The Conservative plot to cancel Surrey's elections

The Surrey Conservatives are trying to seize the opportunity to use English Devolution as an excuse to cancel this year’s May elections.

By way of background, before Christmas, the Government published an English Devolution White Paper. There has been a lot of speculation about what this could mean for Runnymede. We therefore wanted to take the opportunity to set out the facts as they currently stand.

The White Paper broadly outlined:

• The Government wants all of England to be run by Mayoral Strategic Authorities (MSA), similar to Manchester, West Midlands, London, etc.
• These MSAs will have populations of 1.5m or more and be based on economic geographies.
• The MSAs are likely to be made up of a number of Unitary Authorities, each with minimum populations of 500k.
• The current two tier local government structure (a county council and boroughs/districts), as we currently have in Surrey, will cease to exist. The Boroughs and Districts (e.g. Runnymede) will be absorbed into one or more Unitary Authorities.

Having described what is to be achieved, the government is inviting local top tier authorities (such as Surrey) to submit proposals for how these unitary authorities should be made up and organised.

In Surrey, we have a population of 1.2m so naturally following the government’s guidelines we wouldn’t expect Surrey to be one single unitary authority.

The Conservatives at Surrey County Council are using this as an opportunity to cancel the County elections in May 2025, by bidding to be in the first phase. This is against the wishes of the majority of Surrey’s boroughs and districts, governed by various parties and groupings. To date, there has been no public consultation with residents or stakeholders. There is currently no broad agreement or consensus for what the future of Surrey looks like.

Speaking about the potential cancellation of Surrey’s elections, Don Whyte, Leader of the Liberal Democrats in Runnymede, said “The Conservatives are using this to deny residents an opportunity to engage in the process and deny them their democratic rights. They are trying to seize the opportunity to keep their seats for as long as possible and deny the voters of Runnymede a right to decide who represents them. We must continue with the elections as planned, and let the public choose how they want to be governed in the coming years.”

We will keep this story updated as things change.