Owl believes that this hotly debated and topical issue derives from our longstanding “cheap food policy” which leads to poor wages and conditions. Not generally recognised but….. 

“Britons spend an average of 8% of their total household expenditure on food to eat at home. This is less than any other country apart from the US and Singapore……The food consumed in the UK is also the cheapest in Western Europe – costing 8% less than the EU average,….

It is also much cheaper in relative terms than the food bought by Britons’ parents and grandparents. 

The proportion of household income spent on food has more than halved over the past 60 years, according to the Office for National Statistics (ONS), while spending on housing costs and leisure activities has doubled.”  (2018) www.bbc.co.uk › news › business-45559594

Lisa O’Carroll  www.theguardian.com

British applicants for jobs harvesting crops have said farmers have made it virtually impossible for them to secure the work despite a national appeal for a “land army” to save the UK’s fruit and vegetables.

Dozens of workers have expressed anger at claims they are too lazy or picky to take the jobs, alleging that farmers are favouring cheap migrant labour.

Offers of on-site accommodation in which three or four workers share a caravan were among the most frequent complaints on social media and in emails to the Guardian, after reports that thousands of British workers had turned down jobs and Romanians were being flown in to pick salad.

Chay Honey, in Bristol, whose work on festivals has disappeared, said the pay and conditions of the farm work were difficult to justify. “I live with my fiance and to live on site would mean I would only have one day a week for friends and family. They also said you can’t use your own vehicle, which makes getting out to the shops difficult. Very quickly the romance of going to work for a farm to help provide food for the nation has become very unattractive,” he said.

“It seems it is very much geared up for migrant labour. We are not looking for special treatment, but the whole system needs to have some flexibility and not just have this blanket approach.”

Genevieve Black, in south Wales, said she had been unsuccessful in applications for 10 jobs despite being willing to live on site in Kent, Hampshire or Scotland. “The idea that Brits are just too lazy to work on farms is just not true,” she said.

She is part of a Facebook group, Jobs for Camper Nomads, which is awash with criticism of the farming industry. One poster suggested that farmers could allow applicants with their own camper vans to live on site. “We are forever being told these are unprecedented times and we are all in it together. UK berry farmers not so much! I am sure with a bit of thought a workable solution can be found.”

Alison Harrow, an England Athletics running coach seeking farm work, said she was feeling “really discouraged”. “I’ve applied for 200 jobs and you either get ‘We’ve got enough people now’ or you don’t hear anything back,” she said. “Well, if they have jobs coming up at the end of May or June, why don’t they just allocate those now and just confirm a job?

“I get an email from one farm worker recruitment agency saying I have not been shortlisted. How can this be? There seems to be a mismatch between demand for workers and matching workers to farm work.”

Nick Marston, the chair of British Summer Fruits, said the business model of fruit farming had been “structured around a non-UK workforce for many years” because UK workers had shunned the work: “Farms are receiving large numbers of applications and I think it would be unfair to say the industry is not accommodating local workforce.”

He appealed for patience among the army of would-be-pickers, saying the season had barely started and that there would be surge in job opportunities at the end of May and June.

Tom Bradshaw, vice-president of the National Farmers’ Union ,said he could understand why people felt frustrated over the lack of job offers. “In a way, the media publicity has come a bit too soon, because the jobs don’t peak until the end of May and June,” he said.

He added that a national website that “would act as a centralised hub for all recruiters” was expected to launch later this week, which would make it easier to match supply to demand.

Almost £30million in Government grant support has been paid to businesses in East Devon in response to the coronavirus lockdown.

Philippa Davies www.sidmouthherald.co.uk

A total of 2,528 qualifying businesses have received the money, which is being distributed by East Devon district council.

The portfolio holder for the economy, Cllr Kevin Blakey, said: “We have written to all eligible businesses and emailed them where possible. We are still waiting to hear from 1,500 businesses and urge them to use the information provided and claim their grant.”

Any businesses that believe they qualify for a grant but have not heard from the council should email businessrates@eastdevon.gov.uk

Cllr Blakey said: “For businesses that do not meet the criteria for grants and other forms of support, please be assured that we are compiling a record of these types of businesses and we are feeding this back to central Government.

“We are aware that there are a number of businesses who have displayed entrepreneurialism and innovation in adapting to the current circumstances, for example, establishing new ways of delivering their business and engaging customers.

“We would like to help showcase such examples and I would encourage you to send these to us.

“This week, we are highlighting the work that Darts Farm have done to quickly launch an online delivery service which is also helping to benefit a range of local suppliers.

“We continue to receive feedback which shows the grants are providing real support during this challenging time.”

The comments include:

“Many thanks for this and a huge thanks for you and all your colleagues, keeping the country running at a time like this.”

“I was really impressed with how quickly EDDC got a system set up. It took a week from applying online to getting the much-needed money, so well done and thank you EDDC.”

“Received remittance advice for my £10,000 yesterday. Only applied a few days ago so thanks for a fast business saving job.”

“I just wanted to say that you and your colleagues at EDDC have managed this grant process wonderfully well. Please convey my thanks to the team at EDDC who have worked through this process so efficiently.”

Information on the business grant support available, and an online application system, can be found here on the EDDC website.

Remember that the official definition of the South West Region includes Gloucester, Wiltshire and Dorset on the eastern boundary.

Welcome news but right now who’s counting? (Maybe they are – see Max Hastings again)

Beth Sharp  www.sidmouthherald.co.uk 

More than £13billion of NHS debt has been written off as part of a wider package of NHS reforms announced by the Health Secretary.

This includes more than £825million of debt in the South West, across 13 NHS trusts.

As of April 1, more than 100 NHS hospitals were rid of historic debt, freeing them up to invest in maintaining vital services and longer-term infrastructure improvements.

It comes alongside new NHS funding model to make sure the NHS has the necessary funding and support to respond to the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic.

This is part of a package of major reforms to the NHS financial system, designed in a collaboration between the Department of Health and Social Care and NHS England, which will begin from the start of the new financial year.

The changes will provide much needed financial support during this unprecedented viral pandemic, as well as laying secure foundations for the longer-term commitments set out last year to support the NHS to become more financially sustainable.

This significant change will mean hospitals will get all the necessary funding to carry out their emergency response, despite many hospitals cancelling or limiting their usual services such as elective surgery or walk-in clinics due to the virus.

Simon Jupp, MP for East Devon, said: “This is great news for the NHS in Devon and provides an opportunity to focus on the future without having to worry about the past.

“I will continue to work closely with our superb NHS as they tackle the virus today and provide first class healthcare for all of us into the future.”

Health Secretary Matt Hancock added: “As we tackle this crisis, nobody in our health service should be distracted by their hospital’s past finances.

“The £13.4 billion debt write off will wipe the slate clean and allow NHS hospitals to plan for the future and invest in vital services.

“I remain committed to providing the NHS with whatever it needs to tackle coronavirus, and the changes to the funding model will give the NHS immediate financial certainty to plan and deliver their emergency response.”

107 trusts have an average of £100 million revenue debt each, with the 2 trusts with the highest debts reaching a combined total of over £1 billion.

At times like these we need individuals in Whitehall who know when to cut the red tape (see previous article by Max Hastings)

A supplier of personal protective equipment (PPE) has warned that government bureaucracy has made it impossible to buy the necessary supplies.

Tim Shipman  www.thetimes.co.uk

Howard Amor of Seren Plus, a pharmaceutical supplier with 40 years of experience with Chinese suppliers, was contacted three weeks ago by NHS Supply Chain, the agency that buys kit for the health service, and asked to help.

He provided quotes to supply surgical masks, protective suits, eye protection and sanitising gel, pledging to supply samples within three days.

There was no response. Amor has supplied new quotes every seven days as market prices change. “We’ve heard nothing back from the NHS, except one response to complain that our updates had confused them. The NHS is weeks too slow to compete adequately in this volatile market and against other buyers who are way more aggressive,” he said.

“Foreign governments are paying cash (sometimes over the odds) to secure production capacity and stock.”

Instead, the government has offered to pay after 30 days. “The market in China demands payment up front. Suppliers don’t have infinite cash to finance a national crisis. Government needs to find a funding solution.”

A spokesman said the government was processing offers from 6,000 suppliers: “We are working rapidly to get through orders and ensure they meet the safety and quality standards that our NHS staff need. We have delivered more than a billion pieces of PPE equipment to the front line so far.”

Boris Johnson’s government has come under pressure to defend its handling of the coronavirus pandemic after Michael Gove was forced to admit that the prime minister had missed five key emergency meetings when the crisis first hit.

Peter Walker  www.theguardian.com

With ministers warning that shortages of protective medical gear could continue, test rates remaining stubbornly low and the hospital death toll rising on Sunday to 16,060, some Conservative MPs have expressed private concern that Downing Street does not have a strong grip on the crisis.

Johnson’s role in the decision-making over crucial weeks before the UK-wide lockdown now risks becoming a symbol of that perceived inattention, with Labour saying the prime minister appeared to have been “missing in action” at the time.

His de facto deputy, Gove, sent out on a broadcast round, initially refused to comment on a report in the Sunday Times – which also claims that 279,000 of the UK’s shrinking PPE stockpile was sent to China – saying Johnson had missed five meetings of the government’s Cobra emergency committee in late January and February while he was taking a break at a government country retreat.

“I won’t go through, here, a point-by-point rebuttal of all the things in the Sunday Times story that are a little bit off beam,” Gove told Sky News.

But about 90 minutes later, he told the BBC that Johnson had, indeed, missed all five meetings, saying instead that this was normal. “Most Cobra meetings don’t have the prime minister attending them,” said Gove, whose cabinet title is chancellor of the duchy of Lancaster. “That is the whole point.”

Cobra meetings were “led by the relevant secretary of state in the relevant area”, he argued. “The prime minister is aware of all of these decisions and takes some of those decisions. You can take a single fact, wrench it out of context, whip it up in order to create a j’accuse narrative. But that is not fair reporting.”

Addressing the daily No 10 press conference later, the education secretary, Gavin Williamson, reiterated this point, insisting that Johnson had, throughout, “been leading our nation’s effort to combat the coronavirus”.

While it is correct that the Cobra meetings are often chaired by others, in times of national crisis prime ministers have generally been ever present. Gordon Brown’s former press secretary Damian McBride tweeted that Brown, when PM, had chaired every Cobra meeting during the 2007 foot-and-mouth outbreak.

The sense of the government being forced on to the defensive was reinforced by two hugely detailed rebuttals it published on Sunday. One said the Sunday Times article contained “a series of falsehoods and errors”, while another condemned a Financial Times story about supposed confusion in efforts to source privately designed ventilators.

The acknowledgement of Johnson’s absences, some of which took place during a 12-day period in February during which he retreated into privacy at the government’s Chevening country estate in Kent, risks reinforcing a sense of official drift, with the PM still absent as he recovers from coronavirus.

Conservative MPs are barred from speaking to the media about the pandemic without No 10 clearance, but some are known to be worried about the apparent lack of preparation, the continued significant daily rises in deaths, and the lack of a publicly discussed exit strategy from lockdown.

The latest daily deaths figure from the virus in hospitals announced on Sunday was 596, well down on the previous day’s 888. However, Jenny Harries, the deputy chief medical officer speaking alongside Williamson at the press conference, said this could be in part due to lower reporting rates over the weekend.

Asked to predict whether the UK might have passed the peak of the crisis, she declined to “jump to all sorts of positive conclusions”, but said the data connected to hospital admissions looked as if it was “starting to plateau”.

With the number of hospital victims virus now above 16,000, the country is on a similar trajectory to Italy, according to a government-produced chart estimating total deaths including those outside hospital settings.

Harries warned against comparisons with other European countries such as Germany, which has seen just over 4,500 deaths, saying the countries were “at different phases of the pandemic”, while differences in areas such as data and demographics made the area even more complex.

She also defended official preparations for the virus, saying: “We had and we still have a very clear plan – we had a containment phase and it was very successful.”

Ministers spent much of the day trying to quash reports about possible ways the economy and society could gradually emerge from lockdown once the number of Covid-19 cases begins to drop.

Gove rejected reports of a supposed “traffic light” phased return to normality over May and June, starting with schools, nurseries and more shops beginning to open, then moving on to smaller companies, restaurants and then other venues, with distancing measures in place.

This was not the plan, Gove told Sky: “It is the case that we are looking at all of the evidence, but we’ve set some tests which need to be passed before we can think of easing restrictions in this lockdown.” Williamson reiterated the point at the press conference, declining to give a date as to when pupils might return to school.

Jonathan Ashworth, the shadow health secretary, told the Ridge show that Gove had given “possibly the weakest rebuttal of a detailed exposé in British political history”. There were, he added, “serious questions as to why the prime minister skipped five Cobra meetings throughout February, when the whole world could see how serious this was becoming”.

In this context, he added, the knowledge Johnson had missed key meetings “suggests that early on he was missing in action”.

Johnson remains at his official country retreat of Chequers. Gove said the PM was “in cheerful spirits” and had talked on Friday to Dominic Raab, the foreign secretary, who is standing in for him.

The government’s target of carrying out 100,000 Covid-19 tests each day by the end of the month has come under criticism from senior scientists, who say it will be impossible to reach.

Hannah Devlin  www.theguardian.com 

Experts told the Guardian that a “macho” focus on headline-grabbing figures had been pursued at the expense of rigorous science.

The Cabinet Office minister, Michael Gove, said on Sunday that the government was confident that the goal of 100,000 tests daily by the end of April would be met.

However, scepticism is building. On Saturday, only 21,626 tests were carried out.

Paul Hunter, a professor of medicine at the University of East Anglia, said he viewed the target as impossible. “I cannot see that being achieved,” he said. “It was always designed to be a headline grabber rather than anything else.”

Others said a relentless focus on the number of tests performed each day had led to basic data reporting standards falling by the wayside. Prof Sheila Bird, formerly of the Medical Research Council’s biostatistics unit at the University of Cambridge, said: “The level of incompetence in reporting these tests is outrageous.”

Gove acknowledged on Sunday that the target referred to tests carried out. In the past fortnight the government has placed a growing emphasis on “testing capacity”. It said that although fewer than 22,000 tests were performed on Saturday, labs now had the capacity to carry out 38,000 tests daily, and this had not been fully taken up by hospitals.

Scientists said the distinction was misleading as the logistics of having enough doctors and nurses on the ground to perform swab tests and send off samples continued to be a challenge. “Having the capacity is just the first step,” said Bill Hanage, a British epidemiologist based at Harvard.

Bird said the failure to give breakdowns of how many tests were being carried out on patients in hospital, critical workers and family members of critical workers made it impossible to extract prevalence rates of infection in these different groups and other crucial information that would allow scientists to more accurately assess the status of the outbreak in the UK.

“This macho thing about the number of tests done each day is leading to a reporting standard that makes the data almost uninterpretable,” she said.

Ideally, she said, tests would be reported separately for these different groups and would take into account the fact that hospitalised patients typically have a sequence of three tests over several weeks – an initial positive test followed by two negative tests (the second negative for assurance that the recovering patient is no longer infectious and can be transferred home or to a general ward).

“Reporting the number of tests performed each day is a political requirement, not a scientific requirement,” she added.

Hanage said that even if the 100,000 target were met, this figure was not a relevant measure of the adequacy of the UK’s testing operation. “Aiming for a large number that sounds good is not the way you should be doing this,” he said.

That around a third of those tested in the UK this week had positive results suggests that, while useful for guiding medical treatment, current testing is far below the levels that would be needed for population surveillance.

“The data I’ve been seeing suggests there’s not anywhere near enough testing,” Hanage said. “The way you should be doing it is to build the capacity and ability to run large numbers of tests – enough that only 10% are coming back positive.”

The World Health Organization has repeatedly urged governments to pursue testing and tracing, and some countries, including Singapore and South Korea, have successfully used this approach to contain their outbreaks, while Germany has also continued to carry out contact tracing.

The UK abandoned population testing and contact tracing in early March, when case numbers began to rise steeply, but the health secretary, Matt Hancock, said on Friday that contact tracing would be reintroduced, including through a proposed NHS smartphone app.

Experts say the ability to rely on this approach to safely exit the lockdown will depend critically on widespread population testing beyond the level needed for diagnosing patients in hospital.

Former health secretary Jeremy Hunt is now chair of the health select committee. He has been very critical of the government’s response to Covid-19. Can he escape responsibility for cuts made under his watch or for failing to learn the lessons from the last pandemic exercise “Cygnus 2016”?

Steve Topple 19th April 2020 www.thecanary.co 

Former health secretary Jeremy Hunt has been all over the news during the coronavirus (Covid-19) pandemic. The media has been treating him as some sort of prophet over the virus. Probably because he now chairs the health select committee. But one tweet has given an important reminder of the hypocrisy of Hunt’s words during this crisis.

Hunt: the coronavirus prophet?

Hunt has been wheeling himself out to any media organisation that will listen. Most recently, he told LBC that the UK should do coronavirus testing where:

        every single person who thinks they’ve got Covid or Covid symptoms gets a very quick test

He’s also been somewhat critical of Boris Johnson’s government’s response. The Canary reported in March, that Hunt called the PM’s plan (or lack thereof) for dealing with coronavirus “surprising and concerning”. It would almost appear that the former NHS boss has an iota of concern over the health of the nation. But don’t be fooled. Because ‘Saint Hunt of Surrey’ is actually partly responsible for the huge crisis the NHS is currently in. And someone on Twitter summed it up perfectly.

Twitter steps in

Many people will be aware of captain Tom Moore. He’s been walking lengths of his garden to raise money for the NHS. At the time of publication, Moore had raised over £25m. So, as Rachael Swindon tweeted:

Yes, it’s true. As Nursing in Practice reported, Hunt was health secretary when the NHS paid £21m for consultants to tell it how to save billions; £26bn according to the Mirror. As the head of the Royal College of Nursing (RCN) said at the time:

            The Government will struggle to justify this level of spending on management consultants who advise on        cutting nursing staff.

This sort of expertise should already be held within the NHS. It is a false economy when the consultants cost more than the savings they identify.

Now, with an NHS that’s running out of personal protective equipment (PPE), having to beg retired staff to come back, and hospitals declaring critical incidents, the fall out from years of Tory neglect is clear for all to see. Central to this has been Hunt. Yet he, and the media interviewing him, seem to have forgotten that fact.

Steaming hypocrisy

For example, people seem to have forgotten that Hunt was in charge when the NHS did a pandemic ‘drill’. Called Exercise Cygnus, the results showed the government that the NHS wouldn’t cope with something like coronavirus. Yet Hunt and the rest of the government’s health team ignored it. Also, NHS budgets rose in real terms by just 1.4% per year between 2009/10 and 2018/19, when historically (prior to Conservative-led governments) they went up by around 3.7%, on average. Hunt oversaw most of these meagre rises.

Meanwhile, there was a 2 percentage point increase in spending on private companies in the NHS between 2011/12 and 2018/19. Waiting times have been getting worse, staff shortages have been dire, and health inequality has been on the rise.

Yet somehow, Hunt has managed to absolve himself of responsibility for the mess the NHS is in during the coronavirus pandemic. And our media has allowed him to. So, it’s left to people like Swindon to point out the steaming hypocrisy in his mealy-mouthed words.