The Dragon Says: We Are All Set To Pay Off Woking’s Debts – But We Will Do Nothing But Grumble

Published on: 9 Oct, 2026
Updated on: 9 Oct, 2026

By Martin Giles

In six months’ time we will be under the administration of a new West Surrey or, probably, a “West Surrey and South Middlesex” Council.

But the question that needs to be asked by those of us who will be governed by this new body is: What say have we had?

Only 34 per cent of those who people voted in the last general election voted Labour and even the few of those who had bothered to read Labour’s manifesto would only have seen a vague commitment to reform local government.

In Surrey, support for Labour was, as usual, much lower. Only 77,593, or 12.8 per cent, voted for the party out of the 607,084 who voted.

Nonetheless, only months later, plans were announced to impose large unitary authorities on us.

Surrey is being divided into two unitary authorities, East and West Surrey.

Then, to compound the lack of democracy in the process, Surrey County Council decided to volunteer Surrey for the fast-track route.

Why would they do this?

Earlier they had put forward a plan for Surrey to be one big unitary authority. This was at a time when a political shift from the Conservatives to the Lib Dems was becoming apparent and it was probably considered that there would be political advantage in creating as big an administrative area as possible to maximise Conservative political fortunes.

The only other apparent advantage of being in the vanguard was obtaining £500 million to pay off Woking’s £4 billion debt.

But considering the debt issues faced by Woking and other councils, the fast track decision appeared to many to be bizarre. Surely the debts should be cleared before amalgamations of any kind could be considered? We should have been at the back of the queue.

Then we learned that Surrey, unsurprisingly, was the only council that wished to be fast-tracked and majority views of the public and borough councils were ignored by the Government when deciding how many unitaries Surrey should be divided into.

As if that was not enough, county council elections were cancelled, keeping the Conservative navigators of our local reorganisation option in place, despite the clear evidence of a political swing.

Now, as we know, legal challenges elsewhere have resulted with the government putting the whole Local Government Reorganisation (LGR) programme on hold – except here in Surrey.

One might have expected local councillors to be outraged and demand a rethink, but no. All parties seemed to join in a group shrug.

Perhaps this is understandable for Labour and Conservative councillors. After all, their parties are together responsible for this undemocratic debacle.

But why do the Lib Dems appear so complicit? Even if they do feel that legal challenges are unlikely to succeed, surely as a party with “Democrats” in their name they should be vociferous?

And if our local councillors are giving a group shrug, so are most of us, it seems. We might not like it but we feel powerless.

If we were French, the prospect of paying off the legacy debts of others through increased council tax or the sale of assets from our areas would cause outrage. We would be attending council meetings to protest. We would be marching in the streets.

But this is England, this is Surrey and this is Guildford. We will do nothing – apart from grumble, of course.

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