perhaps shared CEO Mark Williams can get it sorted before the elections, unless, of course, it’s politically sensitive!
Daily Archives: 5 Mar 2015
Council meeting boring, councillor? Try reading a golfing magazine or doing Scrabble
MPs: no free dinners, TV licenses or pre-11 pm taxis after 8 May!
“MPs will be banned from claiming expenses for dinners, TV licences and pre-23:00 taxis after May’s election, the expenses watchdog has said.
The Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority (Ipsa) proposed the curbs in 2013 as part of a wider package that included salaries rising from £67,000 to £74,000.
The salary rise is still subject to review from the party leaders.
But Ipsa said the cuts to expenses would go ahead on 8 May anyway.”
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-31745814
Bet a few of them will spin their dinners out until after 11 pm.
Not Hugo Swire’s day ….. but it is Claire Wright’s!
Here:
and here:
and here:
and here:
and, finally (at least for today) here:
“How we lost the plot on housebuilding”
Evening Standard city journalist makes some interesting observations on the housing market:
…”The recession has put most of these [small builders who used to be the mainstay of the housing market] out of business and they can’t get started again because they can’t obtain finance from the banks. As a result, today three quarters of Britain’s homes are built by a handful of large market-listed companies.
The chief executives of these companies do not want to build vast numbers of homes and risk depressing the market.
Instead — and some are quite open about this — they want to build as few homes as they can sensibly get away with because that it is the best way to keep prices high, profit margins up and their shareholders happy.
Far from embracing the free market and competition, they are behaving like monopolists and rationing supply — as Adam Smith predicted businessmen would when they thought they could get away with it.
There is another aspect to this. Because these quoted housebuilders are vast, they are only interested in big developments.
That means most of those inner-city brownfield sites and derelict industrial parks clearly visible on any train journey out of the capital — or indeed any provincial city — are of little interest to them because they are too small and because clearing toxic waste from brownfield sites is a lot more expensive that bulldozing a nice clean bit of agricultural land or a former playing field.
So the derelict sites stay derelict and pressure builds on the green belt.” …
http://www.standard.co.uk/business/markets/anthony-hilton-how-weve-lost-the-plot-on-housebuilding-10088862.html
Real Zorro on Knowle relocation
Very detailed analysis (including the duplicated pages that EDDC didn’t spot:
http://realzorro1.blogspot.co.uk/2015/03/knowle-sale-11-march-eddccabinet-papers.html
A conundrum
Can you say that council tax has been frozen if you are providing fewer services for the same money? Surely, if you are providing fewer services then council tax should go down, then you can claim it’s frozen.
Fewer services, same council tax = rise.
EAST DEVON TORY CULL?
(please note this is a Microsoft clip art cartoon of a sheriff, freely available for download throughout the world and is highly unlikely to be considered as threatening by any police force anywhere – if it is, best take it up with Microsoft – we are assured that no real guns were used in the drawing of this cartoon which depicts a cartoon gun with no real bang and no ability to hurt anyone at all anywhere and it has no connection whatsoever with any prophets anywhere)
We already knew that several Tory councillors have been “de-selected” from the East Devon Conservatives’ list of candidates for the May 7 election, for refusing to toe the party line.
Now we hear from several reliable sources that warning letters have also been sent to another group of cowering Conservatives telling them to “pull their socks up” – or else!
The bearer of this unwelcome news? None other than the weighty Phil “I’ve never whipped anyone in my life” Twiss.
Readers will remember that Cllr Twiss was widely ridiculed last year for complaining to the police that Independent Claire Wright had a comment on her blog calling for – yes!- a cull of East Devon Tories.
East Devon Watch 