Two former Conservative cabinet ministers have launched a joint parliamentary inquiry into the government’s handling of the coronavirus pandemic, as they warned No 10’s own probe will come “too late”.

Ashley Cowburn, Political Correspondent www.independent.co.uk

As infections of the virus surge across the country, Greg Clark, chair of the Commons science and technology committee and Jeremy Hunt, chair of the health committee, said “important lessons need to be learned” to help inform decisions through the next phase of the crisis.

Their two committees – alongside MPs who sit on them – will aim to produce a joint report in the Spring of 2021, but insisted there will be “staging posts” along the way.

In their sessions the chairs are expected to call on ministers and on professor Chris Whitty, the chief medical officer, and Sir Patrick Vallance, the chief scientific, who have often appeared alongside Boris Johnson at No 10, to give evidence to MPs.

The inquiry – starting next week –will focus on the deployment of non-pharmaceutical interventions like the national lockdown and social distancing rules to manage the pandemic, the impact on the social care sector and the government’s widely criticised Test and Trace system.

It will also probe the UK’s prior preparedness for a pandemic, the development of treatments and vaccines, and the impact of coronavirus on people from minority ethnic backgrounds.

In the summer, Boris Johnson committed to holding an independent inquiry into the pandemic, but insisted it was not the right time do so as the government continued “combatting” the virus. Downing Street has not given any further details as to when an inquiry may launch or the exact format.

Ahead of the launch of the joint inquiry by the two Commons committees, Mr Clark, the former business secretary under Theresa May, said: “We’re very focused on being able to find and learn lessons during the course of the pandemic that can be applied to decisions that might be coming up further down the road.

“The prime minister has committed to a public inquiry, but clearly that has some way to go before it even starts, let alone concludes. Whatever lessons and conclusions are learnt from that, it’s likely to be too late for the weeks and months ahead. 

“We want to in a constructive way, feedback what we learn from witnesses both in this country and around the world.”

In a statement, Mr Hunt said: “Parliament has a crucial role in scrutinising the actions of government at a time when the country is in the grip of a crisis such as the current pandemic with its tragic impact on lives and livelihoods.

“Important lessons need to be learned that can help inform further decisions that will need to be taken in the months ahead. It is crucial to learn and apply them now since the public inquiry that the prime minister has promised is likely to be some time away.”

The former cabinet minister added: “Our committees will jointly learn what went well, what didn’t, and what lessons must be learnt at this point in the pandemic. We will use the independence of our cross-party committees and weekly detailed questioning of witnesses to consider the decisions and the evidence they were based on and assess their effectiveness.

“We will develop clear recommendations so that the UK can benefit from the lessons learned for future stages of this pandemic and for future crises.”

Want a new challenge? No previous experience necessary.

Owners of a family-run café in the heart of Sidmouth have expressed their frustration at losing permission for an outdoor seating area, after it was allowed for three months over the summer.

Hannah Corfield sidmouth.nub.news 

‘Street café’ connected to The Dairy Shop

The Dairy Shop on Church Street was issued a temporary pavement license by Devon County Council back in July, as a Covid-19 measure introduced to support local businesses.

“It saved the business; without it the café would not have survived,” Owner John Hammond explained.

“Our business model centres on sharing tables, with limited space available in the café. Obviously, with one person to each table we’ve reached full capacity with about three people. It’s just not sustainable.

“The extra seating outside got us through a busy summer; meaning our staff could come back full-time and didn’t have to rely on the furlough scheme.

“All things considered, it has been a good summer.”

Until September 10, when John received a letter from Devon County Council stating that he would need to reapply for a license to continue with the set up of three tables and six chairs on the pavement opposite The Dairy Shop.

“Initially, the letter seemed to imply that there would be no issue reapplying for a license. But when I did, my application to extend the permit was rejected,” John continued.

“With the arrangement having worked perfectly fine for the the past three months, I don’t understand why there is an issue with it now. We feel quite dumbfounded by the whole situation.”

Sidmouth Town Council has shown full support to The Diary Shop, requesting that ‘common sense prevail’ and the permit be re-granted to enable the business to continue operating.

Chair Ian Barlow commented: “The reasons for refusing to renew the license appear unsubstantiated and rather petty in my opinion.

“To say that Church Street is a ‘busy road’ is ridiculous. The café opposite The Dairy Shop has an outdoor seating area with no problems.”

Cabinet Member for Highways Management, who also lives in Sidmouth, Stuart Hughes said: “A permit to have tables and chairs on the pavement where they were previously located is not viable and will not be granted on the grounds of posing a risk to pedestrians.

“There is a way forward though, and that would be for Sidmouth Town Council to apply for the road closure to include Chapel Street, which runs next to The Dairy Shop.

“This would make a suitable space for an outdoor seating area. It might take some time – probably until January to secure – but it would be a lasting solution.”

When asked why the outdoor seating area couldn’t remain as it was, he responded: “There were objections made by members of the public who were unhappy about how social distancing was being adhered to and restrictions to pavement access.

“Devon County Council granted the initial three-month permit, designed to help businesses through the pandemic, with the proviso that it could be renewed if no one objected. Once complaints have been made, they have to be investigated and in this case it has been deemed unsafe.”

Theresa May has sharply criticised the government’s planning reforms, describing them as “mechanistic” and “ill conceived” as No 10 struggled to contain a backbench rebellion.

George Grylls www.thetimes.co.uk /

In August Robert Jenrick, the housing secretary, published details of a formula that will be used to calculate where 300,000 homes a year will be built.

It permits large increases in development in London and rural areas, while cities in the north including Manchester, Liverpool and Newcastle will be asked to build fewer homes.

Mrs May told MPs that the reforms would send more investment into “London and the south”.

She said: “What this new algorithm does as regards to levelling up, is it flies in the face of the government’s flagship policy.

“This is a mechanistic approach and it is ill conceived. We need to reform the planning system. We need to make sure that planning system sees the right number of homes being built in the right places. But we won’t do that by removing local democracy, cutting the number of affordable homes that will be built and building over rural areas.”

In Mrs May’s Berkshire constituency of Maidenhead, according to the system, an additional 221 homes will be constructed each year over and above current requirements.

Meanwhile, a seat such as Manchester Central will have to build 260 fewer houses, Times analysis has found.

Referring to the government’s change of mind on A-level results, the former prime minister said: “I would have thought the government might have abandoned algorithms by now.”

Anger has been building on the Conservative back benches for some time over the reforms. Fifty-five Tory MPs sought to speak in the debate with nearly 80 in a WhatsApp group opposed to the targets. The government is hoping to avoid a binding vote on the algorithm, but the rebels are expected to amend the wider planning reforms if the formula is not changed.

At a meeting of the backbenchers’ 1922 committee last night, Mr Jenrick tried to calm opposition. But in the Commons, former cabinet ministers including Jeremy Hunt, Chris Grayling, Damian Green and Damian Hinds all spoke out against the algorithm, with Mr Hunt warning the government that it was showing “contempt for local democracy”.

A source close to Mr Jenrick said the government would not be “deterred” from its target of 300,000 homes a year, adding that the targets would be distributed in a “fair and sensitive way”.

Analysis by The Times has shown that Conservative constituencies will bear the brunt of the development. Excluding London — where housebuilding will increase dramatically — Tory seats will have to accommodate an additional 54,000 homes each year, while Labour constituencies beyond the capital will be asked to build 3,000 less.

Bob Seely, MP for the Isle of Wight who called the debate, said that the algorithm would leave Tory shire voters “furious” and Red Wall voters “betrayed”.

Christopher Pincher, the housing minister, responded that the planning system was “opaque, slow and almost uniquely discouraging for all but its most expert navigators”, adding that the government was “actively engaged” with backbenchers and “listening to feedback” about the effects of the algorithm.

With coastal towns severely affected by coronavirus, one creative duo are planning a string of artist-led festivals in October half-term to lure people back to the seaside

Dixe Wills http://www.theguardian.com 

Can the arts help save the seaside? The organisers of a new multi-town festival planned for October half-term (26 October-1 November) are hoping they can.

Billing itself as “a coastal call to arms”, Back & Fill was created by writer and artist Dan Thompson and designer Kate Kneale of Margate-based studio HKD as a response to the economic damage done to seaside towns by the coronavirus crisis. Working with a small team of volunteers furloughed from their jobs, the pair have invited local people involed in the creative arts to put on performances, exhibitions and other events to lure people to the seaside for one last autumn fling.

“The idea came to us when we were sitting in our studios in Margate talking about how the summer would be wiped out,” said Thompson. “So many things were cancelled and the Turner Contemporary, one of our key attractions, was closed for much of the year.”

That loss of the summer season was disastrous for coastal communities across the UK, despite the few weeks immediately after lockdown when some towns were overwhelmed by visitors as restrictions lifted. As early as April, a study by the University of Southampton and the Centre for Towns warned that lockdown would show the economies of seaside towns to be especially vulnerable. Many are heavily reliant on holidaymakers – in Newquay and Skegness, for example, more than half the local jobs depend on tourism. Of the study’s list of the 20 towns in England and Wales identified as most at risk, 16 are on the coast. By August, the National Coastal Tourism Academy was estimating lockdown would see seaside towns losing up to £10.3bn this year.

Back & Fill hopes the festivals will claw back a little of those losses. Each local event is independently run, using a starter kit devised by Thompson and Kneale that anyone can share and edit. To date, a dozen towns have signed up. Ten are in England – Cleethorpes, Hastings, Margate, Newhaven, Portsmouth, Ramsgate, Sandown (Isle of Wight), Southwold, Westward Ho! and Weymouth – along with Swansea in south Wales and Northern Ireland’s Portrush.

With anti-Covid measures still in place up and down the country, Thompson is keen to point out that he’s not encouraging large gatherings. The events are typically small and keep to the rule of six.

“They’re an antidote to big crowds,” he said. “They’re about exploring and discovering, about beauty and magic. We wanted to plan something for people to look forward to, that would extend the summer season. A moment of joy and happiness somewhere over the horizon after the summer has ended.

“We’ve also created a new network of arts organisations in seaside towns that will talk to each other and offer mutual support in these difficult times.”

Plans for events are still being finalised in many of the participating towns and details will be released shortly. Those already announced include a “pennydrop” treasure hunt in Westward Ho! by the artistic duo Quiet British Accent, who have organised similar events around the world.

Swell Portrush is unleashing Operation Zombie by the Big Telly theatre company, in which teams of up to six people will work their way across town, completing missions to drive the zombies out. There’ll also be a wild food walk, a wildlife cruise, lots of yoga, driftwood boat-making and shop-window exhibitions along Main Street.

Among events planned in Margate is an exhibition of “lockdown prints” by Robert Montgomery, famous for his art installations.

In Cleethorpes, the Birdhouse Theatre is hosting Life’s a Beach, a week-long programme engaging children and families in nature-based and creative activities, most of which will take place outdoors, including a shipwreck ramble and story-telling in the sand dunes. Full details will be announced on its website on 12 October.

According to Thompson, there’s still time for more coastal towns to join the event. So it will be worth checking the Back & Fill website nearer the date for a last dose of seaside fun before winter.

As a correspondent wrote to Owl a few days ago:

Johnson wants more young people to buy their own homes.  More and more young people will be unemployed over the current months as furlough ends and more lickdowns may take place.  Some who own their homes may have to move miles to get new jobs and will be unable to take those jobs – until they sell their homes to people who can’t afford to buy them.  Add that there is a possibility that post-Brexit house prices may fall, many new buyers may then be in negative equity.  AND their homes being converted from shops and offices may turn out to be sub-standard….. Would you buy a house from this man?

www.independent.co.uk 

Few television programmes can be as depressingly upbeat as Homes under the Hammer. It’s not the dated music, formulaic structure or the cheesy, lobotomised chirpiness of its presenters.

It’s the fact that, every weekday morning, for 1,000 episodes now, it has nonchalantly exposed the glaring absurdity at the heart of UK economy, apparently without even realising.

I’m not suggesting that a daytime TV show is responsible for the housing crisis. But Homes under the Hammer did start in 2003, which, coincidentally, was roughly when the UK property market finally ceased contact with objective reality, consigning a generation to insecure renting.

For 17 years since, a rolling cast of would-be property developers have enjoyed their 15 minutes of fame telling pinstriped estate agents how they made their fortunes flipping run-down terraced houses.

On a basic level, we know something feels intuitively odd about this. Why do we live in a country where people make so much money by covering the nation’s properties in cheap laminate, magnolia paint and faux leather sofas – then renting them out to people who can’t afford to buy their own?

Can this really be more valuable than, say, being a civil engineer or starting a business that makes something or provides a service?

Is it just an immutable law that house prices always rise? Or have we created a system with fundamental flaws?

Figures out this week give credence to the latter view. They should cause alarm, but the government seems to have its fingers its ears.  

Despite a catastrophic recession, a global pandemic, the looming prospect of mass unemployment and huge disruption to trade, average house prices jumped 7.3 per cent in the past year – far more than wages.

Meanwhile, Boris Johnson unveiled his plan to turn generation rent into “generation buy” – a slogan that hides a barely fleshed-out plan, apparently to subsidise 2 million low-deposit mortgages with public money.

To understand this phenomenon, and why the government’s plan will make it worse, it’s necessary to confront two fundamental myths about the housing market and the financial system that props it up.

First, the pervasive myth that high prices are caused by a shortage of supply. This is not true, no matter how many times it is repeated. Supply rose last year at its fastest rate for three decades, yet prices shot up.

While supply and demand are important factors in determining price of anything, in the housing market an over-riding factor is the cost of debt, because property is the one purchase that almost all ordinary households fund largely with borrowing.

According to Bank of England research, the fourfold increase in house prices since the 1980s can be explained almost entirely by falling real interest rates. Cheap money means expensive houses.  

Markets now think the economy is going to tank, so rates are forecast to stay low, meaning banks are continuing to offer cheap mortgages – particularly for those with a big deposit. Along with a cut in Stamp Duty, this has helped push up house prices further.  

The second myth is that banks are responsible stewards of money; financial intermediaries channelling idle savings into profitable investments.  

In reality, banks are more like debt factories, creating money out of nothing. They don’t look at their deposits to see how much they have left to lend then think who might make best use of it. They simply create as much money as they are allowed to under the rules and lend it out to the most profitable borrower.  

They simply tap a number into a computer and it’s in your account as a debt to the bank.

Because of poorly designed rules supposedly designed to make banks safer, it’s much more profitable for banks to lend against the value of a “safe” asset like a house than it is to lend to a company that wants to expand. Property asset bubbles are built into the system.

The vast majority of money that UK banks create is for assets or financial transactions. In other words, it does not expand the nation’s productive capacity by, for example, funding education or research, it merely inflates the value of assets that already exist.  

This has created a £7 trillion housing market that fails to construct affordable homes and gives a huge, unearned windfall to those who joined in the game first – some of them are part-time developers of Homes under the Hammer fame, others are simply homeowners born at the right time who’ve now cashed in their chips.

To all intents and purposes, the UK housing market is a pyramid scheme reliant on ever-increasing prices.

This can’t continue forever, but successive governments and central bankers have done their best to try and keep the music going long after the party should have ended, and they may well keep it going for a while yet.

At some point rates must rise, the cheap money tap will turn off and homeowners, banks and the country will have a problem. 

And yet, at this point, the government plans to provide 95 per cent LTV mortgages, adding tens of billions of pounds more debt, probably backed by the public, (though we don’t know yet as Boris Johnson hasn’t said) to an already colossal pile.

This would effectively protect banks by putting taxpayers first in line for losses when house prices fall. It will not result in more affordable homes being built.

The approach taken by recent governments has also meant years of missed opportunity. At the low rates available for much of the past decade, governments could have borrowed to expand the productive capacity of the economy, to boost skills, develop infrastructure and build publicly-owned housing.

Then, as the economy picked up and wages rose the Bank of England could have taken its foot off the throttle and increased interest rates, returning the property market slowly to planet Earth.

Instead, the government chose to slash spending on public services and is now ready to get the chequebook to underwrite a further splurge on housing debt.

So we are left with the absurdity that, a decade after a crisis caused by trillions of dollars pumped into an unsustainable bubble, our government and central bankers seem intent on giving it a few last puffs just to make sure it bursts as catastrophically as possible.

That won’t be tomorrow, it may not even be next year, but it has to happen.  

“Sea defences at the mouth of the River Otter, built 200 years ago to claim fresh farmland from the sea, along with other man-made alterations to the river over the centuries, mean the Otter is no longer as naturally connected with its floodplain as it once was.”

Unintended consequences of land-owner tinkering with nature, but who picks up the bill? And can this be cited as “mitigation” for building on the Clyst estuary? – Owl 

Howard Lloyd www.devonlive.com

Ambitious new plans have been submitted for a £15m scheme to help protect the Lower Otter Valley from the increasing threats of climate change.

The EU-funded scheme, which is still subject to approval, would create a new nature reserve while also protecting public amenities and leaving the area better-equipped to deal with rising sea levels.

The project is being proposed due to the failure of existing sea defences and the impact this is having on the immediate area.

“The project is being considered because the existing 200-year-old sea defences are now starting to fail and are becoming increasingly hard to maintain,” claim the Lower Otter Restoration Project.

“This is already impacting on public infrastructure, local businesses and homes, and recreational facilities. The project is in the process of securing sufficient funding as well as planning and other consents to allow us to move towards implementing the proposals.

“The Lower Otter Estuary is a very special place. It is home to local people and businesses. It provides habitat for a wide variety of breeding and wintering bird species, and it is enjoyed by tens of thousands of visitors each year.

“But this coastal community, like many others, faces growing challenges due to climate change. As the oceans warm up, they take up more space and sea levels rise. We are also seeing more extreme storms and rainfall events which increase the intensity and erosional power of rivers and the sea.

“The Lower Otter Restoration Project is working with local people and partner organisations to adapt and enhance the downstream part of the River Otter, its estuary, and its immediate surroundings for future generations in the face of a rapidly changing climate.”

The project, led by landowner Clinton Devon Estates and the Environment Agency, would see the Big and Little Marsh floodplains around Budleigh Salterton restored, with breaches created in the Little Bank, the Big Bank and the River Otter Embankment to allow water to flow through.

It would also see the town’s cricket club move location.

Previous flooding at Budleigh Salterton Cricket Club’s Ottermouth ground

The funding will support the Lower Otter Restoration Project’s aims of climate change adaptation by working with natural processes to provide benefits for people and wildlife.

Sea defences at the mouth of the River Otter, built 200 years ago to claim fresh farmland from the sea, along with other man-made alterations to the river over the centuries, mean the Otter is no longer as naturally connected with its floodplain as it once was.

The hope is that the plans will see ‘original habitats restored (and) riverand wildlife allowed to respond naturally to climate change’.

Floods have left part of their current Ottermouth home under water on three occasions in the last 10 years, with a plan to relocate to Janie’s Field on the outskirts of the town having been agreed.