Having put my head above the parapet on social media to try to keep residents and businesses as informed as I can about the town centre works, in addition to communication from the Surrey County Council Farnham Infrastructure Programme team, I would like to clarify a few things and ask for residents’ help.

Firstly, the project has been designed by qualified Surrey County Council officers, and they have contracted services from qualified engineering companies.

The work is being implemented by Surrey County Council’s contractor, Ringway, and they have at times contracted some services. The project is not being run by councillors. In fact, the member-officer protocol for Surrey County Council makes it clear that “officers are responsible to the chief executive, and not to individual Members of the Council”.

No Surrey County councillor can tell any officer of Surrey County Council what to do. As a local councillor, when the town centre plan was “fixed” in 2024 after consultation, I did not 100 percent support the plan; it was a compromise.

There were some elements — particularly the rain gardens on The Borough — that I was especially unhappy with, as rather than widening the pavements they would narrow them in the busiest shopping area in the town.

I proposed instead vertical planters that would take rainwater from the roofs and could be placed in the existing alcoves in the historic town centre. I wrote papers and shared them with officers, but in August 2024 officers published a paper advising that the recommendation remained rain gardens.

Where are we now with the design of that section of The Borough? Officers have now agreed to delete one of the three areas of greening or rain gardens and reduce the length of the other two. The officers are the experts and, although I and other local councillors — particularly Cllrs Hesse and Martin — can see more negatives than positives, it is not our decision.

In better news, since the new signals at the top of Downing Street have become operational, local councillors have been in very regular contact with officers, raising concerns that they did not appear to be working effectively or as hoped. Surrey County Council officers have, over that time, advised that they were reviewing the situation and would get back to us.

An update from Friday, December 12 read: “Since the signals became operational, it has become clear that vehicles stopping to load on West Street are intermittently obstructing the radar queue detection. This results in a false assessment of queue lengths, reducing the number of vehicles able to pass through the junction during certain signal phases and leading to increased queuing at peak times.

“To address this in the short term, we have been working closely with the traffic signals team and have temporarily overridden the radar detection and placed the junction on fixed signal timings. This removes sensitivity to parked or loading vehicles and provides a more consistent and predictable level of traffic throughput during busy periods while further measures are implemented.”

Inconsiderate parking remains an issue across the town, from residents’ drives being blocked to drivers pulling up on both sides of the road at the same time. So, please think of others when you are parking.

If you would like to contact the FIP team, please email them at: [email protected].