of unaudited accounts. I will leave it to others to judge whether failing to close accounts on time or at all, is a bigger problem than dealing with a growing mountain of debt, but they are of course closely interrelated.

Constructing West Surrey’s first new budget is a challenging enough task on its own, in the absence of complete and reliable financial and other information, the more so as some of the people who might know where bodies are buried will have retired, been made redundant or be working somewhere else, as a result of this half cocked reorganisation.

I was not a finance qualified chief executive but it probably means that the new finance director will want to build healthy reserves to mitigate against nasty surprises in future. And additional reserves in this situation means higher taxes.

What I do know is that for more than fifteen years in a row, in three councils, I worked with my finance directors to ensure that our accounts were always signed off and that our budgets were annually balanced. That was admittedly in easier times. Many things have happened since to make it much harder for councils to close their accounts.

There are also issues still left over from the abolition some years ago of the National Audit Commission by the Government and the consequent destruction of the District Audit function, (whose auditors had a better grip on local authority accounting practices and in my view were less reluctant to hold councils to account if they dragged their heels, than now).

Having said that, all of the finance directors I worked with would have regarded it as a matter for professional shame not to have completed their accounts so that they could be signed off on time.

I must however add a few comments about John Murray’s interpretation of my original comments.

Firstly, he says that debts are debts and will have to be addressed irrespective of reorganisation. Yes, but by whom?

If you are the taxpayer paying for them when you had no obligation before; when half the current county is excused from the burden; when this government says nothing about what it is going to do about it, and when interest goes on accruing before it is repaid?.

Remember too that the capital debt is, without more, going to be a multiple of the new council’s entire annual revenue budget.

Secondly, I don’t know when the market is going to improve. No one does. But it means that the new council is going to have less choice, when it tries to dispose of its assets for best value.

Even worse, good councils use their assets to promote a whole range of benefits, some in aid of balancing its books, some to promote the best interests of its area and some to promote the kind of development opportunities which can outflank a restrictive planning regime by partnerships with the private sector, not otherwise possible.

My point is that the repercussions go far further than just a loss of immediate value. And I suspect Woking, as part of the new council area, will be given some reprieve at the expense of assets previously held by other councils, including of course Guildford, and SCC.

We might be able to calculate the current debt and how it will grow, but the cost of lost opportunity from asset disposals is incalculable not just financially but in lost betterment opportunities.