Residents' survey (12 November - 29 November) - let us know what you think about your local area.

Council tax support consultation (12 November - 6 December) - what do you think about the revised council tax support scheme.

Priory Park Survey 2013 (3 October - 29 November) - a survey about Priory Park.

Do check on the current consultations page on our website for other feedback opportunities.

Our what's on listings are updated regularly on our website so do check there for new events.

November

14 -16 November: Gilbert and Sullivan's Iolanthe

Banstead Community Hall, Park Hall, Banstead, SM7 3AJ

Banstead Operatic Society present a satirical performance.

Time: 7.30pm and Saturday matinee at 2.30pm

Cost: £12 including a light meal

Contact info: 07716 496878 or john@banaos.org.uk

16 November: Christmas bazaar

Horseshoe Community Pre-School, Banstead Youth Centre, The Horseshoe, Bolters Lane, Banstead, SM7 2BQ

A range of children's craft activities along with stalls featuring handcrafted gifts, cakes and refreshments.

Time: 10am - 1pm

Contact details: 07814 791528 or email thehorseshoepreschool@yahoo.co.uk

16 November: eReader and tablet demonstrations

Redhill Library

Drop in sessions with a 10 minute demo followed by a 20 minute 'stay and play' to interact with the devices.

Time: 10am - 1pm with sessions starting on the hour and half hour

Cost: Free

Contact: Email libraries@surreycc.gov.uk or phone 01483 543599

21 November: Fireworks display

There's a free fireworks display on Thursday 21 November at 7.30pm at Memorial Park, Redhill. Start Christmas with a bang!

To celebrate the 150th anniversary of Reigate and Redhill becoming a municipal borough.

For further details visit the rr150 website.

23 November: Rag wreath making

Gatton Park, Rocky Lane, RH2 0TW

Create your own shabby chic wreath using reclaimed and recycled materials.

Time: 10am - 3pm

Cost: £35

Book in advance phone 01737 649066 or email education@gatton-park.org.uk

Further info visit the Gatton Park website.

23 November: Lunchtime youth concert

St Matthews Church, Redhill, 1.10pm-2pm. Entrance by donation with refreshments provided.

Contact Mrs Winter on 01737 768522.

23 November: Charter anniversary concert

Reigate Park Church

A night of music by Redhill Sinfonia to celebrate the 150 years of Reigate and Redhill being a municipal borough.

Time: 7.45pm

Further details visit the rr150 website.

30 November: Christmas Craftacular

The Reigate Community Centre, High Street, RH2 9AE

Handmade original crafts, Xmas gifts, decorations, cards and stationery, home baked cakes, lunch and refreshments.

Time: 12.30pm - 4.30pm

30 November: Family Christmas decoration making

Gatton Park, Rocky Lane, RH2 0TW

Create Christmas wreaths and other decorations from the natural materials of Gatton Park.

Time: 10am - 12.30pm and 1.30pm - 4pm

Cost: £8 adults and £5 children.

Book in advance phone 01737 649066 or email education@gatton-park.org.uk

Further info visit the Gatton Park website.

December

3 December: Festival of carols

St Joseph's Church, Ladbroke Road, Redhill

A Christmas celebration for all the family with Reigate and Redhill Choral Society joined by several local school choirs in traditional festive music.

Time: 7pm

Further info visit the Reigate and Redhill Choral society website

5 December: Reigate on ice

This year, Reigate will have its very first real ice skating rink. The rink will be open from 5 December 2013 - 5 January 2014. Tickets can be bought online now.

Priory Park, Bell Stree, Reigate.

7 December: Tattenhams Indoor Market

The United Church of St Mark, Great Tattenhams, Epsom Downs, KT18 5RD

A special Christmas market featuring cards, jewellery, gifts, homeware and much more.

Time: 10am - 2pm

Free entry

Further info contact StMarksmarket@virginmedia.com

7 December: Santa helicopter landing and grotto

Reigate Priory Junior School

Gates open at 10.30am with Santa's Grotto, balloons, funfair rides and fun stalls run by the local Scouts and Guides. Santa will land by helicopter at 11.30am.

Further details email sydneytavern@hotmail.com

7 December: Reigate Christmas Fayre

Church Street, Reigate

Annual Market run by Reigate Business Guild with fun for all the family. Supported by the Mayor, events include donkey rides to Santa's Grotto, street entertainers, performance by the Rock Choir and much more.

Time: 11.30am - 5pm

Contact info: chairmanrbg@willowsreigate.co.uk

8 December: Carols at the Belfry

A special night of carols to celebrate the 150 years of Reigate and Redhill being a municipal borough.

Time: 7pm

Further details visit the rr150 website

To apply, interested athletes should visit the GLL Sport Foundation website. Applications for 2014 open on 20 December 2013.

Helping talented youngsters succeed

We’re working with the GLL Sport Foundation, which aims to help talented athletes achieve their full sporting potential, to provide access to funding for local sporting stars.

The funding is there to reduce the financial burden on young athletes to they can concentrate on achieving their goals.

Are you eligible?

To be eligible for the funding, athletes must:

• Compete within Olympic, Paralympic, Deaflympic and Special Olympic sporting disciplines
• Compete from regional to Olympic and Paralympic levels
• Live or be educated where GLL and partners operate venues; or affiliated to a sports club that has a training base at a GLL and partner operated venue.

For the full awards criteria, visit the GLL Sport Foundation website. 

What does the support programme provide?

Athletes will be provided with:

• Financial training grants of up to £1,250.
• Training memberships enabling wider venue access for athlete training programmes across GLL and partner operated venues.
• Support opportunities targeted towards sports science, performance sport and coaching and employment. 

More information

• Visit the website - www.gllsportfoundation.org
• Send an email - gllsportfoundation@gll.org
• Follow the GLL Sport Foundation on twitter

We’re celebrating our new recycling service’s first birthday by publishing our ‘Thank you for recycling’ Infographic – full of stats, figures and quirky recycling facts. Did you know after only one year :

• 8 out of 10 homes* in Reigate and Banstead are now recycling
• we’re recycling 50% of our rubbish – compared to a national average of 43%
• £215,000 in landfill tax has been avoided by diverting rubbish from landfill into recycling
• £2.5 million has been raised from recycling materials – helping keep the pressure on your council tax down.

Download our Infographic for facts on:

• what recycling different items can mean for energy saving
• the scary amount of food thrown away each year in the UK
• ‘did you know’ facts to impress your friends with.

Our Infographic is just part of a wider campaign we’re running to encourage people to rethink their rubbish and recycle as much as possible. Check out our website for more campaign details and look our for our posts on our Facebook page, tweets, ads online and outdoors as well as mailings to some households.

*with the new service

Recycling round-up

Christmas is coming

Look out for a letter from us at the end of November/early December telling you about Christmas and New Year changes to your recycling and refuse collection days. We will send you your 2014 recycling and refuse collection calendar at the same time. You can also check on our website for the Christmas and New Year changes.

New recycling service rolling out to flats

We’re starting to introduce the new recycling service to flats area by area, over the next couple of years, working through the collection days one at a time. Flats in Court Lodge, Horley were the first to go live in October.

There’s no need to contact us – we will write to you ahead of the new service coming to your flat.

Business support grant

If you run a small business employing up to four people, you could be eligible to apply to the Council for a business support grant. We’ve already awarded over £15,000 to new start-ups and existing businesses, who can sometimes find it difficult to get the funding they need.

 The one-off grants of between £500 and £1,000 aim to help businesses develop and grow by helping to fund:

• new or improved equipment such as machinery, tools or IT equipment
• property improvements
• essential training and support for business growth

Locally-based fashion label, House of Sunny, successfully applied for a grant towards tools to help them market their business. Creative Director, Sunny Williams explains: “As a new start-up, this grant has given us the helping hand we needed. We used the money to develop a high quality look-book of our designs to show to clients and buyers and to help us to better compete with larger fashion houses. It’s helped us to secure new stockists for our lines in Surrey and some of our designs have recently been used in national magazines, on TV and we’ve even been asked to dress a celebrity!”

Entrepreneur Academy and Dragons’ Den

Our Entrepreneur Academy is in full swing, providing budding entrepreneurs with practical advice and skills, as well as the opportunity to win vital funding, to turn their business ideas into reality.

Over the last few months, the entrepreneurs have been learning about a whole range of topics from business planning, finance and legal aspects to marketing and online business promotion. The six monthly sessions, run at East Surrey College, are a mix of trainer-led learning and real life examples from local business people.

Next month, the entrepreneurs will each pitch their business idea to a panel of business experts in a 'Dragons’ Den' style competition for the chance to win £5,000 to help get their business off to a flying start.

Lynne Geary, founder of Monster Moo Studios, which provides craft and cooking classes for children, said of the scheme: “The Entrepreneur Academy has given me a great insight into a wide range of business topics, which has been essential in setting up my business, Monster Moo Studios. It has also provided an excellent opportunity to network with other people at the same stage of setting up a business, enabling us all to share stories, problems and knowledge."

To register your interest now for next year’s Entrepreneur Academy, email businessandcommunityengagement@reigate-banstead.gov.uk. 

Learning Lunches

Run in partnership with ‘Let's Do Business’, our learning at the Town Hall provide an opportunity to hear from informative speakers on a range of interesting business topics and network with local colleagues.

For details of up-coming events and to book your space, visit the Let’s Do Business Group website.

Find out more

For more information about these and our other business initiatives visit the how we can support your business page on our website.

We're running a survey for residents of Reigate and Banstead to find out what they think about their borough. We're asking:

• What makes somewhere a good place to live?
• What do you think about council services?
• Are you satisfied with your local area?

If you have something to say about these issues, and live in the borough, then why not take part in the online residents’ survey. It only takes ten minutes to complete and you can do it at home, at work or on the go. Your input really is invaluable and will help us to find out more about what you like and don’t like about your local area.

How to take part

It couldn’t be easier – simply click on this link and answer the questions, remembering to think about your local area, which is within 15-20 minutes walking distance from your home.

And as a thank you for taking part, we’ll enter you into a prize draw to win either:

a)      a month’s free gym membership (at one of our leisure centres)

b)      a pair of theatre tickets (at the Harlequin)

c)      or one of two pairs of cinema tickets at the Harlequin's Waller Cinema.

Did you know:

• Over 45s are more likely to drink alcohol every day.
• People who work are more likely to drink than unemployed people.
• Alcohol is the second biggest cause of cancer after smoking.
• Around 200,000 people go to work with a hangover every day.

It’s Alcohol Awareness Week and we want to get you thinking about drinking. We will be in Horley High Street on Saturday 16 November between 10am and 5pm.

They’ll be easy to spot as they’ll be accompanied by a trailer packed with information and tools to help raise awareness about alcohol. There’ll be samplers of zero-alcohol drink options, information about how many units are really in your drink and much more. So, if you’re in the area, stop by and have a chat with one of us.

Two free days

Debbie Stitt, Community Safety Manager at the Council, has some handy tips to offer if you can’t make it to see us on Saturday:

“We're encouraging people to try and have two alcohol free days per week. Why not also try substituting every other drink with a zero or low alcohol one? There’s also a very helpful drinks app you can download from the Change 4 Life website so you know exactly how much you’re drinking. It is also important to be aware of how many units are in each drink – the number may surprise you.”

If you’d like to know more and make use of some of the available tools, visit the Change 4 Life website.

Did you see our fraud investigators making their television debut on the BBC's "Saints and Scroungers" programme recently?

The series, fronted by Matt Allwright, looked at both sides of the benefits system, focusing on the "scroungers" who steal from the public purse and the Councils taking positive action to hold the fraudsters to account and the "saints" who help people access the benefits and assistance they are entitled to, but maybe weren’t aware or were unable to claim.

Former Kingswood resident, Younus Algohar, was prosecuted by the Council earlier this year for making a series of false representations to gain benefits that he was not entitled to. The programme showed how our investigators uncovered the fraud, which totalled £77,646 and spanned three different addresses in two boroughs.

Anonymous investigator

Due to the nature of his job, the lead officer responsible for the investigation remained anonymous during filming. Afterwards he said, "All in all it was a really interesting experience, although a bit surreal sometimes with cameras following me round. Hopefully however, it will help to put off any potential fraudsters in our borough as they now know that we have a zero tolerance apporach to fraud."

Report it

If you have any information or concerns about a suspected fraud you can report it in confidence online, by email to fraudstoppers@reigate-banstead.gov.uk or call 01737 276483.

If you’re aged 40-74 and have not had a stroke or been diagnosed with heart disease, kidney disease or diabetes then you’re eligible for a free NHS Health Check at a nearby pharmacy or GP surgery.

The risk of developing these illnesses increases as you get older so it’s important you have your check as it will help you and your GP or pharmacist identify your risk earlier. Even if you feel well at the minute, it’s still worth having a check to lower your chances of developing these health problems in the future.

The check will only take about 20-30 minutes and you’ll be asked a few questions about your family history and lifestyle choices which may put your health at risk. Your GP or pharmacist will make a note of your weight, age, sex and ethnicity before taking your blood pressure. You’ll also have a simple blood test to check your cholesterol level.

Your GP or pharmacist will talk you through the results and tell you how you can reduce your risk and stay healthy.

If you’re aged between 40 and 75 and haven’t previously been diagnosed with stroke, heart disease, kidney disease or diabetes you will be invited for a check once every five years. It’s important that you attend this appointment to reduce your risk of developing these health problems in the future. Visit the Healthy Surrey website or email healthchecks@surreycc.gov.uk for details of participating GPs and pharmacists.