What happened to the promised health centre?
A developer wants to build a lot of new houses in your area. “It will be ok,” you hear, “We will also have a new school, a new health centre, better buses and better roads.” Fast forward 4 years, and none of those things have materialised. Instead, you have 6 playgrounds within 50 metres of each other, flooding on neighbouring estates, traffic jams and a 6 week wait for a doctor’s appointment. So whatever happened to those promises? Did the developers lie to us about this promised infrastructure?
Surprisingly, the answer is “No”. The developers sign a contract with the council to provide money or land – this is called the S106 agreement. It is then up to the council or the health service to spend that money to mitigate the harm of the development. Except, too often, that money does not get spent (and then has to be returned to the developer). Why?
Cllr Sue Wyeth-Price
Cllr Sue Wyeth-Price has spent years trying to get to the bottom of this. By tracking through all the S106 agreements, she believes that there is £20 million of money promised to just the Ash region (her Ward) that has not been spent. A promised Health Centre that the NHS has no intention of building. Money to extend the school that has been spent on another school.
So what is going wrong with the process?
The idea behind the S106 agreement sounds very reasonable. If you are building a lot of houses, then the council should be able to insist that you pay for a road/school/medical upgrade. Yet clearly it doesn’t work, or we wouldn’t be in the mess we are now. Why not? Let’s take the example of the promised Health Centre in Ash.
This was included because it was part of the Local Plan from 2019. That Local Plan was rushed through, and the Health Authority didn’t give it more than a cursory glance. This is then copied into the S106 agreement and a piece of land is set aside for a new Health Centre that the authority has no intention of building. That’s the first problem. Nobody is checking with the relevant authority that the requirement is still valid.
The second problem is that until Cllr Wyeth-Price started investigating, Guildford Borough hadn’t been tracking these agreements. Any money that was received was passed on without tracking whether it was being spent in accordance with the agreement. Any money that should be collected “when the 10th dwelling is occupied” would only get collected if the developer paid it.
And finally, the money gets diverted out of the Ward. Instead of increasing the capacity in the Local Ward, a school in a neighbouring Ward was upgraded.
In the days when we were building a few hundred houses a year, the process might have worked. Now, the council must do better with the original agreement, the collection and the tracking of these commitments. That is the battle that Sue is fighting.
