Surrey salutes the Coalition’s response to Labour’s profligacy and waste (20th July)

Surrey Conservatives will continue to pursue value for money.

Tim Hall, Cabinet Member for Change & Efficiency, this week criticised Gordon Brown’s Labour government for leaving local authorities, such as Surrey County Council, in an invidious financial position: “Labour threw monies around like there was no tomorrow without looking at whether monies were being spent wisely, they oversaw a series of increasingly iniquitous local government funding settlements, they failed to oversee the country’s finances properly, led us into a recession despite their ludicrous claims to have abolished boom and bust, and as with all Labour governments they ran out of other people’s money and they left the country with a massive bill.

Thankfully under David Cameron the country is already experiencing far better leadership than it was under Gordon Brown and I am confident that the decisions of the present government, unlike their predecessors, will be in the long-term interests of the country, even though some of them may be painful.

“It is unfortunate that local government has to suffer as the Coalition seeks to tackle the deficit, but at Surrey County Council we have been preparing for this for some time and I believe we are in as good a position as it is possible to be. We have been preparing for smaller budgets since before the election, and we believe we are in as good a position as possible to be able to ameliorate the effects of reduced income”.

David Hodge, Deputy Leader of Surrey County Council, added, “Through the first five of our Public Value Reviews we have identified nearly £23m of savings to be made between now and 2013/2014, and since there are many more PVRs to be completed (13 are currently ongoing) we anticipate further savings being identified. We do not seek to pretend that this will be easy, but I am confident in the abilities of our Members and our Officers to find savings and deliver value for money.

Our PVRs will also help us to deliver in this Conservative administration’s ambition to see Surrey County Council become a world-class authority, by placing the Council in the top 25% of local authorities for performance and the lowest 25% for unit costs.

We have prepared for an era of decreasing public spending, and it is a shame that the previous government didn’t do likewise”.