Message from Woldingham Parish Council – New Road Junction layout

Dear Residents,

It is obvious from the reaction to the new road layout at Halliloo Valley Road / Bug Hill that residents are displeased. This is the power of social media. I drove past yesterday and had someone cut the corner. We get it.

I will briefly cover the history of this project and action being taken.

The junction was identified a number of years ago as a safety hazard including incidents occurring. Councillor David Hodge (Head of Surrey County Council (SCC)) requested the SCC Highways team assess it. Four proposals were put forward by the SCC expert team. All four were judged to be safe, Woldingham Parish Council was asked our opinion given local knowledge and assisted in making the final decision between the four. The key point being, all four were meant to resolve the issue.

What next? With any junction change an independent audit team would assess the junction after the change and reevaluate if needed. However, we would like this resolved sooner given the feedback. We have spoken to Councillor David Hodge over the weekend and he has already requested SCC Highways meet us on site early this week. We will fully relay the feedback received and experiences detailed and will seek a solution that works.

Please let me know if you have further feedback: chairmanwpc@woldingham.com

With respect to broader Parish Council communication. The feedback here is also useful. We have an existing approach with respect to posting in the Facebook Group, Woldingham.com and the Village Magazine. We will review how this is done at our next meeting. The point that I personally have most noted in the last few weeks is that residents want details more than descriptions and residents most affected by any project expect more direct consultations. I will raise this point. I also wanted to raise the point that we don’t tend to get involved in the Facebook Group conversations unless comments resolve the issue immediately. This might seem old fuddy duddy of us (if you know us, you’ll see the sarcasm in that joke) but on subjects like this we tend to read the feedback, visit the issue and find ways forward rather than leap straight into the debate and that can take a few days.

As a final point, I’m pretty sure 99% of the comments are because all residents want to keep Woldingham safe and love Woldingham for its unique green character and preserving that in the best way possible. We as a council volunteer our spare time because we care so much about those simple points. So in the end we’ll succeed because we want the same thing.

Thank you all! Oh and please come litter picking this Sunday 14th October, meet on the Village Green at 10am. It is by contributing that we keep Woldingham as lovely as it is. If you are still unhappy with me, you can throw some of what you collect :-)

Best regards

Matthew Quaife

Chairman of Woldingham Parish Council