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Woman of the people?

Credit: Ragged trousered philanderer Facebook page

and:

“... Asked if she had misread the public anger, she replied: “What I have done since this incident took place is, first of all, ensure that the public services had the support they need in order to be able to do the job they were doing in the immediate aftermath.

Pressed again on whether she had failed to understand the public’s anger, May said: “This was a terrible tragedy that took place. People have lost their lives and others have lost everything, all their possessions, their home and everything. What we are doing is putting in place the support that will help them.

“But it is a terrible tragedy. I have heard horrifying stories from the fire brigade, from police and from victims themselves who were in that tower but also from other local residents, some of whom of course have not been able to go back to their homes either.

“What I’m now absolutely focused on is ensuring that we get that support on the ground.

“Government is making money available, we are ensuring we are going to get to the bottom of what happened, we will ensure that people are rehoused, but we need to make sure that that actually happens. …

Asked how residents in other high rise blocks would be able to sleep at night, May said: “The government is doing everything in its power to ensure that people are safe. We have identified those buildings and now and over the weekend people are going in and inspecting those buildings.”

The prime minister’s performance prompted scorn on social media – including from once-friendly media outlets such as the Daily Mail, which panned her interview online under the headline “Maybot malfunction”. …”

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2017/jun/17/theresa-may-avoids-questions-on-personal-response-to-grenfell-disaster

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Another privatisation obscenity

“The boss of one of the UK’s biggest energy companies has been given a 72% pay rise, just weeks after arguing against consumers having their bills capped to save them £100 a year.

Alistair Phillips-Davies, the chief executive of SSE, will be paid £2.92m in 2017 after receiving the maximum possible bonuses for leading a “robust performance” by the supplier last year.

The pay rise is even bigger than the 40% rise awarded to the chief executive of the British Gas owner, Centrica.

Phillips-Davies was paid £844,000 in base salary, largely unchanged from last year, but topped up by £25,000 in benefits, a £910,000 annual bonus – more than double the year before – and a long-term incentive payout of £644,000. He was also handed £502,000 for his pension.

The retail arm of SSE increased the profit margin it makes on householders from 6.2% to 6.9% in the financial year 2016-17.

Among the big six suppliers, SSE has the highest proportion of customers (91%) on standard variable tariffs, the default energy deals that the Conservatives have promised to cap. The government has said householders are paying a total of £1.4bn over the odds for energy as a result of such tariffs. It claims a cap would save customers up to £100 a year. …”

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2017/jun/16/sse-boss-gets-72-pay-rise-weeks-after-arguing-against-energy-bill-cap-alistair-phillips-davies-big-six

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NOT the Owl!

Owl wishes to say that it has NO CONNECTION WHATSOEVER with the Facebook page “Huguenot Swire” but Owl DOES admit that, having had its attention drawn to it, it has bookmarked the page for future reference!

Vile! Vile!

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Austerity, inequality and deaths: Robert Peston tells it as it is

“… there is horror that the government never made it obligatory for the fire safety standards that apply to new buildings to be enforced at older blocks – that such improvements are only recommended, not obligatory.

But such lax or light touch regulation only becomes fatal in a system – such as we have – designed to drive down costs and save money, not to put the safety of people first.

It is a system in which those working for all the interconnected bodies that made the refurbishment decisions and gave the wrong safety advice to tenants are able to say – as if that makes it alright – “we followed the rules”.
It is a system in which identifying anyone who can be proved to be ultimately responsible for what happened may be impossible.

And as we saw in the banks before the financial crisis, when people can take reckless decisions safe in the knowledge they can’t be held to account, reckless decisions get taken.

The horrific corollary of a faceless, irresponsible system of public-housing governance is that many of the poor and vulnerable people who died in the fire are not even being given the respect of formal identification as victims – because they live on the fringes of the state, and the authorities seem unable to be confident they even existed, let alone that they have died.

There is a social contract between those of us lucky enough to have voices that are heard and those who don’t that we should not put them in harms way. Grenfell seems the most grotesque breach of that contract in my lifetime. It shames us all.”

Robert Peston, Facebook page

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Cranbrook, Gypsy and Traveller policy

A way of dealing with travellers in Cranbrook?

“Harlow Borough Council and Essex County Council have secured a three-year extension to an injunction which bans Travellers from setting up unauthorised encampments across Harlow.

The injunction will now apply until midnight on 14 June 2020. It had been due to expire on 16 June 2017.

The councils said that they had, in seeking an extension, also applied to add five named persons to the injunction order and one piece of private land, previously not included.

The injunction bans 40 named persons from setting up unauthorised encampments on any land in Harlow. It also protects 322 vulnerable sites across Harlow including parks and playgrounds, business areas, highway verges, schools, cycle tracks, previously occupied sites and some private land from person’s unknown setting up unauthorised encampments.

The two local authorities originally applied for an interim injunction in March 2015, after Harlow experienced 109 different unauthorised encampments for nearly 18 months.

In December 2015 a full injunction was granted by the High Court for 18 months.

The injunction was seen as a ground-breaking move at the time as an injunction excluding named persons from an entire district had never been applied for before. …”

http://localgovernmentlawyer.co.uk/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=31524%3Acouncils-win-3-year-extension-to-district-wide-ban-on-unauthorised-encampments&catid=63&Itemid=31

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Accountability, EDDC, Exmouth, Grenadier, Inequality, Regeneration

Exmouth Seafront protest tomorrow (Saturday)

Seafront Protest.

Meet at 11.45 at Fun Park for 12 start.

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“New Tory DWP minister claimed he had ‘experience’ of zero-hour contracts – as a £250-an-hour BARRISTER”

“A Tory who said he had ‘experience’ of zero-hour contracts as a £250-an-hour BARRISTER has landed a job in the welfare department.

Guy Opperman made the astonishing comment in a House of Commons debate in 2013 when quizzed on the perils of insecure work.

Theresa May has now promoted the MP to a junior role in the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) in her reshuffle.

As pensions and financial inclusion minister, his job will include steering the Tory manifesto pledge to slash winter fuel payments for all but the poorest pensioners.

Mr Opperman made the remark during a debate on zero-hour contracts in October 2013.

He said: “As a barrister, I spent two and a half years without a contract.

“With respect, I therefore suggest I do have some experience of that, with no contract whatsoever.”

He argued MPs should only be against “inequitable and exploitative zero-hours contracts”, not try to ban the type of work outright.

The register of MPs’ interests says Mr Opperman was normally paid between £100 and £250 an hour for his work as a barrister, before he joined the House of Commons in 2010.

The number of zero hour contracts has soared in recent years and stands at more than 900,000.”

http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/politics/new-tory-dwp-minister-claimed-10630960

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“Fury as Theresa May promotes MP who said people use foodbanks because of their ‘choices’ in life”

“There was anger tonight after Theresa May promoted an MP who said people use foodbanks because of their ‘choices’ in life.

John Glen is now in government despite his “astonishing” comments – and at one point was even lined up as minister for foodbanks.

The government told trade website Civil Society News yesterday that Mr Glen would be minister for civil society, overseeing charities.

But that was later retracted and he was confirmed as minister for heritage, arts and tourism, part of the same department.

Even so, Mr Glen has come under fire for remarks blaming foodbank use on “the chaotic nature of lives of some people.”

Source: Daily Mirror

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“The UK government is abdicating its responsibilities and “unfairly shifting the burden” of dealing with dirty air on to local authorities, says an industry body.

The Chartered Institute of Environmental Health outlined its views in response to the government’s consultation on air pollution. … ”

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-40274238

So, instead of doing more with less local authorities have to do even more with less.

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“With Grenfell Tower, we’ve seen what ‘ripping up red tape’ really looks like”

George Monbiot:

“But both Conservative and New Labour governments have been highly reluctant to introduce new public protections, even when the need is pressing. They have been highly amenable to tearing down existing protections at the behest of trade associations and corporate lobbyists. Deregulation of this kind is a central theme of the neoliberal ideology to which both the Conservatives and Labour under Tony Blair succumbed.

In 2014, the then housing minister (who is now the immigration minister), Brandon Lewis, rejected calls to force construction companies to fit sprinklers in the homes they built on the following grounds:

“In our commitment to be the first Government to reduce regulation, we have introduced the one in, two out rule for regulation … Under that rule, when the Government introduce a regulation, we will identify two existing ones to be removed. The Department for Communities and Local Government has gone further and removed an even higher proportion of regulations. In that context, Members will understand why we want to exhaust all non-regulatory options before we introduce any new regulations.”

In other words, though he accepted that sprinklers “are an effective way of controlling fires and of protecting lives and property”, to oblige builders to introduce them would conflict with the government’s deregulatory agenda. Instead, it would be left to the owners of buildings to decide how best to address the fire risk: “Those with responsibility for ensuring fire safety in their businesses, in their homes or as landlords, should and must make informed decisions on how best to manage the risks in their own properties,” Lewis said.

This calls to mind the Financial Times journalist Willem Buiter’s famous remark that “self-regulation stands in relation to regulation the way self-importance stands in relation to importance”. Case after case, across all sectors, demonstrates that self-regulation is no substitute for consistent rules laid down, monitored and enforced by government.

Crucial public protections have long been derided in the billionaire press as “elf ’n’ safety gone mad”. It’s not hard to see how ruthless businesses can cut costs by cutting corners, and how this gives them an advantage over their more scrupulous competitors. …

Conservative MPs see Brexit as an excellent opportunity to strip back regulations. The speed with which the “great repeal bill” will have to pass through parliament (assuming that any of Theresa May’s programme can now be implemented) provides unprecedented scope to destroy the protections guaranteed by European regulations. The bill will rely heavily on statutory instruments, which permit far less parliamentary scrutiny than primary legislation. Unnoticed and undebated, crucial elements of public health and safety, workers’ rights and environmental protection could be made to disappear.

Too many times we have seen what the bonfire of regulations, which might sound like common sense when issuing from the mouths of ministers, looks like in the real world. The public protections that governments describe as red tape are what make the difference between a good society and barbarism. It is time to bring the disastrous deregulatory agenda to an end, and put public safety and other basic decencies ahead of corner-cutting and greed.”

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/jun/15/grenfell-tower-red-tape-safety-deregulation

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Should we judge our LEP by results?

Our LEP loves to take credit – often for the most tenuous reasons – but will it take criticism?

“The South West has haemorrhaged more than 50,000 manufacturing jobs in the past decade, a new study by GMB has shown.

The figures were discussed at GMB’s annual Congress in Plymouth between June 4 and 6. …

In 2006 the South West supported 294,400 permanent and temporary manufacturing jobs – almost 12% of the all jobs in the region.

By 2016, that had slumped to just 243,100 or 9% of the total.

http://www.devonlive.com/staggering-50-000-manufacturing-jobs-lost-in-a-decade/story-30391778-detail/story.html

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Rees-Mogg looks forward to slashing environmental controls, safety and workers rights

“Britain could slash environmental and safety regulations on imported products after it leaves the EU, a Tory MP has suggested.

Jacob Rees-Mogg said regulations that were “good enough for India” could be good enough for the UK – arguing that the UK could go “a very long way” to rolling back high EU standards.

The idea, floated at a hearing of the Treasury Select Committee, was immediately rejected by an economist, who said such a move would likely cause “quite considerable” difficulties.

“We could, if we wanted, accept emissions standards from India, America, and Europe. There’d be no contradiction with that,” Mr Rees-Mogg said.

“We could say, if it’s good enough in India, it’s good enough for here. There’s nothing to stop that.

“We could take it a very long way. American emission standards are fine – probably in some cases higher.

“I accept that we’re not going to allow dangerous toys to come in from China, we don’t want to see those kind of risks. But there’s a very long way you can go.”

The MP’s comments came in the context of a discussion about trade deals with other countries following Brexit.”

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/brexit-safety-standards-workers-rights-jacob-rees-mogg-a7459336.html

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Swire does a Trump: blames everyone but himself for his win!

https://www.hugoswire.org.uk/news/personal-view-2017-general-election

Pack it in Mr Swire – you are embarrassing yourself.

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Privatisation and austerity: the dreadful human cost

“The company responsible for managing Grenfell Tower had been reviewing fire safety procedures after previous incidents, it has emerged.

Kensington & Chelsea Tenant Management Organisation (KCTMO) was paid £11m by the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea to manage social housing in 2016.

KCTMO’s Adair Tower, also in north Kensington, had previously suffered a fire – the result of arson – and some residents suffered from smoke inhalation and had to be rehoused.

The London fire brigade issued an “enforcement notice” telling KCTMO to install “self-closing devices” on the front doors of flats in Adair Tower and the nearby Hazlewood Tower, built to the same design.

KCTMO, named this year among the top 100 not-for-profit firms to work for by the Sunday Times, has offered its “sincere and heartfelt condolences” to anyone affected by the fire. “It is too early to speculate what caused the fire and contributed to its spread,” the company added. “We will cooperate fully with all the relevant authorities in order to ascertain the cause of this tragedy.”

KCTMO contracted the £10m refurbishment of Grenfell to a private construction firm, Rydon, which in turn subcontracted some of the work, in an illustration of the rewards on offer to private firms from social housing projects.

One of the other firms in the chain of companies involved in the refurbishment appears to have removed a description of the project from its website.

Rydon landed an £8.6m contract to “upgrade” the Grenfell Tower, including adding the external cladding that is being investigated as a potential factor in the fire’s rapid spread.

It boasts a string of contracts for the NHS, local councils and the Ministry of Defence, while its maintenance division, which led the refurbishment of the Grenfell Tower, maintains 22,000 properties and has nearly £450m of contracts on its order book.

The company made a pre-tax profit of £14.3m last year on revenues of £271m and paid investors a dividend of £2m, the largest slice of which went to Rydon’s chief executive and largest shareholder, Robert Bond, 61.

The company’s highest paid director, usually the chief executive, also earned a salary of £424,000 in 2016, a pay rise from £392,000 the year before.

“We are shocked to hear of the devastating fire at Grenfell Tower and our immediate thoughts are with those that have been affected by the incident, their families, relatives and friends,” the company said.

It insisted its work “met all required building control, fire regulation and health and safety standards”.

“We will cooperate with the relevant authorities and emergency services and fully support their inquiries into the causes of this fire at the appropriate time.

“Given the ongoing nature of the incident and the tragic events overnight, it would be inappropriate for us to speculate or comment further at this stage.”

After Rydon won the contract to refurbish Grenfell, it commissioned the ventilation specialist Witt UK to work on the project, it emerged on Wednesday.

Witt UK, based in Halifax, West Yorkshire, previously had a page on its website that boasted of work by one of its subsidiaries, PSB UK, on Grenfell Tower.

A version of the page was still available in Google’s historic “cached” data, in which the company explained that ventilation systems would protect residents from smoke in the event of a fire.

A description of the project read: “The lobby smoke ventilation system has been designed to provide the existing stairwell with protection from the ingress of smoke from a fire within a dwelling by means of a mechanical extract system.”

Witt UK is owned by the German family business Witt & Sohn, run by Dr Henrik Witt, 62, and Karsten Witt, 58.

A person who answered the UK company’s telephone said it had been advised not to comment.

According to the removed page of the Witt website, it handed over the “prestigious project” to a Birmingham-based building service engineering company called JS Wright & Co.

A spokesperson for JS Wright & Co said: “We are shocked by the catastrophic fire at Grenfell Tower in London and our thoughts are with the families, relatives and friends of all those affected by this tragic incident.

“JS Wright carried out a contract with Rydon Maintenance last year to provide Grenfell Tower with improved building services.

“Rydon Maintenance was in the process of refurbishing the building for Kensington and Chelsea Tenant Management Organisation on behalf of the council.

“Like everyone else at this stage, we are unaware of the causes of this fire but we will co-operate fully with all inquiries and investigations into this incident.”

Rydon also contracted another firm, Harley Facades, to provide the cladding that is being examined as a possible factor in the blaze.

Harley’s website reveals it was paid £2.6m for the Grenfell Tower work.

Grenfell Tower has been managed by KCTMO since 1996, when it took over responsibility from the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea.

KCTMO documents reveal it put its fire safety policy under review last year, ordering changes including speeding up the installation of self-closing doors, tackling hoarding and dealing with clutter in communal areas.

According to board minutes for November 2016, KCTMO admitted it needed to adopt “a more proactive approach to the installation of self-closing devices to flat entrance doors across the stock”.

The company said it would increase the frequency of fire risk assessment reviews, install fire action notices in the entrance lobbies of all blocks and undertake “further work to address the issue of storage and charging of mobility scooters within communal areas”.

The latest accounts filed by KCTMO with Companies House show that “key management personnel”, led by the chief executive, Robert Black, shared £760,000 in salaries for managing properties in the borough.

The accounts did not reveal the names of the recipients, but the company lists four people under “senior management”.

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2017/jun/14/towers-managers-were-reviewing-safety-after-fire-at-another-block

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“Lack of confidence in leadership”

The chair of the supervisory body for Scotland’s national police force has stepped down, after two committees of MSPs declared a lack of confidence in his leadership of the Scottish Police Authority.

Is there anyone here in Devon who might be in a similar position – whose abilities are found wanting at the top level?

Owl can think of several people!

But it takes strong leadership of the bodies that oversee such incompetent leaders to take effective action in these situations.

Ah, well …

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Midweek Herald coverage of General Election results

It has excelled itself this week!

Absolutely nothing unless you count one letter about absentee candidates and a bit about Parish being re-elected.

Should it perhaps change its name to Midweek Nothing Political Of Any Kind To See Here Move On Please!

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Economy, Post-Brexit Adjustments, Rural communities

Time for pensioners to get off their sofas – your country needs you

“Restricting access to migrant workers once the UK leaves the EU would negatively impact the profitability, efficiency and viability of more than half of rural businesses, according a new survey by the CLA.

Revealing the results on 8 June, the CLA which represents landowners, farmers and rural businesses said Brexit had already caused problems for rural employers, with 44% of CLA members surveyed saying they had experienced a reduction in the availability of migrant labour over the past year. Almost 90% of respondents tried to recruit locally but the majority found it difficult to fill positions with British workers. …”

https://www.cla.org.uk/node/10704

Owl says: But surely we have already been given a solution by a former Conservative agriculture minister who said that young, fit migrant workers should be replaced by pensioners:

https://eastdevonwatch.org/2017/05/04/pensioners-should-replace-foreign-fruit-and-veg-pickers-said-former-agriculture-minister/

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Rural communities, Small and Medium businesses

Community Business Fund

The £10 million Community Business Fund is open oJune until 5 July at 12 midday.

Grants between £50,000 and £300,000 are available to community businesses in England to help them progress towards self sufficiency. The £10 million Community Business Fund from Power to Change opened on 7 June and will close on 5 July 2017.

Community businesses are run by local people for local people. They can revive local assets, protect the services people rely on, and address local needs. There are many types of community business. What they all have in common is that they are inclusive and give decision making power to local people and that the profits they generate flow back into the community to deliver positive local impact.

You can find out more here:

http://www.powertochange.org.uk/funding/grants/community-business-fund/