Local council wheezes

Residents' Associations (RA) are curious animals which only exist in two or three places in the country, associations which pretend to be apolitical but which mostly attract people who would otherwise vote Conservative. Epsom council has long been run by the RA and despite their Conservative roots they seem to like nothing better than having a pop at Surrey County Council (SCC) which is staunchly Conservative.

Now some time ago now, I read that local councils, starved of money by central government, had taken to speculating on commercial property to boost their incomes. This worked because while central government was not willing to give councils the money they needed to do their job - the subtext being that you trash the service and then claim that it would be so much better to privatise the lot - it was willing to lend them money on attractive terms for capital projects with very little regard to the quality or value for money of those projects. Something looked after by something which used to be called the Public Works Loan Board.

So I read today in the RA newsletter that SCC has had its fingers rather badly burned by speculations of this sort, taking big hits on loans totalling around £200m - with annual net expenditure on services running at around £1,000m by way of comparison. All this and more is no doubt to be found at reference 1, the source of the snap above.

References

Reference 1: https://www.surreycc.gov.uk/council-and-democracy/finance-and-performance/statement-of-accounts.

Reference 2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_Works_Loan_Board.

Reference 3: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2021/08/warrington.html. Previous notice of same.