1 Star Rating legal challenge - Tories refuse to back down

6.54.00pm GMT Tue 24th Mar 2009

Surrey's Conservative administration has finally lost touch with reality!

County Hall Tories have refused to back down in the face of a Lib Dem demand for the Council to stop wasting taxpayers' money, by putting an end to its legal action against the 1 Star Rating it recently received from Ofsted.

For once, all Opposition and Minority party members were united in their support for the Liberal Democrat motion. This called for an end to the Executive's legal action demanding a judicial review of Ofsted's assessment of Surrey's children's services as "inadequate" - saying the money and management time would be better spent improving front-line services instead.

The Tories claimed they had to defend their reputation - using taxpayers' money - to avoid, among other things, future serious problems with staffing and further inspections.

Lib Dem leader Cllr Hazel Watson said there was already a serious problem with staffing - social work vacancies for instance are at almost 25% - and Surrey was facing greater inspections anyway because of the ruling last year that three out of five categories of children's services were inadequate. The real reason, she said, that the Council was disputing the findings in children's services was because that had automatically brought its overall rating as an authority down to 1 Star.

"After 12 years of a majority Conservative administration, the County Council has been awarded the lowest star rating of 1 Star, clearly demonstrating its failures," said Cllr Watson. "Its legal action is simply to save face and that is no justification for wasting potentially hundreds of thousands of pounds of Surrey council taxpayers' money on legal bills - in fact, it faces double costs if it loses, paying Ofsted's expenses as well as the Council's.

"It's outrageous for the Conservatives to gamble with council taxpayers' money like this - perhaps it has more to do with the fact it doesn't want to be branded a 1 Star council in the run up to the County Council elections in June!"

Instead of pursuing the expensive legal action, the Lib Dems suggested that the administration paid closer attention to improving children's services - most of which are long-standing and serious. "The children's service has a severe shortage of social workers, large numbers of expensive agency staff and a £14m overspend on its budget," added Cllr Watson.

"We have been calling for action for a long time - we argued against staff cuts back in 2006 with the Business Delivery Review but the Conservative administration has been slow to face up to the problems and to tackle them. They've lost touch with reality."