Surrey County Council announced today that it was no longer pursuing Energy from Waste Plants, known to you and I as incinerators, in Surrey. Thus ends one of the most expensive and fiercely fought policy battles in the area’s history.

There will be no incinerators in Surrey - including Martyr's Lane

The county council has obviously come to the conclusion that residents in all affected areas would fight any proposals to the wire and they couldn’t justify the cost in terms of money and time in battling their own residents. It’s a message that should have got through a while ago – when you find yourself being taken to court by the people who fund your wages and pensions, something is not quite right.

There is an hint of new brush as well, with Cllr Andrew Povey making what I hope will be the first of many sensible and pragmatic decisions in his new regime and change of direction with what came before. Instead of the waste plants, there will be an Eco Park that will cost a quarter of the £200m Surrey wanted to spend on its incinerators and a gasifier and anaerobic digester will be among the “attractions”.

So that means that Martyr’s Lane will not be the site of an EfW plant, which is a relief following the recent good news about Heather Farm. Whether or not it’s the future of waste management, the authorities failed to convince residents of its need and there is no reason why a government should do anything to make its people sleep less easy at night.

And I’m delighted to see some common sense finally emanating from county hall.

One final thing though – the Surrey Joint Waste Management Strategy for 2006-2025 still says:

“Whilst acknowledging the concerns of some people, but with due regard to the waste hierarchy, we consider energy-from-waste recovery via incineration (with the most up to date controls on and effective monitoring of emissions by the Environment Agency as the most practicable (sic), financially viable and sustainable approach currently available for that residual part…[that cannot be dealt with any other way]“

Will this strategy now be changed? And won’t that require all 12 Surrey councils’ consent?

It's all peace and tranquility in the council tonight

The executive committee tonight was a relatively tame affair and it will be interesting to see whether any sparks fly at the full council meeting on December 10. The fees and charges are always a contentious issue and there were a few murmurs tonight but I thought the most interesting part of that debate was something that won’t catch headlines like parking or leisure centre charges.

Section 4.16 of the report talks about provision for Looked After Children. These are of course the children in Surrey County Council care - either directly or via Foster Carers – who become so for a variety of reasons including abuse, illness or disability but all whom are taken into care because their families - who so many of us take for granted will always be there for us - are unable to fulfill their normal function of nurture. For obvious reasons, their opportunities are reduced compared to others, despite the many good efforts of foster carers and social workers.

Liberal Democrat leader Ian Johnson pointed out the provision that the borough council currently makes to children in this position. Even though social care is a Surrey County Council responsibility, Woking Borough Council is a partner in the Surrey Children and Young People’s Plan and offers free swimming, Key Cards and gym inductions. But these benefits only last until young people reach 19, at which point they considered adults and no longer under the care of the local authority.

Cllr Johnson said:

“I would like to think that in areas such as housing we can extend the care in this paper. These are people who have had a pretty rotten start in life and we ought to be supporting them in other ways and not just cut them off at 19.”

I’m delighted to say that his sentiments were shared by deputy council leader David Bittleston, who said the point was important and needed to be looked at. It is vital that if we are to promote opportunity and real equality in this country that rather than simply capping the aspirations of higher-performing children or creating a huge gap between the independent and public schooling systems, we must give children from inauspicious background the opportunity early to understand they can take control of their lives in a positive way.

Too often the cycle of abuse, neglect and care home childhood is replicated in future generations. We need to break that cycle – and we also need local politicians who understand that government will give them the tools to do so but can’t actually do it for them. It’s nice to see that the Conservatives in Surrey County Council understand that with their plan and it’s nice to see the Liberal Democrats in Woking putting issues of concern before a political opportunity to grab a headline.

I hope that we can work together will the Lib Dems on this to achieve better lives for some of the least fortunate in our borough.

The Woking News and Mail today reports Surrey County Council plans to launch a comprehensive review of its passenger transport budgets in common with most of  its other budgets. It simply cannot afford, it says, to keep subsidising bus companies to run routes that are not commercially viable and the level of subsidy has risen from £4million in 2001 to £11million now.

One could say that the bus companies are being greedy and not putting enough of their margins on the commercially viable routes into helping out loss-making “social” routes. But that is a moot point because rising costs and the recession have forced them to tighten their costs too and the county council is not able to negotiate from a position of strength.

Unfortunately, the only way to cut costs is to cut subsidy and that means routes having to change dramatically or go altogether. The spin on the county site is upbeat enough and talks about a fresh review and an opportunity to shape services but the reality is too stark to deny.

In Horsell, the number 73 bus that goes from Chobham to Woking via Well Lane and Horsell is listed on the review document as one that the county council would like views on but is not immediately under threat. It is then really important that as many people in Horsell as possible contact the county council to express support for this service. It would also be a good idea for as many people as possible to use it.

Should the 73 service be questioned – and there is nothing at this stage to suggest that it will be any more than any other route – one solution is alluded to by Cllr Ian Lake in his quote – that community transport could be answer. That, of course, raises the question of who is going to pay and we had just such a question tonight at the management committee of Horsell Residents’ Association.

Chris Chaney and Edward Bentall came to speak to us about the Chobham community bus that currently runs from Chobham to Woking during peak hours and the possibility that it could be extended into Horsell, which would give us a chance to shore up at least a part of the 73 route. The committee gave a resounding endorsement to the principle of extending the service and giving this option to Horsell residents in the future.

The question is where the money will come from. At the moment, the scheme is funded in part by Surrey Heath Borough Council and Woking Community Transport. But to extend the service would mean more money, which Surrey Heath is hardly likely to pay for given it is Woking residents who will benefit. And Woking Borough Council has little capacity for additional expenditure as things stand.

But I’m hopeful that we can make it work and I will certainly do everything I can to find a solution because I think that having that extra option of peak services into Woking from Horsell will give reassurance to many people in our village. The figures may suggest that few people use it but to those people that do it is often a vital part of their quality of life. And a community is defined by its treatment of the minority, not the majority.

Horsell Common with Heather Farm on far left and Common Close visible

I’ve never quite understood why a possible site for one of Surrey’s two required energy-from-waste plants was smack bang in the middle of a Site of Special Scientific Interest.

Horsell Common is a precious resource – a haven for wildlife and rare plants, a respite from the bustling town life all around, a place for walking dogs and riding horses and somewhere of cultural importance to Woking being identified so clearly in HG Wells’s War of The Worlds. It stretches much farther than the width of Shores Road and cuts across the majority of the west and east Horsell areas. It is generally undervalued within Woking but has a number of staunch supporters who are dedicated to protecting it and its natural beauty and preserving it for others to enjoy.

What it is not is the correct place to site a large industrial building for generating power. It is not a place where large vehicles can enter and exit easily and it should be protected from the noise, odours and detritus of medium-scale industrial activity. To me, this is plainly obvious; but two sets of local authority officers have worked in such a way as to make exactly such an industrial eyesore a realistic possibility. Thankfully, it now looks unlikely.

Horsell Common Preservation Society has successfully argued to overturn a Woking Borough Council planning decision against a change of use for the site to include small-scale industrial and storage buildings. The borough council refused the application on the basis that the Surrey Waste Plan had set aside the site as a possible location for one of its two energy-from-waste plants. But the inspector decided there were compelling reasons – not least of them concerning HCPS’s control over access to the site – that meant Heather Farm was unlikely to be viable prospect as a EFW location and he granted the original application.

His report is pretty clear and it won’t make for comforting reading at county hall. But it should do in Horsell; if a buyer can be found to take on the operation of the site, we should have seen off the bizarre prospect of a waste plant on the doorstep of one of the county’s most environmentally sensitive areas.

If you are ever unfortunate enough to entertain Lib Dems to tea, make sure you bake two cakes – one for them to have and one to eat. Having moaned for ages that Woking parking charges were too high, they are now moaning that the action the Conservatives have taken to reduce charges at commercially sensitive times are inadequate.

His latest blog, imaginatively entitled Parking Charges seem to go up and up under the Tories, offers nothing new in the way of ideas about how to address this issue. Yes, charges have gone up. Yes, the council needs to increase its revenue to cover increasing costs.

“I wonder if in Woking parking charges should be linked to cost of providing
parking services and public transport and that the money raised should not be
spent on other things. In Woking this would probably mean a threat to
services that are paid for by the profit from parking.”

He muses. Profit from parking? Can Cllr Wells please explain what this profit is – the parking service is not run as an independently operating financial unit but as part of Woking Borough Council, which doesn’t make a “profit”.

“The money raised should not be spent on other things”- yes, he’d like that, wouldn’t he? Then the nasty old Tories would have no money to provide any other services, which he would then be able to crow about when they got cut. The Conservatives will not cut front-line services in Woking.

“What about restricting any additional income from rises in parking charges to be
ring fenced to only be spent on improvements in parking facilities and better
public transport.”

This gets funnier. Is Cllr Wells seriously saying that Woking should hand over part of its income to Surrey County Council for it to make improvements to public transport in other parts of the county? Are the Lib Dems saying that they would do that? And the parking facilities have only just undergone a multi-million pound capital overhaul. Where is he going to spend this ring-fenced revenue to any effect?

Car parking income is dropping because the recession means that fewer people are using their cars and they are not buying so many goods. The increased cost can never be a good thing – but it is not the primary factor for most people staying away. Woking Borough Council’s experience in the past is that dropping the charges has no effect on takeup.

Cllr Wells’s pie-in-the-sky nonsense shows a total lack of understanding about local government finance, the respective responsibilities of tiered authorities, not to mention a great deal of naivety about how to bring about increased revenues, a vibrant town centre and transport improvements.

God help us if this is the level of the Lib Dem thinking we can expect if they take control next year. But mark my words – if they do, car parking charges will increase in the same way that they have this year.

When the Lib Dems were last in charge, parking charges in Woking went up twice in the same year.