A million pound contract is being torn up just weeks after Waverley Borough Council approved it following “significant concerns” over the “honesty” of the deal.

In March, the council signed off on £1 million project to bring its grounds maintenance contracts in house – despite none of the money having been in the  budget.

It argued the contract would “ensure the council is able to provide a high-quality grounds maintenance, with built in flexibility and adaptation”.

With devolution and local government reorganisation looming – Surrey’s boroughs and districts are likely to be merged – opponents questioned the wisdom of spending so much on a service with such an uncertain future.

Now, with the ink barely dry, that deal has been ripped up after a motion calling for it to be rescinded was passed during Wednesday’s full council meeting of Waverley Borough Council.

Extracts from the original motion said that there were “concerns that the executive may have voted to take the ground maintenance in-house without having been provided all the facts” .

It added that there was a lack of confidence that “fairness, impartiality and transparency can be satisfactorily demonstrated”  and that there was evidence that placed “significant concerns that councillors have not been provided with all the facts/have potentially been misled”.

Raising the motion was Councillor Jane Austin, leader of the Conservative opposition.

She told the meeting it was brought forward to protect honesty in council dealings and to uphold doing council business the right way.

She said: “What was in question here was honesty, honesty from councillors, and actually from officers – certainly what was in the reports, whether our decision making process was robust and whether the councillors had been provided with sufficient appropriate information that they could rely on.”

She added: “Officers now agree this decision was not safe and could have potentially been open to challenge.”

Unusually for an opposition-led motion it was backed by the council leader, although Cllr Paul Follows took issue with questions over honesty from councillors who he said were relaying information given to them in good faith.

He added that he had his suspicions over the root causes of the issue but that it would not be appropriate to go into them in a public room.

The council has now agreed to “rescind the decision to approved capital expenditure on the grounds maintenance service taken by Waverley Borough Council on March 25, 2025…to enable further consideration of the matter by the executive at their meeting on June 3 and for council to receive and determine a further recommendation from the executive regarding capital expenditure in due course”.