Yesterday Surrey Heath Council “released” information relating to these two major town centre acquisitions in 2016. This has attracted some comment and interest and so I wanted to share my own thoughts.
For disclosure, I was not a councillor at the time but as a Conservative, I do represent the Party predominantly responsible for decisions made. I think this type of introspection and review of how decisions are made is healthy and can help us, as councillors, learn how to effectively scrutinise decisions in future.
I do, however, have some issues with how the new Administration is seeking to present the facts in this instance. Firstly, the vast majority of the information the Council has collated was already publicly available and the bits that were not, do not to me, appear to reveal anything particularly interesting or useful. If I were being cynical this appears something of an effort to distract from the fact that since the new Administration has taken over the Council they have actually done and changed very little.
Secondly and predictably, the tone of the Council and Liberal Democrat leadership’s comments in the last 24 hours appear much more interested in “bashing the tories” than analysing or learning anything for the future. The arguments on whether the decisions to acquire these properties were right or not have been well rehearsed over previous years but I think there are a couple of points worth drawing out:
1. The focus of the investment was to provide regeneration and improvements to Camberley Town Centre. It was always known that as an income generating investment it would take a long time to deliver a return on the capital investment. It is important to note that the primary focus was to improve Camberley not deliver immediate financial returns.
2. Values of town centre retail centres have fallen since 2016, a trend which has been exacerbated by COVID. This has caused a reduction in the “book value” of the investment. However the Council has (to my knowledge) no intention of selling and so this loss seems unlikely to be realised any time soon.
3. The reports previously conducted do raise very valid critiques on the level of scrutiny applied to how the decisions to make these acquisitions were made and there are certainly lessons I hope to learn from this as an opposition councillor. This does not however make the decision to acquire wrong.
My biggest gripe, however, with the way the Liberal Democrat administration is seeking to present this is the scaremongering being put forward that the Council is now in significant financial strife. While all local authorities are feeling the pinch in the current economic climate, from what I have seen in my time on the Council, the negative rhetoric coming out of the Council’s leadership is not reflected in the facts nor is it reflected in the fairly modest budgetary tweaks the new administration has made since taking over.
Unless the Council leadership itself is not being transparent on its own financial position, I can see no reason to seek to scare residents by talking about reductions in services that no one is proposing.
Unfortunately this episode seems to me to reflect a council leadership more interested in political point scoring than with getting on with the job of running the Council.
- Cllr Jonny Cope, Councillor for St. Paul's Ward
