Transcript

and welcome to cabinet meeting here at Woodhatch, Surrey County Council. And this follows on from the full council meeting this morning. There's only one item, stand to item on the agenda today, which is around the level of the organisation and the final plan. Before we do that, there are no members of the public present, so I won't read out the fire alarm or indeed any of the rest of this of the social media. You're very familiar with that, so we'll go straight into roll call. If you could say who you are, please, and your portfolio is starting with Claire Curran. Good afternoon, Leader. I'm Claire Curran, the cabinet member for children, families and lifelong learning. Thank you. David Lewis. Thank you, Leader. Good afternoon. I'm David Lewis. I'm the cabinet member for finance and resources. Thank you. Denise Turner-Stewart. Thank you, Leader. Denise Turner-Stewart, cabinet member for customer communities and deputy leader. Thank you, Mark. Sorry, Kevin Dinas. Kevin Dinas, good afternoon. Cabinet member for fire and rescue and resilience. And Mark Nuti. Thank you, Leader. No funnies today, as I thought. It was a bit of a week of reflection, so I will just give you a few little bits here. So, on May the 4th, you may or may not know, Germany, the German army unconditionally surrendered to our forces in Europe. And on May the 7th, today, in 1945, the message was sent marked secret to all of our British troops to declare that war in Europe was over. And tomorrow, VGA Day is when that will be celebrated as Churchill declared at 3 o'clock on the 8th to the rest of the nation that war was finally over. The last shot was fired on May the 8th by a ship, HMS Dido, in the Danish waters when it fired towards a German fighter plane who immediately turned tail and headed back home. And, of course, it wasn't quite the end of the war. VGA Day came later on in August that year. But I thought it was a good time to reflect on what's going on around the world today as we celebrate tomorrow victory in Europe. Oh, and I am Cabinet Member for Health and Wellbeing. Thank you very much. And, of course, they have gone into a papal conclave today, so we will see when the white smoke comes out. Thank you for that, Mark. Marissa. Thank you, Leija, and thank you, Mark, for those facts. I'm Marissa Heath, the Cabinet Member for Environment. Thank you very much. Maury Natterwell. Good afternoon, everyone. Maury Natterwell, Deputy Cabinet Member for Children and Families and Lifelong Learning. Thank you. Natalie Bramhall. Good afternoon. My name's Natalie Bramhall, and I'm the Cabinet Member for Property Waste and Infrastructure. Sinead Mooney, Cabinet Member for Adult Social Care. Thank you. And then lastly, Steve Back. Good afternoon, Leija. Steve Back, Deputy Cabinet Member for Highways. Thank you. And then we have apologies from Matt Furness, Cabinet Member for Transport and Economic Development. Paul Deitch, Deputy Cabinet Member. Jonathan Huddy, Deputy Cabinet Member. I should just point out that when we come to a vote, if we take a formal vote on the recommendation today, that the – as per our constitution, the Deputy Cabinet Members don't have a vote, so their hands won't go up for that reason. Okay. Item two then, declarations of interest. Does any member have any interest to declare in relation to this item? Thank you very much. Item three. So we'll take 3A before the main substantive item, and 3A is the report of the Council's Select Committee Chairs and Vice Chairs group. And we've got the Chair of the Chairs, Hazel Watson, who's going to introduce the report. Thank you. Thank you, Chairman. Select Committee Chairs and Vice Chairs group met several times to be briefed on the development of the Council's proposal for devolution and local government reorganisation. We'll now set out the recommendations of the report to bring them to the attention of the Cabinet. The group continued lobbying of government for solution on debt, which includes government assistance so that Surrey residents do not have to unfairly bear the burden of debt run up in specific district and borough areas. This is vital to ensure that both shadow authorities are financially sustainable and that critical services are not impacted by historic debt. In relation to IT, the lessons learned from Surrey's implementation of the ERP replacement project in the report of the Digital Business and Insights task group made recommendations for future IT programs. The group recommends that these should be revisiting that managing the aggregation and disaggregation of IT systems and data is likely to represent one of the most significant challenges to local government reorganisation in Surrey. The group recommends that work to understand the sufficiency of supply for SEND in the proposed geography is prioritised by the executives so that shadow authorities can be fully informed early on of the demand for critical services in their areas and where there may be gaps and pressures, particularly for home-to-school transport and school places. The group is deeply concerned about the financial picture for Surrey and the pressures that may be placed on residents, including from council tax harmonisation and urges continued efforts by the executive to lobby government to mitigate the impact of any funding reforms, including the fair funding review and subsequent council tax equalisation by writing off Woking's existing stranded debt. The group recommends that resourcing is prioritised by the cabinet so that the county council can forward sound recommendations to shadow authorities on the approach to local engagement and to ensure the boards are able to perform a meaningful role delivering real results and improvements for residents. The group recommends that the model is developed to include spending powers for the boards to make decisions on allocations of monies to deliver results for local residents. The group also requests that councillors are actively involved in the pilots and that outcomes and lessons learned from those pilots are reported back to scrutiny for review. The group hopes that the group hopes that the cabinet will give due consideration to the group's recommendations. Thank you, Chairman. Thank you very much. Does any cabinet member wish to comment on any of the recommendations? Mrs. Karen? Yes, thank you, Leader. One of the very important recommendations that the group has made does pertain to the services which fall under the remit of children, families and lifelong learning. And there was some comment this morning at the council meeting, I think some criticism levelled, that perhaps not enough research and exploratory work had been carried out. Particularly, I think those comments were levelled at our SEND service. But I just wanted to reassure members that there has indeed been some initial analysis made to inform the work that's been done and being presented to government. And that it will be an absolute priority of the directorate to make sure that we do have that detailed understanding and profiling, not only of SEND sufficiency, which I think is mentioned in these recommendations. SEND places for schools, but also the demand for those critical services where children live, where there may be gaps and pressures, pressure on school places, and importantly also the pressures on our home-to-school transport budget, particularly for those children with additional needs. But I wanted to go further and say for children's services, I think it's important to mention that we have been starting already the work around children looked after, including our residential children's homes. Those children for whom statutory safeguarding arrangements are in place, and early health arrangements, because it's absolutely critical for those shadow authorities that from day one they are able to operate at the very least a safe and legal service, and hopefully really a first-class, high-quality service for vulnerable children. I just wanted to acknowledge the focus, really, from the chairs, vice-chairs, and I think that they have levied a lot of focus in that area, and I think the feedback that they've given is really important. So I just wanted to acknowledge that, and in the response, I think, since I joined the Council, and we frequently refer to it, and check that we are adhering to the recommendations. Last Friday, we had a, was it Friday? A couple of days ago, we had a session with the... Okay, thank you. Okay, thank you. We can't see any of the hands up. So, again, can I just thank Hazel Watson as chair, the chairs of the select committees, for your engagement in the whole process, and indeed, for the recommendations. The cabinet response was published, as you know, in a supplementary agenda yesterday, and it's fully supportive of all of your recommendations. What will happen now is that work streams will be set up to take forward the whole, through you, Hazel, to understand how you want to scrutinize those work streams and move forward. Thank you very much. Thank you very much. So, we'll move to item three then, which is a substantive item, which probably is to approve the submission of the final plan for local government reorganization in Surrey to the government by the 9th of May. It is an executive decision, but we did have a full council meeting this morning, when there was a healthy debate on the issues, and a final vote, I think, of 36 members in favor, 20 members against, and all three abstentions. So, a significant majority in favor of the county council's proposal, which is that the county be divided into an east-west unitaries, and we take it forward on that basis. There is an alternative submission supported by some of the districts and boroughs for three unitaries, but that, on the evidence, that doesn't look to be, from our position at least, in the best interests of the county and of residents. I wanted to just pick up on two or three points, though, that have been talked about during this process and, indeed, this morning. There was a significant emphasis on the debt that sits within some of the districts and boroughs within the county. The working position is very public and is well known, and there continue to be conversations with the government, both with the ministry, MHCLG, and with the Treasury, as to how the government intend to deal with that debt. I think there's a general recognition and acceptance that the debt is so large that it simply cannot be dealt with, accommodated locally, certainly not within Woking. So, the conversation continues to be around the writing off of that stranded debt, so-called stranded debt, but if that isn't possible in the very near future, for whatever reason, I think that it is, the government will provide additional financial support for the foreseeable future. The position of Spellthorn and Runnymede is more complicated. They don't have a crystallized debt, and whilst the government did issue a minded two notice recently regarding the appointment of commissioners for Spellthorn, that hasn't happened, and indeed it's fair to say that the leader and chief exec of both Spellthorn and Runnymede don't accept that the debt is in the same category as Woking, i.e. that it's irrecoverable against its commercial investments. That remains to be seen, but that isn't going to crystallize any time soon. But if it does get into the same sort of situation as Woking, then I think the government will have no alternative but to step in on a similar basis into those two boroughs. But it was being used, almost weaponized this morning, on the basis that it wasn't fair to have Spellthorn and Runnymede and Woking all in one unitary, and that it should be split up, and that it should be split up the pain, but it's not going to work like that. But that, so some of the submissions were that Spellthorn would be better, it would be fairer to put Spellthorn into the east of the county and not into the west. But ultimately all of this is going to be a decision of the government. I did find it odd though, that running that argument, that it's not right to have those three boroughs in one unitary. They then went on to explain that some of the members, they supported three unitaries where actually would have an inconsistency in the way in which some of those arguments were being pursued. But at the end of the day, we need to, you know, we should remind ourselves, if not others, that the County Council's responsibility here is to demonstrate how we can disaggregate, separate out the services that we deliver, you know, that is adult social care, children's services and highways. Debt issue is a debt, is an issue for the district and boroughs and is, you know, to that extent, is irrelevant to how the county approaches this on the evidence. The evidence shows that the split that we are proposing, our preferred option, is fair and even in terms of most of the rest of the metrics around size, population, demand for services, council tax base and so on. So that is why the county has landed on that. It is fair to say that that version 2.1 has the support of the two of the boroughs, Elmbridge and Mole Valley. It remains to be seen whether some of the others will also support it as well. At the end of the day, this is not and should not be looked at through a political lens. This is about what is in the best interest of the residents. How can we establish unitaries that are going to be financially secure going forward? And whatever, you know, even in a single unitary, it would be impossible for an unfair, entirely unfair, for the residents of Surrey to pick up all of the debt from those three councils. So that isn't going to happen and what we need to look at is how can we, say, disaggregate our key services, which are the most significant in terms of the cost, you know, the 900 million or so that we spend on social care out of a 1.2 billion budget. So I'm comfortable, confident, I'm very grateful to the officers, to the chief exec and the deputy chief executive in particular, and indeed to the director of policy, because this has been a piece of work, a significant piece of work that has had to have been done at pace, but has been absolutely embraced by the team. I think the report is of an outstanding quality. I think it covers all of the key issues, all of the issues that the government have asked us to address, and we have matched our answers to the criteria that they will look at the responses against. So I don't think there is anything more that we could have done or indeed would have been able to do, even if we had been given a lot more time to do it in. It is also important that we take our key partners along with us on this journey. The dissolution of all 12 councils, but in particular the district and boroughs, means that the police, the police and crime commission, the chief executive, chief constable, have been looking at how they will operate, and in the conversations with them, they are very comfortable with that east-west that works for them, and indeed the same conversation with the health system. So, you know, those are the two key, two of the key partners, but also you will find attached to the report letters of support from voluntary organisations as well and others. So we have done a lot of work just to make sure that those other sort of public authorities, in particular, that operate in the county are comfortable with the proposal. And then really, I'll just touch briefly on timelines. I just want to echo the points that have been made though in relation to the community boards. It is a great shame that there are some people that deliberately seek to mislead our residents over what those boards will do, and in particular the role of the town and parish councils. I have been very clear, the paper is very clear, that town and parish councils where they exist now will be valued members of those boards. Those boards will be led almost certainly by elected unitary councillors. They are the ones that will have the responsibility for making sure the public funds are used appropriately. But the town and parish councils will have a significant role on those boards should they choose to do so. And it may well be that some of the smaller parish councils might not want to take on further responsibilities. But that will be a decision for them. But beyond that, the boards will bring together in a sensible footprint all of those other key agencies. And that has to be good news. This isn't – if we need to use this opportunity, you know, that's referred to in the white paper, the co-terminosity of police, of health, of local government, you know, that will be able to accommodate the way in which they operate along similar lines. So we will pilot those community boards. And we'll have one in the north, south, east, and west. We will roll those out as soon as we can. We will get member engagement and welcome any views that people have as to how those might operate. There are many examples around the country that other councils have adopted. But I have to say, from what I can see, the majority of those are really just focused on local government services and not others. And, you know, that isn't – there are other things that batter to residents beyond, you know, simply the things that we do here. So beyond that, I think we've had many conversations around this. I appreciate that residents aren't necessarily fully familiar with the detail. There is an executive summary sheet which we will distribute or put up on social media. And we will be engaging regularly now with residents as we go through the process. The process from here on is that the plan will be submitted by the end of this week. So we would then hope for a response in some form or another within – from the government within the next few weeks or couple of months at least, on the basis that then there's a consultation that the government will lead over the summer. And then – and we're not clear at the moment whether they will consult on all of the different options that are being submitted or on their preferred option. That will be a matter for them. And then we would expect them to serve a structural change order which sort of sets out what that future looks like in the autumn. And then with the elections next May to the Unitary Council in shadow form for a year. And then that authority will vest at the end of March 2027. And we're expecting a directly elected mayor to appear in May 2027. So I think, you know, the key stage now is to get government feedback. In the meantime, you know, we will start on the work streams. There will be a number of those. Some of those will be for this county – this county council to drive forward. Some of them will be for the district and boroughs. But at the end of the day, I hope that all councils now can come together and really focus on the implementation of the reorganization. Ultimately, whether it's two or three, the principles will be the same in all of those sort of key areas, service areas. So that is our task. That is our challenge. That is our opportunity. And I think we must see this as a significant opportunity. To have a directly elected mayor as other parts of the country have has demonstrated the strength that that brings to a community. It brings a national voice, which we wouldn't have otherwise. It brings funding, you know, and for those mature mayoral strategic authorities, you know, a considerable flexibility in moving that funding around the whole of the system. That's where we need to get to. So it isn't entirely unique, but it is one of a tiny handful of councils that have to reorganize into unitaries, into strategic authorities, before we can go down the mayoral route. That is why we were selected by the government to do that and we have kind of stepped up to the plate and, you know, got us to a point now within less than five months where we've got a very credible plan to put to the government. And that's what we will do at the end of this week. So I think that's all I was going to say. I mean, I would recommend people to look at our website. There's links to the final plan with appendices, letters of support and exchanges with the government and so on. So it says out very clearly kind of where we're coming from and what we're suggesting as the way forward. And then, as I say, the work will now move into implementation with the select committees helping and so on of those plans. I'll stop there and I don't know if any other member wants to say something. Say Mark first. Thank you, Leader. And just to back up what you've said there and I think to answer some of the, let's say, more negative comments that we've had. If you look in Annex 3, you'll see the Equality Impact Assessment, which has been done in great detail, a huge amount of information in there. Well, we've looked at the positive impacts and also the negative impacts on our population, our residents. We live in a very varied, very diverse county and we've taken into account everybody's situation there. And we will continue to do so and reflect on that as we move forward with local government reform. And I think if you look at the detail and what we've been looking at here, you can see how Surrey County Council is definitely a part from the borough and district offer of the three unitaries. We've really actually taken this very seriously and we are engaging directly with our localism, if you like. The word has been used a lot. The community boards, I think, are a really exciting opportunity, not just for government, but to bring together housing, police, our blue lights, our GP surgeries, community groups, our resident groups, charities, volunteer sectors. We'll be able to actually solve problems, issues directly at ground level with the people that really matter and the people in the room that will be able to actually stand up and say we can resolve that. Be that a housing issue, antisocial behaviour, or just making communities and areas better and healthier places to live. So I think that's really exciting. That's going to bring local government directly into people's homes, on their streets, in their communities, more so than has ever been done before. So where the argument is that this is moving people away from our communities, I think this is going to have the reverse. This is going to take local government and services to our doorsteps of the residents that really need it. And it will engage hopefully with a resident group that quite frankly in this day and age are very disassociated to local government and services that they could either be using or supporting through volunteer and charity sectors. So this is a massive opportunity for Surrey and I think once the general public really understand what we're proposing and what we're putting forward, I think they will get behind this. I think they will welcome the change. I think we've had 50 years of this system. It's had its good moments. I think we're probably coming to the end of that as we can see with the debt and other areas where we now are struggling with resources. This is the way forward and we fully support this and I think our public will support this too. Thank you very much. Marissa. The council business that you and officers have done, so thank you very much for that. I've spoken to a lot of residents across not just my area but other areas as well and what they want is services delivered. It's that simple, efficiency and services delivered. And if we can find ways to cut admin supports and put money into services, that's what they want as well, more than anything. And this process is happening. Whether we like it or not, it's happening. It's being banulated by government. We're going ahead. And finding the opportunities in this and there are indeed opportunities. It's not about authorities or buildings. It's about competence, delivery and wise use of taxpayers' money. That's what I got from speaking to the residents I spoke to. I hope that actually as a result of this we see standards of councillors go up. There will be less councillors but maybe we can have really good councillors who deliver for their residents and get engaged in those community boards. That would be a great thing to see across the whole board. So it's not just a certain set of councillors doing a really good job. It's every single one of them delivering for their residents. And, you know, a sharper focus on what we actually do want to deliver rather than endless meetings that can go around and make sure this is something that really improves local democracy. At the end of the day, the way you really make things better as a councillor is when you're right in the midst of your community to make sure we're running better local democracy going forward. Just briefly on the issue of debt, we're completely right to push back on government about this. And, you know, we're taking the right approach. Sorry. Thank you. Great. Thank you very much. Any other? Denise? Thank you, Leader. I think I just wanted to commend the report, but not just for the sheer amount of effort and energy that's gone into producing it. But actually, it gives a really, really clear picture of Surrey. And it's the first time, I think, I've seen all of that information in absolutely one place. All of this data and evidence appear on the side and it's a really monumental moment for us. Thank you. I think that's just a point worth just emphasising. The decision was always going to be based on the evidence, that not on political lines or emotional lines. It was on the evidence. And that's what this report pulls out is essential base, might be quite clearly. Okay. I cannot see any other hands up. So, I will read out the recommendations. Recommendation one, it is recommended that Cabinet approves the Council's final plan for local government reorganisation in Surrey. Secondly, agrees the leader of Surrey County Council submits the final plan to government for the 9th of May deadline. And then thirdly, delegates authority to make any final amendments to the final plan and other associated information for local government reorganisation in Surrey to the Chief Executive in consultation with the leader of the Council before submission within the deadline given by the Secretary of State. Are those three recommendations that brings us to the – there's no part two items, so that brings us to the end of the meeting. Thank you all very much. Thank you.