Number 10 Petition

Low levels of government funding during a recession will damage the local economy.

Surrey Conservatives have today urged the Prime Minister to review the inadequate funding for local government in Surrey. Surrey’s services and infrastructure have long been under-funded by central government, with Surrey people having only £205 p/a allocated to local services whilst those in Manchester get £856 p/a, but County Leader Nick Skellett believes that during the current recession this will become an even greater problem.

“Surrey’s infrastructure is crucial to the economy of not just Surrey, but the UK as a whole, and if the government are as serious as they claim about getting the country out of a recession they could start by ensuring that public services are properly funded. It is no good talking about helping the country through a recession whilst leaving local authorities consistently short of money and forcing us to borrow money that will eventually have to be paid back, leaving hard-pressed taxpayers with a large bill further down the line.

My colleagues and I have long argued that the £5,000 p/a NET that each man, woman and child in Surrey contributes to the national economy would be under threat if the government continued to furnish us with inadequate levels of support, but now the economy has started to contract this is a far more immediate problem. Local taxpayers already contribute 80% of Surrey’s funding and we have always done our best to try to keep the Council Tax down as low as we can, but this isn’t easy when we are hit with an annual shortfall in our funding settlement. For 2008/09 for instance the government only provided us with £4m for our Highways maintenance, forcing us to borrow £25m just to ensure we spent up to the level that the government thought we should be spending. This sort of shortfall is a problem at the best of times, but it is an even greater problem now.

The Conservative Group on Surrey County Council will continue to work hard to deliver budgets that fund our services as well as we can and we will make savings wherever we can, but it would be a lot easier if we didn’t constantly have to work with our hands tied.

I have written to the Prime Minister and the Secretary of State to ask them to urgently review funding for Surrey’s local authorities and we have started a petition on the Number 10 website where residents can register their views: http://petitions.number10.gov.uk/Surrey-Funding/

I sincerely hope that the government will listen”.