Dishonest, stupid or both? What’s going on with the new hospital site?

The local Lib Dems are a funny bunch to understand. Even harder to understand is why so many people vote for them. Conventional wisdom is they represent the anti-vote, you vote for them to avoid someone else winning.

That’s certainly been the case in recent elections in Surrey Heath.

They managed to generate a story that the Conservatives should be kicked out because they had bought The Mall shopping centre in Camberley for too much. Regardless of the facts, this became the story, and it worked.

The Lib Dems wiped the board in the 2023 Council elections, reducing the Conservatives from 17 to 6 seats, on a manifesto promising “Accountability | Community | Transparency”. 

Their track record since then is clear: out of their depth, unable to manage relationships with officers, dishonesty about the state of the Council’s finances, selling never-to-be-replaced Council assets.

Ironically, Councillor Sashi Mylvaganam was the originator of the “paid too much for the shopping centre” story when he was Lib Dem Leader.

But Sashi saw the light in 2024, jumping ship to the Conservatives and denouncing the Lib Dems as a bunch of liars, guilty of “blatant unruth” and “false messages”.

I first met Alisdair Pinkerton during the 2019 General Election campaign; the first thing he said to me was “I don’t know what I’m doing here. I’m an academic, not a politician.”

But he built an anti-Michael Gove campaign, “Get Gove Gone”, over the next five years. His campaign was entirely based on criticising Michael Gove for not living in the area, and making weak or false claims about what he’d done.

After he changed his name to “Al”, Michael asked “do you think should I start calling myself Micky?”

When Michael decided not to stand, the “Get Gove Gone” wind was well and truly taken out of his sails, and his campaign became entirely based on the fact he _did_ live in the area.

Al’s victory at the 2024 General Election was assisted by the morons in the Conservative Party who point-blank refused to allow the local members to consider a local candidate, despite being told in clear terms that this would deliver Surrey Heath on a plate to the Lib Dems’ “local champion” candidate.

I’m sure it’s been a shock for Al in moving from the world of academia to Westminster.

Michael’s five-strong constituency team were not in the least bit interested in working for him, but they diligently went through every one of the 40,000 cases on their computer, contacting those with live cases, including me, asking if they wanted their case details to be passed onto the new MPs’ team.

Yet for whatever reason, Al’s team was incapable of taking on this data, and he was reduced to asking constituents via social media to resubmit any cases they wanted to be taken up.

I imagine Al’s caseload is now dominated by correspondents concerned about the location of the new hospital.

At the Frimley Green, Mytchett and Deepcut Society Annual General Meeting on 14th November last year, Al was the guest speaker, and he told the audience, including me, that he didn’t know the location of the preferred site.

But only a few days later he wrote a letter to the Secretary of State, describing his concerns that “In every meeting” he has attended on the subject, “the team has consistently promoted a preferred site”. He goes on to raise specific objections to this “preferred site”, making it clear he knows exactly where it is.

I checked what I had heard the previous Friday at the meeting with a friend, a staunch Lib Dem voter, who confirmed I had heard what I thought I’d heard.

The only possible explanations could be “every meeting” Al went to, took place between 8pm Friday 14th and before he wrote the letter the following Tuesday, which seems unlikely; or he wasn’t telling the truth.

It’s now clear it was the latter. So much for Al’s pious proclamations of integrity.

Since then there has been much speculation that the preferred site is land owned by local charity Frimley Fuel Allotments, very possibly Pine Ridge Golf Club. It certainly fitted the clues in Al’s letter. And this week it was confirmed the rumours were true.

History tells us that Frimley Fuel Allotments is a charity that has been around for a long time, initially being given land in 1801, which it has used to benefit the community. It sold some of the land to build Tomlinscote School, it owns the land that the golf club is built on, for which it receives £250,000 a year that it uses for its charitable purposes, giving grants to individuals and groups.

Over time, it has morphed from its original structure of Trustees including the Lord of the Manor and Church Wardens, to being run by the local Council, to being an independent Charity.

This history is reflected in its governance structure that includes four Trustees nominated by Surrey Heath Borough Council, currently:

Rob Lee – Lib Dem Councillor for Parkside

Cliff Betton – Lib Dem Councillor for Mytchett & Deepcut

Mary Glauert – Lib Dem Councillor for Town

Murray Rowlands – Labour Councillor for St Michaels

Now, if I were a Trustee of a charity who were negotiating the sale of land, AND I was a Lib Dem Councillor whose party and local leader is vociferously opposed to the sale of that land, then that’s clearly a conflict of interests.

It’s unclear exactly why the Lib Dem-run Council feels it’s OK to have debates where Rob Lee demands that the Chairman and Treasurer of the Charity for which HE is a Trustee, turn up to answer questions at a Council committee, or why Al thinks it makes sense to write to the Charity Commission, raising concerns that he is vague about.

What’s going on?

It’s baffling until you understand who the Chairman of the Charity is.

It’s Alan McClafferty, the former Conservative Leader of SHBC.

Alan should be regarded as a local hero to the residents of Surrey Heath.

Alan was the Councillor who took the initiative to grasp the nettle and topple the previous Leader of the Council, when it was discovered she’d agreed the pay rise that the previous Chief Executive, Karen Whelan had asked for. When no-one else either thought she deserved a pay rise, or knew about it.

After Alan became Leader, he led the efforts to turn around the Council. That started with getting rid of Whelan, and then Alan set about replacing the whole top team of officers, a job that was done by 2022, together with new processes and procedures to stop anything like that ever happening again.

Alan is a master of the understatement, and doesn’t blow his own trumpet very loud.

Some people, myself included, believe that Alan’s quiet determination to do the right thing, and not seek publicity to tell the story of the Council’s turnaround, was a significant factor in the rise of the local Lib Dem vote.

By not telling the story of the turnaround, the story became the one the Lib Dem peddled.

That of the overpriced shopping centre.

There is certainly a lot of material here the Charity Commission could get its teeth into, and I were a Lib Dem Councillor I’d be Googling the not insignificant sanctioning powers the Charity Commission has.

The Trustees have a duty to the Charity. If they could sell the land for (say) £15m, they could invest and get an annual return of 3-4%, £450,000 – £600,000, significantly more than the £250,000 they get today, to put towards their charitable objectives.

They would be failing in their duty as Trustees if they didn’t consider this. If this creates a fundamental conflict of interests, they need to resolve this, by resigning from enough roles to eliminate the conflict.

It will be interesting to watch the FFA entry on the Charity Commission website to watch what might happen in the coming weeks and months.

Access is a real concern.

Unless they are thinking of a new junction at the M3/Maltway and increasing the capacity of The Maltway by widening it, it’s hard to see how it would work.

Roads are expensive, the recent relatively simple bridge over the railway at Ash cost £55m.

It seems clear to me that an access route via Old Bisley Road is a non-starter. I’ve run along here at school pick-up time and it is a nightmare.

The only way I can see it working in that direction is a junction where the Tomlinscote fields are, a big roundabout that takes traffic to the new site. Tomlinscotes playing fields would have to be moved South. You could also have access via The Maltway, providing two access points like St. Peters Hospital in Chertsey, another road through the current 10th hole:

 

But it all needs analysis and the worry would be that the traffic experts analysis says it would be okay, as it usually does.

I recommend following local politicians you can trust, people like Deachy, Trefor Hogg, Jonny Cope, if you want to get a balanced view of the options and how to lobby to ensure it goes the right way.

Stuart Black

June 2026