As revealed by View from Axminster but remains at District and County:
Priorities, dear boy, priorities!
Daily Archives: 8 Jun 2017
Swire says NOTHING about his one-man hustings last night
Nothing, zilch, nada, zero!
Correspondents reported car park spaces and empty seats at the start.
BUT he has made a whistle-stop tour of EVERY polling station. Anxious night for him!
EDDC and East Devon Alliance cited in Guardian postal vote cock-ups article
“… In East Devon postal votes were sent out to voters without an official security mark. The acting returning officer for the East Devon constituency, Mark Williams, issued a statement earlier this week reassuring postal voters that if they had not yet returned their postal votes they should still do so. “We have taken all the necessary steps to ensure the postal votes are valid and will be counted,” William said.
Paul Arnott, chairman of the East Devon Alliance, expressed his dismay at the situation, calling for the new government “to centrally digitise the issuing of ballot papers and remove the potential for fraud in all levels of elections”. …”
EDA could, of course, also have mentioned:
the lost 6,000 voters of 2015:
https://eastdevonwatch.org/2014/07/07/the-missing-6000-voters-eddc-named-and-s/
which led to Electoral Officer EDDC CEO being summoned to Parliament to not-very-satisfactorily explain himself:
AND the other mistakes that took place in 2015:
EDDC Scrutiny Committee – we await your input!
PLEASE GO OUT AND VOTE!!!!!!!!!
In this election it REALLY DOES matter. No more posts from Owl till tomorrow – so anyone who doesn’t vote can’t blame Owl.
Don’t get it wrong, vote Wright in East Devon.
In Honiton and Tiverton, if you value your NHS, vote tactically or specifically for Kolek.
Swire fails to draw a crowd – empty seats at his one-man “hustings”
Report from Exmouth:
“I went into the college soon after the meeting started.
Given that a number of those present were Tory councillors, the numbers of ‘ordinary folk’ looked pretty small for a town of 36,000. Far fewer there than the last Town Council meeting I attended, plenty of spare chairs.
Perhaps a better indicator was the car park, often a struggle to find a place, it was no trouble this time. For some peculiar reason 5 or 6 spaces were taped off for Jill Elson- these remained empty. Maybe there was a last minute rush expected- but it hadn’t arrived by the time the meeting started.”
At least one local paper stands up for itself – but not here
“While taking Conservative cash to place the ad, The Blackpool Gazette ran a headline above it which read: Poverty-hit families are forced to rely on food bank handouts. And inside, the paper ran a special report detailing the impact of Conservative austerity on local families [as quoted below]:
Food bank Britain
Britain is hungry. The figures from the Trussell Trust, Britain’s largest network of food banks, reveal a staggering rise in emergency food dependency across the country. As shown below, food bank dependency was virtually a non-issue in 2008/9. But the number of emergency food supplies given out now essentially accounts for one in every 60 adults in the UK.”
Even the Cabinet Office cocks up voting! Doesn’t auger well for Brexit legislation!
“On Monday this week, just days before general election polling day, the government was forced to table a new set of rules for the general election after numerous errors in a key statutory instrument drawn up by the Cabinet Office came to light.
Both the original faulty and sudden replacement statutory instruments cover the costs Returning Officers can claim from central government for the running of the election in their constituencies. The Parliamentary Elections (Returning Officers’ Charges) (No. 2) Order 2017 replaces the previous legal order from 4 May because of problems with the ‘maximum recoverable amount’ (MRA) which the original legal order set for each constituency, limiting how much can be claimed.
As the Electoral Commission’s latest bulletin to Returning Officers explains, a new legal order has been required because:
“This revision is to take account of a number of incorrect MRAs that came to light after Cabinet Office received a few enquiries from Returning Officers about their level of allocation. A full review of all the allocations for England, Scotland and Wales has identified that a mixture of erroneous and inconsistent data on combinations and polling station resource, added to some clerical errors in transposing numbers, has led to a number of the MRAs being incorrect.”
Or in other words, the Cabinet Office drew up a bit of legislation which was so full of errors that it had to be hurriedly replaced.
Hardly a good sign for how the vastly greater and more complicated reams of legislative changes required for Brexit will go.
http://www.markpack.org.uk/150331/parliamentary-elections-returning-officers-charges-order-2017/
EDDC Cabinet meeting highlights
Wednesday, 14 June 2017; 5.30pm
page 26:
EDDC has underspent its Disabled Facility Grants by £336,000 as “Demand not as high as budget/grant allocation from Devon County Council”.
page 42:
Freedom of Information
658 requests have been dealt with under the Freedom of Information Act (Environmental Information Regulations) during the year 2016/17.
This figure has risen from 588 in 2015/16.
There continues to be a trend for requests originating from commercial organisations asking questions relating to council contracts; information pertaining to businesses and their payment of business rates; and topics of general news interest like the impact of changing legislation.
The council’s major projects, such as the office re-location and the regeneration of Exmouth seafront are also continuing to generate interest amongst local residents, and campaign groups, although these requests form a relatively small proportion of the overall number received.
The service areas receiving the highest number of requests are Council Tax, Environmental Health and Planning. …”
Click to access 140617combined-cabinet-agendapublicversion.pdf
Four very naughty EDDC councillors
“In the 2016/17 council year:
1. How many councillors were issued with reminders for missing council tax payments due in the 2016/17 council year? – 4
2. Of those referred to in question 1, how many councillors complied with the reminders to the point where no further action was required? – 4”
East Devon Watch 