You may have read recently that Surrey County Council are considering closing Cranleigh Recycling Centre! Before they go ahead with this closure SCC are carrying out a consultation on their proposal to shut the recycling and refuse tip in Cranleigh and other sites across the county.

This news comes only months after the opening hours at the Cranleigh site were reduced. Considering the increase in residents we are expecting following all the house building that Waverley Borough Council have approved this seems pretty short-sighted. Infrastructure issues have been at the heart of our objections to the high increase of housing in the area and this change is very unhelpful and we think it could lead to an increase in the amount of fly-tipping that already costs Waverley Borough Council large amounts each year.

Please click on the link to the consultation site below and complete the questionnaire before 7 August to let them know what you think.

Consultation

Also, if you have anything you have been meaning to chuck out, take a trip to the tip in the next few days.  The more we can prove that we need this refuse tip, the better!

Here is what one of our members thought about this proposal:

Dear Cranleigh Society

As I am sure are aware, the local paper recently carried a story about a SCC consultation to close a number of Community Recycling Centres including Cranleigh. Travelling to the alternative CRCs would not in any way be convenient, Witley would be a 45 minute journey and the alternative of Guildford likely well in excess of an hour as it will require negotiating central Guildford and then queuing traffic at Slyfield.

I have completed the online survey and if you are able to encourage members (and indeed non members) to respond to the survey there are three opportunities to specifically object to the closure of Cranleigh CRC:

Question 5 – strongly disagree to close Cranleigh

Question 7 – preferred option “closure of some CRCs” set to lowest preference i.e. 1

Question 8 other comments – I have pasted in my own answers below as an example. Although answers to this question cannot be relied on as it is unstructured data it is an opportunity to get individual comments across:

1. Apart from my fortnightly refuse collection, my local CRC is one of the few obvious ways I see that I get something in return for the large amount of council tax I pay. Closing my local CRC would cause me to resent paying my council tax. It’s no good pointing out what else my council tax is spent on as I don’t see any evidence of that, for instance my local roads are very poorly maintained. Putting out “positive” messages about what the saved money would be spent on instead simply won’t cut it as that doesn’t compensate me for the considerable inconvenience of travelling to an alternative CRC. I want the Cranleigh CRC retained, period.

2. At a time when a very large number of new houses are being built or planned to be built in Cranleigh it seems beyond belief that the council would consider closing the Cranleigh CRC. This would be rubbing salt in the wound opened up by having so much housing dumped on a community whose infrastructure is already struggling to cope, and that is before before the population is increased by all the planned house building.