“An “army” of people to fill potholes on Devon roads promised last year has been thwarted by legal paperwork and insurance delays.
Last October Devon County Council asked volunteers to help repair the roads to help save money.
Fifty five people applied to become Community Road Wardens but no work has been yet been undertaken.
The council said the scheme was “innovative” and it was taking time to get everything in place.”
“Tens of thousands of new homes in greenfield areas in England will be given automatic planning permission amid fears that communities will have inappropriate developments forced on them.
Ministers have quietly given developers the right to be granted “planning in principle” in areas that are earmarked for new housing schemes.
Rural campaigners said the new powers will restrict the rights of council planning officers to ensure that the design, density, size and location of homes is in keeping with local areas.
Shaun Spiers, chief executive of the Campaign to protect Rural England, said: ““The country needs more house building, but the way to achieve this is through well-planned developments that win public consent. Imposing development without local democratic oversight is a recipe for discord. …”
Seven Police commissioners, including ours at Devon and Cornwall, join forces to urge Policing Minister Mike Penning to halt ‘deeply flawed’ changes and threaten to sue:
“Tony Hogg, the police and crime commissioner for Devon and Cornwall, said: “It is with considerable regret that I cannot rule out mounting a legal challenge against the Government’s plans. I feel I must do everything I can to stop these proposals coming into effect.”
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/police-cuts-forces-threaten-to-sue-government-over-unjustified-budget-reforms-a6718676.html
Security company AGS drives around Frinton-on-Sea in Essex every night between 7pm and 7am and also has an emergency phoneline.
First it’s Hugo Swire and Councillor Elson whose photos are changed by EDDC, now it’s David Cameron’s who has had his doctored to add a large poppy.
It seems that when Tory politicians don’t like their pictures – they just airbrush them!
Though no-one appears to have doctored the picture in this article, which accompanies a story about Mr Cameron accepting free membership of an expensive private members club:
where it also says:
“… But what kind of club has Cameron joined? It’s one where the dress code requires that men refrain from wearing such excrescences as collarless shirts and deck shoes, while women will be shown the door for sporting denim or exposing their undergarments. It’s one where the menu doesn’t have prices (according to Zagat: “Members sniff, ‘If you ask how much it costs, you can’t afford to eat here’”), but will reportedly offer Dover sole meunière at £40 and wine from £60 a bottle. It’s one where Vivienne Westwood launched her memoirs in 2014, and where Boris Johnson held his Christmas party. It’s one with which Dave and Sam Cam are familiar, since they had a lovely election victory dinner there in May.
Earlier this year, though, the owners of Mark’s decided that their club wasn’t quite exclusive enough. So they chose to cull about a third of its members. “Members will be asked if they want to join the club again,” Charles Price, the American entrepreneur who oversees the club, told Vanity Fair. “If they do, they can submit their applications.”
The idea was to make Mark’s the most exclusive club in London. “It’s going to be a global A-list, from a variety of backgrounds, old world and new world,” Price said. “You can’t just have a name or money to get in; the main qualification is you have to be interesting.” So, while Mark’s closed its doors in July and Paris-based designer Tino Zervudachi gave the club a multimillion-pound makeover, there was a kind of night of the posh knives in which membership was reduced from 2,500 to 1,500.” …
And they will be the ones most affected by Tax Credit reductions and whose wages most affect their struggle to pay increased rents and house prices.
There are already warnings that many care homes (a backbone of the East Devon economy) may soon close because they cannot afford to raise wages when council payments to them are not rising to take account of higher wages.
“Within Devon, the figure ranges from 18 per cent in Exeter to 28 per cent in East Devon, 31 per cent in Mid Devon and Teignbridge, and 41 per cent in Torridge.”
http://www.exeterexpressandecho.co.uk/Devon-workers-earns-Living-Wage-new-figures/story-28085285-detail/story.html
When the Commons debates the government’s new housing and planning bill tomorrow, people will start to see that the Tories’ housing plans are driven by the politics of the Conservative party, not by the housing needs of the country.
Ministers talk about building more houses and helping people become homeowners. But this hides the truth that their housing record is five years of failure on every front.
Home ownership has fallen every year since 2010 and is now at the lowest rate in a generation. The Conservatives have overseen the lowest number of homes built under any government since the 1920s and the lowest number of genuinely affordable homes for two decades. Homelessness is rising; private rents have soared.
So in a political panic about falling so far short on their new-build numbers, the bill gives ministers wide-ranging powers to impose new house building and override both local community concerns and local plans. With a total of 32 new housing and planning powers for the centre, this legislation signals the end of localism.
Ministers’ rhetoric also hides the realities at the heart of this new housing bill. At prices up to £450,000, new “starter homes” don’t do nearly enough to help those struggling to buy and will be totally out of reach for most young people and families on ordinary incomes. Most damaging of all, the bill sounds the death knell for our ability to build the affordable homes to rent and buy that are so badly needed.
The forced sell-off of council homes to fund right-to-buy discounts for housing associations will mean affordable homes currently set aside for local people will be sold on to speculators and buy-to-let landlords, with no prospect or plan for replacement like for like in the areas they’re lost.
While housing associations may build more homes as they sell under right to buy, many will increasingly build for open market sale and rent. Indeed, a third of them now say they’ll no longer build any affordable homes.
And as ministers use new powers through the planning system to impose starter-home obligations on developers, the system that has provided nearly 250,000 genuinely affordable homes to rent and buy in the last decade will be choked off. All told, Shelter predicts the bill will lead to the loss of 180,000 affordable homes over the next five years.
Like the cut to tax credits, this bill is the chancellor’s work, with his political fingerprints all over it. And like tax credits, it faces a looming row in the Lords. Above all, it fails the same low- and middle-income working families that the Tories claim they represent.
The more people see of this bill, the less they’ll like it. It is set to become a slow-burn problem all the way through to 2020. Some moderate Tory council leaders and MPs already recognise it as bad policy but know the chancellor believes it to be good politics.
I’m determined to expose this bill as both bad policy and bad politics.
John Healey is shadow cabinet minister for housing and planning
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.
East Devon Watch 