There is no getting away from the performance issues on grass cutting and your councillors are continuing to press for them to be fixed.
The situation arose because grass cutting had been contracted out by Surrey to all eleven District and Borough Councils. That made an awful lot of sense because the local councils owned some of the verges and because as the Districts and Boroughs are Local Planning Authorities, they were much better positioned to put pressure on developers that failed to maintain the verges they were responsible for.
In the first quarter of this year several councils decided to cut costs and handed back grass cutting to Surrey at short notice. Effectively Surrey was then forced to take back the responsibility from all eleven without any preplanning. Some of the Councils passed back the crucial information on responsibilities, others less so, some even sold their machinery and cancelled the final cut before handover.... In short it was chaos.
Surrey is gradually getting a consistent approach in place and gathering the required information, but with many thousands of parcels of land and the splits in responsibilities that have been created it isn't a simple or straightforward process. This year's weather has also caused difficulties with perfect conditions for the growth of grass meaning that at the end of "No Mow May" cutting the grass became a challenge of its own.
However, in Camberley East Councillor Jonny Cope has been working hard on residents' behalf to make sense of it all and get the right solutions in place to maintain the verges properly. He is also working to resolve issues in relation to trees on Wellington Park (in St Paul’s) that are causing nuisance to residents.
A complication is that the trees are owned by a mixture of residents, SHBC and SCC with several different tree preservation orders that may need updating. This is quite a knotty issue and Jonny has committed to working with the Council’s officers to try to see how these trees can be better maintained.
- Cllr Trefor Hogg
Pictured, Iberian Way in St. Paul's Ward, Camberley
