Epsom & Ewell Liberal Democrats

The directors of the Abelea Green management company have forced St Joseph's RC church in Epsom to bar the gate between their car park and St Joseph's primary school, to prevent St Margaret Drive on the Abelea Green estate being used to access the school via the car-park.

After spending years trying, the directors who live on the estate eventually succeeded by pointing out that the lease for the car park access road mentions the church and the hall, but not the school.

There will be peace:

when attitudes change;

when self-interest is seen as part of common interest;

when old wrongs, old scores, old mistakes

are deleted from the account;

when the aim becomes cooperation and mutual benefit

rather than revenge or seizing maximum personal or group gain;

when justice and equality before the law

It is quite ironic that Epsom's Residents' Association (RA) council is pushing to over-develop the site of the Wells social centre with a four-storey building of 23 flats. Epsom had the fantastic windfall of having the huge sites of five redundant hospitals made available to develop for residential purposes.

Parking charges of £1.30 per hour, with a maximum charge of £5.00 per day, were introduced in the car parks on Surrey County Council's Countryside Estate, including those at Norbury Park, on 6 August 2018 despite significant opposition from local residents. Previously there was no charge.

Liberal Democrat County Councillor Hazel Watson (Dorking Hills) said: "Following the introduction of the parking charges, the car parks, unsurprisingly, have been virtually empty.

Railway cutting land at Mill Road, Epsom, now mostly behind green hoardings, is the subject of another planning application. 18/00271/FUL proposes 31 units in a serious of blocks, with associated parking. The area to the north of the site is retained as a wildlife sanctuary (where there are badger setts and other wildlife). Comments must be submitted to the council by 13th October.

This coming Saturday 8th September, there is an opportunity for everyone to visit derelict Horton Chapel

Visitors can learn about the heritage of the site and the plans which have been made for its future use.

Free tickets are available from hortonchapelproject.org

Horton Chapel Arts & Heritage Society has been created to develop and run the building along charitable lines. It bid successfully from the Heritage Lottery Fund and is currently awaiting legal matters to be processed by the borough council before starting on work.

Liberal Democrat county councillors in Surrey have criticised the ruling Conservative administration for recruiting a new "Business Manager" post, on a salary of more than £43,000, when at the same time planning hundreds of staff redundancies and millions of pounds of cuts to front line services.

The advert, which has appeared on the Guardian website, seeks to recruit a "skilled networker" to County Hall whose work "will often be politically sensitive". The salary offered is £43,638 for a working week of 36 hours, with the promise of a "generous local government salary related pension".

Surrey County Council has commissioned a second report from the Chartered Institute of Public Finance & Accountancy (CIPFA) to review its financial resilience. This follows a report commissioned in December 2016, costing nearly £25,000, which warned that the financial position of the County Council was "extremely worrying" and that "it is risk of becoming financially unsustainable".

Liberal Democrat county councillors are calling for urgent improvements to Child & Adolescent Mental Health Services, known as CAMHS, in the county. Surrey County Council currently commissions these services from Surrey & Borders NHS Trust but there has been strong criticism of the long waiting times for routine assessments and appointments. Liberal Democrat county councillors have tabled a motion on CAMHS to be discussed at Council next week.

This time last week, 100,000 people marched through the streets of London calling for the public to have a final say on Brexit.

Everyone can see the Conservatives are making a mess of Brexit, Theresa May's negotiations on the deal are getting more chaotic and confusing - meanwhile Jeremy Corbyn and the Labour leadership is helping the Tories deliver a destructive Brexit that will be bad for Britain.