Surrey Unitary Authority

Richard Kelly, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Plans are afoot to change Surrey County Council into a Unitary Authority. What this means is merging the 11 District Councils into the County Council . This should result in efficiencies and savings. Oh my aching sides. There have already been plans to do this but they have fallen foul of Central Government diktats.

In general a Unitary Authority should have about 500,000 inhabitants whereas Surrey has in total about 1.2 million.  The obvious answer is to create two Unitary Authorities. The Districts don’t lend themselves to a North South split so it will likely result in East Surrey and West Surrey. Both of these will have that old favourite beloved of all politicians, an elected Mayor. Even then there will have to be a bit of jiggery pokery too achieve a reasonable split.

As it stands today there are overlaps in responsibilities, especially when it comes to roads. Any road plan needs the agreement the County Council and one or up to three other councils including parish Councils. These decisions are made by the councillors, very few of whom have any deep level of traffic knowledge, very little common sense but a massive sense of self importance. The officials doing the planning, who do have traffic knowledge, often have little hair because they are so often pulling it out in frustration at being so frequently overridden.

The Unitary plan will happen but the details are still being thrashed out; see I have been doing my homework, you have already seen efficiency, savings, responsibilities and Mayors. Politicians love this kind of thing, it ask sounds so good.

The County Council is basically ruled by the Unions when it comes to compensation, grievances and being able to sack anybody. Essentially they will never agree to anybody being sacked and everyone deserves heaps of compensation. The Fire Brigade is also covered by the County Council and they have their own union, the FBU, who are fiercely, sometimes aggressively, protective of their members.

Any worker who is any good and makes an effort to do a good job is discouraged in the first few months by the similarity between the work and banging your head against a brick wall. There is a kind of mantra at play here; anyone any good will leave within a relatively short time, time servers and those attracted by one of the best pension schemes in the UK clings on for dear life. Those clinging on are also attracted to any means of getting compensation and/or promotion. The secondment mechanism is also a sight for sore eyes.

The County Council, with around 20,000 employees replaced an SAP system with something from Unit4 who call it SaaS (software as a service) but may in fact be Oracle Fusion under the covers. In common with all other Councils who have made a similar leap into a bold new future, it has been a massive balls up. Anyone who works in IT is just fire fighting all the time. The cost has increased several times and is well over budget by tens of millions. It is obvious nobody there understood the complexity of the change and the data was not all migrated, or if it was it was not done correctly. A shambles would be too kind a description.

All decisions are political in local government and the sound of the Utopia just within reach by merging councils is extremely attractive to those at the top.

The amount of social care under the jurisdiction of a county council is so varied you would all be shocked. I think central government has dumped responsibility after responsibility on them. Finding and keeping competent care and social services staff is a nightmare and all sorts of people end up working in it. We await the findings of the inquiry into the death of ten year old Sarah Sharif with interest. Murdered by her family but I also reckon social services were too afraid of being called racist to stand up to the father.

There is a new CEO at the County Council and one of his big obsessions to begin with is to reduce costs. I won’t say what he has just done but it ain’t going to save any money that’s for sure. He was 13 years at Wiltshire County Council before getting the Surrey job based in Reigate. He still lives rather a long way away from Reigate and is only in the office one or two days a week but expects everyone else to be in at least two days a week and preferably three and I suspect his real wish is for everyone to be in five days a week.

In 2009 Wiltshire became a Unitary Authority. The new broom at Surrey joined Wiltshire in about 2011 and they only had to merge 4 District Councils with the County Council. I think Swindon was made a Metropolitan Council at that time. Four into one should be much easier than 11 into one or probably two should it not. Ah, now comes the rub. The recent external audit(s) do not make pleasant reading 15 years after the merger.

From the external audit –

  • There have been delays in signing off previous statements of accounts which is a common issue for many local authorities
  • The council is transitioning to a new ERP system, which has caused some difficulties in obtaining information from ICT colleagues2.
  • The external auditors were unable to present their audit plan as intended, but expect to do so at the July committee meeting

On the financial side

  • The 2020-21 and 2021-22 financial statements are still pending approval:
  • The council is expecting to receive the ISA260 report from the External Auditors imminently.
  • A “disclaimer of opinion” is anticipated for both years.
  • The council aims to conclude the process for these accounts by the “backstop date” of 13 December 2024

Ongoing challenges

  • Several issues continue to impact the audit process:
  • The external audit market is described as “broken,” with a shortage of firms able to undertake local authority audits.
  • Financial reporting regulations for local authorities are considered complex and not entirely relevant for public scrutiny.
  • The Dedicated Schools Grant situation has been repeatedly flagged as a concern by the Financial Planning Task Group

Fifteen years after the merger Wiltshire Unitary Authority is still deep in the mire. Would anyone expect Surrey’s merger and probably split to be any better. Surrey CC is dysfunctional at best and the way it runs right now means it will never improve. Merging 11 Districts in with a County Council disaster cannot result in anything other than a bigger disaster.

The information in this article has been extracted from publicly available data. I could have said more (a lot more) but have refrained. Seeing as central government set the rules for local authorities you might expect some MP to take an interest in all this but it seems they don’t. Why don’t we have more people in Parliament like the excellent Rupert Lowe who has already got more than enough on his plate.

There are several other Unitary Authorities in play and I do not expect any of them are significantly better.

Finally Surrey have asked that the May local elections be postponed. Both Labour and the Tories are united on this. They are both terrified they will be blown away by Reform and with good reason. The latest polls have Labour and Reform on 25% each and the Tories trailing in 3rd place. If find this a cheek. There is still no plan for reorganisation, when there is it will have to be approved and eventually implemented. It would be a miracle of they could do that in under 4 years, the implementation takes a long time. It is another ploy by the two big parties to keep their monopoly.
 

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