Surrey West: Born Bankrupt

There’s a website called woking-corruption.uk that has spent years meticulously documenting how Woking Borough Council racked up nearly £2 billion in debt through reckless borrowing and failed commercial ventures. It’s a thorough, well-sourced read, and if you live anywhere in Surrey you should probably take a look.

The short version: under long-serving CEO Ray Morgan and successive Conservative leaders, Woking funnelled hundreds of millions into a web of 13 Thameswey Group companies with minimal oversight. The Victoria Square development alone cost over £700 million — far beyond original projections — and the company behind it, GolDev Woking Ltd, was lent £250 million despite having virtually no independent assets. A £3 million discretionary “Opportunities Fund” operated with almost no transparency. An independent review by Grant Thornton later found the council’s practices were “potentially unlawful” and that “no reasonable council could have failed to consider the risks.”

In June 2023, Woking declared itself effectively bankrupt with a Section 114 deficit of £1.2 billion — the largest of any UK council. Government commissioners were sent in. The council’s core spending power was just £16.9 million per year, but servicing its debt was costing £1.3 million per week in interest alone. The debt per resident sits at around £20,600 — more than double the next worst council in the country.

But Woking wasn’t alone. The woking-corruption.uk site highlights that all five West Surrey councils that accumulated unsustainable debt were Conservative-controlled: Spelthorne (£1.07 billion), Runnymede (£638 million), Guildford (£312 million), and Surrey Heath (£170 million), all following a similar pattern of aggressive commercial borrowing with inadequate scrutiny.

Enter Surrey West

In October 2025, the government confirmed a two-unitary restructure for Surrey. The county’s eleven district and borough councils plus Surrey County Council will be replaced by just two new authorities: Surrey East and Surrey West. Elections for the new councils are scheduled for May 2026, with formal takeover on 1 April 2027.

Here’s the problem: the restructure lumps Woking together with Spelthorne, Runnymede, Surrey Heath, Guildford, and Waverley into the new West Surrey council. These are, collectively, the most indebted councils in the county. The combined debt heading into West Surrey is approximately £4.5 billion. The majority of all accumulated council debt across the whole of Surrey will sit with this single new authority.

The government has committed to repaying £500 million of Woking’s debt in 2026-27 as a first tranche, with further support to be explored later. But £500 million against a £4.5 billion debt pile is a drop in the ocean. Three Liberal Democrat MPs in the area have already raised “grave concerns” that West Surrey will be bankrupt from day one.

It’s a remarkable situation. Decades of reckless borrowing by a handful of councils, enabled by a lack of oversight at every level, are about to become the problem of a brand new authority that hasn’t even held its first meeting yet. The residents of Waverley and Guildford, whose councils were less reckless (though not blameless), will now share responsibility for Woking’s catastrophic debt along with Spelthorne’s and Runnymede’s.

The woking-corruption.uk site is worth bookmarking. It pulls together council reports, audit findings, parliamentary records, and news coverage into one place, making it far easier to understand how a borough of 100,000 people ended up nearly £2 billion in the red. The real question now is whether lessons will be learned — or whether the same patterns will simply continue under a new name with a bigger balance sheet.