South West Surrey TPA organiser Peter Webb gives us his branch’s update from their May Campaign, including:

• Mass lobbying of Surrey County Councillors;
• Attending Councillor meetings to hold them to account;
• Numerous letters published in the Surrey Advertiser. (See below for a selection of clippings)

If you want to join the SW Surrey TPA Campaign email Peter Webb at [email protected]

April omissions. Member Mike Harrison reported use of Guildford BC white vans as mobile CCTV platforms and that no privacy impact assessment carried out. This is a sensitive issue brought to attention of MP Anne Milton.
Long running issue of poor state of Surrey roads and management: Peter Rauch FOI questions cv of Jenny Isaac new Head of Surrey Roads. Answer only assures proper interview and selection procedures followed. No qualifications divulged.

May 9th: PW letter published on 7 week delay in Hospital medical report. Followed on 24th by news report in Surrey Times crediting  as of TPA.
Reported in press that only 1/3rd of Surrey people now think County gives value for money

10th: Surrey Ad report on TPA 10% cut initiative with quotes after consulting me on 30th April

11th: Sent block message to County councillors and MP on value for money. Asked MPs for more intervention in Surrey government and suggested to CCllrs a different approach to planning leading to stripping out non-productive activity to reduce cost base, and then simulate without income cap towards making good case publicly supported, for income to match.

12th: Attended with Barry Smith and Ernie Hughes at Guildford library to question CCllrs on their initiative ‘Council Tax Unwrapped’. Lack of other people due to lack of notice given gave us opportunity to harangue for 1 ½ hours.

16th: Surrey Ad reported on meetings at expensive hotels outside the county to foster nebulous ‘togetherness’. I had been asked for comment and noticed that Editorial Comment was excellent: “County togetherness hardly harmonises with the taxpayer”;  “nebulous ambition to build capacity”; “long-term challenges vs emptying bins and mending roads”; “partnership” now hackneyed word;  “having shied away from prospect of single tier local government in Surrey, now we are told local politicians need cash to work out how they are going to work together”; “does it matter which tax,  council tax or otherwise”.

30th: 3 letters published (click to enlarge):

Punishment of Taxpayers Must Stop (Steve Bowers),

Who Will Take a Stand in Council Tax Battle ?(Peter Rauch),

and Quangos and Call for Control (Peter Webb).

Council tax unwrapped block message to CCllrs set out big figure perspective over ten years asking ‘what have you done with it all ?’. Also joined to question to our two MPs: “When will Surrey MPs raise their game on high spending and disconnected Surrey government? When will they address government machinery failure and publicly call, and plan, for re-structuring? When will they acknowledge more forcefully the weaknesses in the taxation system and especially the local funding question?
CCllr Gosling (Exec Ctee – Resources) wants to see me “to clarify things” and “look at SW Surrey TPA main public statement”. (Will I need armed escort?)

There’s been a lot of publicity in recent days about Apethorpe Hall (a notable Elizabethan house whose name strongly suggests the resident butler should be a monkey), and English Heritage’s forays into property development. Essentially, the Government bought the house with a compulsory purchase order for £3.18 million, English Heritage spent £4 million restoring it and it is now on sale for £4.5 million. Yes, that’s right – a loss to the taxpayer of over £2.6 million. Sarah Beeny would not be impressed.

Before I go on, I ought to say that I’m not just shooting from a heartless capitalist hip here – my BA is in Archaeology, and I care very strongly about the nation’s heritage. That is what makes me particularly angry about this case.

Not only have the Government and English Heritage spent millions that could have been used elsewhere or simply given back to taxpayers, they had no need to do so in the first place.

As the Telegraph reported on Saturday, that compulsory purchase order snatched the property out of the hands of a consortium that had just bought Apethorpe with the full intention of restoring it, who had bought it three days earlier. Why, having originally planned to forcibly buy the property from an owner who had let the house fall into rack and ruin did the government steam ahead regardless of the fact that a new owner, enthusiastic about restoration, was on the scene?

Surely the preference should be for such restoration to be carried out by private owners rather than by English Heritage at the taxpayers’ expense? The planning laws and listed building regulations are so strong that there would have been constant oversight of work done by the private group to such an important building to ensure they adhered to the rules. So why did the State feel the need to butt in and take over?

Even worse, it now turns out that when they learned that a compulsory purchase order was on the cards, the consortium offered to seel the house to the Government for a mere £1.6 million, just over half what the taxpayer ended up coughing up after HMG insisted on compulsory purchase. That is a bizarre decision, that unfortunately smacks of the bloody-mindedness recognisable to anyone unlucky enough to find themselves on the receiving end of a public construction programme. Whoever turned down that offer, and thus cost you and me over £1.5 million, should be ashamed of themselves.

And where has all this hoohah left us? The taxpayer is out of pocket. Other archaeological and historic projects, to which £2.5 million could make the world of difference, are unfunded, and the house itself will only be open to the public for 28 days a year.

An English Heritage spokesman has defended the fiasco by saying:

It was crucial that we acted, it was at risk of being lost for ever and we rescued the property because it is of exceptional importance.

But the sad thing is that Apethorpe Hall was already being saved by people who were keen to restore it to its former glory and had their plans dashed by the dead weight of public intervention. This "rescue" was equivalent to fighting someone who is already providing first aid for the right to be the saviour of a stricken person – pushing off a paramedic because you want to be in the papers as the hero instead.

The unsettling impression this sorry tale leaves is that the State seems to think that when something is saved for the nation, it must be saved by the State. Indeed, all too often the state seems to think it is the very embodiment of the British nation. It is time our civil servants, quangocrats and particularly our politicians realised that this is not the case; Britain is far more than its public sector, nor do they have a prime claim to our cultural heritage.

It is reported in the Telegraph today that Conservative MEP Giles Chichester paid almost half-a-million-pounds from his EU expense account in the last ten years to his own family firm.  The funds came from his £160,000-a-year staffing allowance paid out to all Members of the European Parliament. 

In the article it’s exposed how Chichester:

• Paid his company £445,000 since 1996 for secretarial and other duties;
• Paid the Company Directors (who were solely Mr Chichester and his wife) £47,792 since 2002
• Paid £40,000 rent between 1996 and 2003 for office space in the same address given by the Chichester household.

With your money Giles Chichester has allegedly paid himself with staffing expenses, paid rent to himself for using his home as an office and paid his company for miscellaneous duties.

Hopefully a thorough investigation will be under way as soon as possible.  But it begs the question: how many more politicians are fiddling the expenses system to fund a lavish lifestyle at our expense?  No wonder the tax burden has gone through the roof if their attitude to public spending borders on an addiction.