“I want the Conservative Party to learn from what local Conservative councils are doing right now” George Osborne said in September 2009. Surrey County Council (SCC) seems to agree: its Conservative leader recently said that he wanted “David Cameron to be coming to us for advice”.

It wouldn’t be the first time. David Cameron was in Surrey in May 2006, inspecting the council’s new ‘Pegasus’ school bus scheme. He told ITN that “Here in Surrey the council has actually spent five million pounds of its own money […] to expand these school buses and it’s cut the number of cars at the school gate in the morning by twenty percent. […] It’s a really exciting agenda and one that I am determined the Conservative government is going to pursue.”

The council, however, seems less determined: three years later, the very school where Cameron launched Pegasus found itself fighting the scheme’s termination. Having considered four possible options for its future, the Conservative council opted for “maximum savings at the earliest possible date”: ending the service in July 2010 and selling the twenty-two buses at a loss of £1.7 million. This was a controversial decision, it being noted that “withdrawing Ride Pegasus would affect access to learning for those students not statutorily-entitled to transport” and that, as the council’s cabinet member for transport conceded “there is no doubt that this is a very popular service”. By the date of the council’s decision 1,500 signatures had been gathered in opposition to Pegasus’s discontinuation.

The move came shortly after the council had allocated a 2009/10 budget of £147,000 (the cost of roughly two months of Pegasus operations) to preparations for the 2012 Olympics, employing a 2012 ‘Coordinator’ at £46,000 per year. No part of the games will take place in Surrey. SCC has also been criticised for taking Ofsted to court to overturn a one star rating it gave the council. The unsuccessful appeal, opposed by all non-Conservative councillors, cost £10,000 in legal fees and almost £5,000 in costs paid to Ofsted. In particular, Ofsted had criticised SCC’s children’s services, concluding that “The contribution of local services to improving outcomes for children and young people at risk, or requiring safeguarding, is inadequate.”

All this begs the question of whether or not the council is serving the county well. Its former interim CEO Michael Frater does not seem to think so. In his July 2009 handover report he accused the council (on which the leading Conservative group holds 56 of 80 seats) of a “failure of leadership, culture and governance”, describing a “macho” culture of “blame and bullying” and a “breakdown in trust”.  The council, he said, was “very internally focused, obsessed with itself, with its own processes and bureaucracy”.

“A complication to this attitude is an implicit, and often explicit, attitude by some Members that could be summarised as ‘private sector good – public sector, bad’” Frater wrote, also criticising a “highly centralised model of control” which “has encouraged micromanagement and ‘control freakery’”.

He argued that “The most striking aspect of the management style in Surrey is how bureaucratic it has become as a result of an obsession with the control of inputs and resources […] which is then mistaken for a focus on efficiency. This is perhaps inevitable given the lack of a clear vision and strategy […]”

Frater’s comments were supported by Surrey County UNISON, which congratulated him for speaking out and described his report as “entirely accurate”.

All eleven of Surrey’s MPs are Conservatives, four of which (Chris Grayling, Michael Gove, Jeremy Hunt and Philip Hammond) are in Cameron’s Shadow Cabinet.  David Cameron and George Osborne surely have plenty to learn from their colleagues in Surrey, but precisely what is a matter for debate.

| Category Governance, Public Services, South East, Transport