Owl had been slightly worried that some of Dominic Raab’s laissez-faire attitude may have rubbed off onto his one-time SPAD.

Simon Jupp MP writes in this week’s Exmouth Journal:

If you glance out of your window or take a short stroll, you’ll be reminded that we live in a very special corner of the country. East Devon is a beautiful place with picturesque villages and towns nestled around breath-taking countryside and coastline.

Now we’ve emerged from restrictions, our beaches and high streets bustle with residents and visitors. We need both to keep the shop doors open across East Devon and I’m proud to represent a place people want to visit.

Many visitors will no doubt wander past the many estate agent windows to peruse the property market. They may romanticise about the idyllic lifestyle they could have if they upped sticks from somewhere up the line and made East Devon their home. Some may even be able to afford that dream.

Meanwhile, some local people may look at the estate agents’ windows and experience a sinking feeling. The average salary in East Devon is £28,800 and the average price of a property is around £327,000.

Many people who’ve lived here for generations are being pushed further away by property prices they simply cannot afford. We also risk our communities becoming unsustainable because those who work in town can’t afford to live there, resulting in a recruitment crisis as we’ve seen in places including Salcombe and St Ives. The solution is not simply to build more houses everywhere, although affordable and social housing prioritised for people with local connections is undoubtedly needed locally. We must also look at the rise of second home ownership and the increasing numbers of holiday cottages. Whilst some holiday cottages are being run as legitimate businesses which provide accommodation for visitors which spend money in our local economy, others are being run as a tax dodge.

After a hard-fought campaign by MPs in the South West, the Chancellor has committed to closing a loophole that lets second homes avoid paying council tax by registering as a holiday rental, signing up for business rates and then receiving business rates relief. I hope we’ll get a date in the diary for this change sooner rather than later. Separately, a countrywide survey assessing the impact of Airbnb-style rentals on the housing market would surely provide a sobering wake-up call in Westminster and Whitehall.

We must also take action to protect newbuilds from being lost to the local market. We could follow the example recently set in Salcombe by setting a specific rule in any new Section 106 legal agreement to ensure new properties remain a principal residence in perpetuity. South Hams District Council recently agreed to pursue this policy and it is now with an independent examiner. I will be watching the outcome of the examiner’s conclusions carefully and I hope our local councillors will too. I’d argue that we need this intervention in some of our towns and villages and the Secretary of State is aware of my views. We should also consider the way we build homes. Mid Devon District Council is showing the way with a modular home development in Cullompton. I’ve had a tour of similar types of housing and I’d very happily live in one. They are considerably cheaper to construct and a firm reminder that our local housing crisis shouldn’t become a license to print money for developers. Over 300 properties are currently advertised on Airbnb in East Devon. Meanwhile, just 25 properties are available for longterm rent in the constituency, some asking for eye-watering monthly rents.

Homes for long-term rent and buy are out of reach for many people who grew up here, work locally or need the support of family to look after children or care for a loved one. Local politicians at every level owe it to everyone in East Devon to consider more than their own backyard.

Cash for the Tories buys you access. And access means cash from the public purse. That’s the abysmal two-step that channels public cash to Party donors. 

goodlawproject.org

All of this happened secretly through the VIP backchannels for PPE and Test and Trace contracts unearthed by Good Law Project. But now the institutionalisation of favours for those with special access is out in the open.

Mandating Covid testing services for travellers entering and leaving the UK has meant a bonanza for those firms lucky enough to get approved. An investigation by Good Law Project into the process for obtaining that lucrative approval has revealed the apparent existence of another VIP lane. 

Applicants for approval are asked to say whether they have a ‘sponsor’ who is a ‘Member of Parliament or Minister’ and to name them.

The fact of a Minister ‘sponsoring’ your application is – or should be – irrelevant to your prospects of gaining authorisation. It is hard to see any reason for this criteria – beyond a desire to red carpet those lucky enough to be on good terms with Government Ministers. 

We also know that many of the firms operating in the lucrative PCR testing market have ties to the Conservative Party. 

Rapid Clinics

Rapid Clinics was incorporated in December 2020 by Dr Ashraf Chohan and has a ‘poor’ rating on trust pilot with users labelling their service as “terrible” and “unprofessional”. 

On the other hand, Chohan does have strong ties to the Conservative Party. He is chairman of the ‘Conservative Friends of the NHS’, a Party donor and a member of the Party’s ‘treasury team’. He has also been snapped at events with Prime Minister Boris Johnson, Chancellor Rishi Sunak and Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab, and a host of other senior Conservative Party figures.

Quick Clinics

Dr Chohan’s son Jamal Chohan also operates a Government approved Covid testing firm – Quick Clinics. Like his father’s business, it also has a ‘poor’ rating amongst consumers, who have labelled the firm “dishonest and avaricious”.

Qured 

Qured, another Government approved testing company, was last week labelled a “joke” and a “fraud” by UK travellers let down by the firm. 

Qured’s company name is Health Technologies Ltd and the firm appointed Stephen John Oakly Catlin as a director in April 2020. Catlin is a major Conservative Party donor and has handed the party £450,000 – including £50,000 as recently as February 2021.

Mr Catlin is also a member of the Conservative Party “Leader’s Group” – an elite Conservative dining club whose members get direct access to Boris Johnson. 

We don’t make any allegations about how these firms won Government approval that many customers don’t think they deserve. But we do say as a general rule this: cronyism – welfare for the wealthy – gives short shrift to the public interest.

Following the guilty verdict on former Exmouth Mayor, John Humphrey, George Dixon posted the following question:

Perhaps Councillors Ingham and Hughes would care to tell us why they felt it appropriate to make him an alderman in 2019, four years into the investigation which led to this?

He was one of eleven proposed by Cllr Ben Ingham, seconded by Cllr.  Andrew Moulding to receive the title of Honorary Alderman or Alderwoman at an extraordinary meeting of EDDC on 18 December 2019.

Cllr. Stuart Hughes, the Chairman, put the proposals to the vote.

The vote was carried by a majority with one abstention. (No details of the vote appear to have been recorded)

Details of the meeting can be found here , though the audio recording appears to be no longer available.

The phrases: “due diligence” and “bringing the Council into disrepute” come to mind.

Will he now be stripped of this title?

[The award of Aldermanic status on this occasion seemed to have been unusually extensive. Handing out lollipops is a bit of a British obsession, easily debased.]

There are fears of a huge Covid spike in Torquay as teenagers returning home from Newquay’s Boardmasters festival at the weekend report that “everyone is testing positive”.

It seemed to Owl that the Boardmasters festival was always going to be a super spreading event waiting to happen. We wait to see just how big a spike it generates and whether it can be contained.

Stay safe!

Colleen Smith www.devonlive.com

The 16 and 17 year olds also reported that people who suspected they had Covid while at the festival were skipping tests on Friday organised to detect people carrying the virus in the 50,000 strong crowds.

Health officials say that data is being monitored from the Festival that finished last Sunday and results should be available later this week.

One Torquay grandmother said: “I want to warn everybody to be careful in Torbay because we are about to get a huge Covid spike.

“The young people are all coming back from Boardmasters festival and testing positive with Covid. My grandaughter is at Torquay Girls Grammar School and lots and lots of her friends are all testing positive.”

A 17-year-old Torquay Boys’ Grammar School pupil from Newton Abbot said everybody in his group of 10 who hadn’t been vaccinated came back with Covid – plus one person who had been vaccinated. He said that out of 30 who went – at least 15 to 20 have since tested positive.

The grandmother, who didn’t want to be named, said: “They have all been to Boardmasters and on Tuesday every one of them who went has tested positive. I was horrified when my grandaughter told me.

“These are mainly 16 to 17 year olds and they were all celebrating after getting their GCSE results.

“What I want to warn people about is that the numbers in Torbay are going to go very high and I want everyone to be aware.”

A 17-year old from Newton Abbot who attends Torquay Boys’ Grammar School said: “All the people in my group who hadn’t been vaccinated came back with it.

“Even one who had been vaccinated had a positive PCR – it spread through pretty much everyone.

“In my group there were 10 of us and I know about 30 who went and I would say at least 15 to 20 have since tested positive.

“I started to have a sore throat before I left, obviously it was hard to know at the time whether you have caught Covid or not but 100 per cent Monday I was feeling under the weather.

“Everyone realised they had it after they got back. They had a thing on Friday (the third day) when everyone was retested and I heard it showed about 1,000 came forward as positive.

“But there were loads who had it but didn’t come forward because they wanted to stay until the end of the festival. Everyone was quite aware about it and it and the tests coming back positive.”

Andrew Topham, CEO of Vision Nine – the company behind Boardmasters – said before the event organisers had put everything in place to minimise the risk.

Mr Topham said organisers went “above and beyond what was asked of us” by implementing its own Covid-19 policy.

Staycationers are thought to be a key reason for the general rise as Brits head to UK beaches rather than contend with the hassle of travelling abroad.

Newquay, where the festival took place, had 182 new positive tests between August 5 and 11.

In the seven days up to August 13 Newquay East’s infection rate rose to 1,123.8 per 100,000 which is higher that cities like London and Manchester.