According to today’s Sunday Times Homes supplement, East Devon is in the top five areas to have recovered after the last credit crunch, after South Norfolk, Tonbridge and Malling, Stroud and East Hampshire.

This is put down to East Devon being “an affluent rural location where buyers are a little older and have built up plenty of equity. They are probably not mortgage dependent so are not constrained by tighter lending rules – which means that they can move more easily”.

And what does EDDC do: it flogs the Knowle site to a luxury retirement home builder to make a bad situation worse and thinks it can solve this crisis by building five “affordable” homes on a town centre car park.