The facts speak for themselves. Half of the money given to the government was handed over before or shortly after the new administration that took power in 2019. It could do nothing about it and then hand-over of the remaining half was, unfortunately, inevitable, given that the previous administration failed to ensure a pipeline of building projects on which to use the money.

As Mr Smith should know, to take any single housebuilding project from the drawing board to construction in less than two years is incredibly difficult.

This is especially complicated when council officers are being redeployed to help deal with a highly contagious pandemic, and even more so when there’s no system in place for councillors of all parties to be kept informed about impending deadlines on the right-to-buy receipts.

The real scandal here is that right-to-buy receipts have to be given to the government at all, given that they come from the sale of houses built at local taxpayer expense in the first place, and that the right-to-buy policy continues to persist despite the housing crisis.

Yet, unfortunately, I don’t seem to ever recall Mr Smith or his party writing letters to The Dragon about that issue.

So I do have to ask, are Guildford Labour actually good for anything other than repeating whatever the Conservatives are saying?

I imagine their supporters would probably prefer their local Labour Party to show a little more imagination and initiative rather than just being a second-rate Tory mouthpiece.