Daily Archives: 11 Apr 2022

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11 Apr 2022

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Planning applications validated by EDDC for week beginning 28 March

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Simon Jupp, Owl has more questions for you

Simon, you used your press articles last week to promote tourism under the headline ‘Tourism is one of the things we do best!’.

  1. Did you know that in all the years the Conservatives controlled EDDC they never bothered to have a Tourism strategy?
  2. Will you, therefore, be giving the “New Guard” East Devon District Council your full support as they rectify this deficit by developing such a strategy?

If your answer to this question is “yes” then do you think it was wise to be quite so partisan as in the latest edition of the Tory leaflet, “In Touch”? 

As the elected Member of Parliament, you are supposed to be representing everyone in your constituency, whether they voted for you or not. That also implies working constructively with those they elected as their councillors.

In this leaflet you wrote: “East Devon deserves better than a district council which puts up council tax, doubles the price of parking and closes public toilets“. Isn’t this a little disingenuous?

All the local authorities have put their taxes up, and within limited options raised revenue for services, including the Conservative Devon County and the Conservative Devon and Cornwall Police Commissioner.

 Why?

Because of the austerity cuts imposed by George Osborne.

Central government grants – including retained business rates – were cut 37% in real-terms between 2009/10 and 2019/20, from £41.0bn to £26.0bn in 2019/20 prices.

Under current government policies this is only going to get worse.

In terms of value for money, readers might contemplate what they get for their Council taxes.

The biggest percentage rise was introduced by Alison Hernandez for policing this year, a “whopping” 4.2% (above the increase in pensions).

For every pound that Council Tax payer in East Devon pays for things like recycling, street cleaning and, yes, cleaning the loos and emptying bins three times a day for tourists, they pay an additional 60p for policing. (60% more) [For clarity for every £1 that goes to EDDC, £1.60 goes to policing]

Owl bets most residents see refuse collection and street cleaning more often than they see a “Bobby on the Beat”. How’s that for value for money?

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Cornish pilot scheme cuts bus fares to encourage use of public transport

Residents and visitors can enjoy cheaper trips around the far south-west of England after the launch of a cut-price bus fare pilot in Cornwall.

Steven Morris www.theguardian.com 

Ticket prices across the county have been reduced by between 20% and 40% in an attempt to encourage more people out of their cars and on to public transport.

The four-year scheme, which is backed by the government, will measure what impact lower fares have on the number of cars on the road. It is hoped it will make it easier for Cornish people to get around and also tempt visitors to visit the county’s beaches, moors, towns and attractions by bus rather than car.

Louis Gardner, the mayor of Newquay, was among those who welcomed the scheme. He said: “The bus fares pilot is a hugely positive step for the people of Cornwall. This will make it easier for young people to access jobs, education and training in towns such as Newquay.

“It’s important for rural communities to have access to affordable alternatives to the car. It will also benefit tourists this summer and could encourage them to use public transport, rather than going everywhere by car.”

Transport for Cornwall has set a goal of increasing bus usage by 10% and is using a £23.5m grant from the Department for Transport to fund the initiative.

The new fares will include:

  • £2.50 a day or £10 a week for adults within Cornish towns.
  • £5 a day or £20 a week for adults for travel across Cornwall.
  • Adult singles from £1.60, and returns from £2.40.
  • Family tickets for £10 a day (up to two adults and unlimited children under 16).

The transport minister Charlotte Vere said: “The launch of this excellent scheme across Cornwall is a significant moment in our ambition to level up transport links across the country. We want to place Cornwall at the leading edge of a national bus revolution.”

The largest bus operator in Cornwall, Go-Ahead Group, is leading the scheme, but under an initiative called “any ticket, any bus” the cheaper prices will mean benefits for customers of all the main companies.

While the scheme is scheduled to last four years, it cannot be guaranteed that the prices will stay at the levels set and they may be tweaked depending on how the services are used.

David Sidebottom, the director of the watchdog Transport Focus, said: “Cheaper fares are vital in winning passengers back and attracting new ones. Our research has shown that Cornwall’s bus passengers wanted better value for money fares. These plans should drive up passenger satisfaction and encourage more people to give bus a go. We will monitor the impact this has on passengers.”

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The levelling up outlook 

8.9m People live in places that our index identifies as most vulnerable to the cost of living crisis

52% Are former Red Wall areas, with the North, Midlands, and London all highly vulnerable

78% Of the places that benefit the most from the council tax rebate are not those that are most vulnerable to the cost of living

A new index measuring the cost of living crisis

www.progressive-policy.net

The cost of living crisis poses a significant and immediate threat to the defining mission of this government, threatening to worsen living standards in the poorest places and further entrench unacceptably high place-based inequalities. In this edition of the levelling up outlook, CPP presents the results of a new index highlighting spatial patterns of vulnerability to this crisis to gain a greater understanding of which places will be worst hit without further government support.

To our knowledge it is the first index of this sort – and while closely related to existing measures of deprivation – it takes a broader view by incorporating a range of economic factors to determine:

1) a place’s relative risk of more people being pulled into poverty; and

2) the relative risk of those who were already hard up being pushed into destitution.

It finds that the North of England will be particularly hard hit by rising living costs with many local areas such as Kingston upon Hull and Blackpool doing badly on all of our indictors.

The prevalence of low pay and working age economic inactivity in coastal and rural communities in the South and the East of England also puts areas such as Hastings, Thanet and Dover at high risk. Meanwhile, very high rates of child poverty and food insecurity account for much of the vulnerability in several London boroughs.

Government support measures are insufficient and poorly targeted at vulnerable places

The Council Tax Rebate announced in February disproportionately benefits wealthier households in places like Rushmore, with low vulnerability, at the expense of highly vulnerable places like Redbridge. Covering the cost of April’s energy price cap rise (£693) for those in receipt of Universal Credit would cost £2.4bn – £600m less than the current Council Tax Rebate – and would result in more spending on the most vulnerable people and places.

Greater immediate spending on Universal Credit is necessary but not sufficient to support vulnerable people and places. Our index points to broader vulnerabilities including a high prevalence of low wages or

people have left the workforce early. Further interventions must be appropriately targeted to alleviate the threat of rising poverty, while aligning with the principles to reduce spatial inequalities as set out in the Levelling Up White Paper.

The Cost of Living Vulnerability Index

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Three-quarters of Britons back expansion of wind power, poll reveals

Survey suggests even Tory voters are unlikely to support Conservatives’ nuclear-first energy policy.

Toby Helm www.theguardian.com 

More than three-quarters of the public are in favour of windfarms being built in the UK. That is the key result of an Opinium poll carried out for the Observer in the wake of publication of the government’s controversial energy security plans last week.

Ministers backed nuclear power but shunned new onshore wind plants as the main means for protecting the UK against future energy crises. But the new poll indicates Tory voters’ backing for wind turbines almost matches that of Labour and Lib Dem supporters – suggesting the move against onshore wind, a result of backbench Conservative pressure, runs counter to the views of the party’s own voters.

In the Opinium poll, 79% of Tory voters said they were strongly or somewhat in favour of windfarms being installed in the UK, compared with 83% of Labour voters and 88% of Lib Dems. Two-thirds of all voters said they would be happy for a windfarm to be built near them.

By contrast, only 46% of all voters favoured new nuclear power stations in principle, while a mere 32% favoured gas power plants. Less than a third of voters would be happy with a nuclear power station being built near them, while less than a quarter would approve of having a gas power station in their neighbourhood.

Polling data for UK approval of windfarms

These findings suggest that government thinking is at some distance from the public’s perception of the need to ensure energy security while still working to achieve net zero emissions. It is also at odds with warnings from experts who say reliance on atomic power raises key concerns for the nation. They point out that the country’s next nuclear plant, Hinkley Point C, currently under construction in Somerset, was supposed to start generating electricity in 2017 but will not do so until 2026 because of delays that have raised the station’s cost from £16bn to £23bn.

“Instead of this wasteful nuclear plan, the government should invest in onshore wind to help lower people’s bills now,” said the Liberal Democrat leader, Ed Davey. “Safely storing nuclear waste is also expensive, complicated and controversial.”

However, former Tory energy minister Charles Hendry – who now advises the energy industry – said he was pleased the government had committed to more nuclear but doubted whether the funding model for building new plants would attract enough private sector interest. The government needed to address whether it should take on the entire funding of the building of the plants, he said. “That happens in almost every other country in the world. Then if it chooses to, when they are built, it can sell them off to the private sector. That is the most assured way of getting the investment which is necessary and the partnerships which are necessary.”

But scientists are warning that heavy reliance on atomic energy is premature when the critical issue of nuclear waste disposal has yet to be tackled. The UK has still not selected a site to build an underground store for the spent fuel rods and radioactive cladding it has accumulated over the past seven decades of operating nuclear plants. Most of the nation’s nuclear waste is still stored above ground, at Sellafield in Cumbria.

“We need to build an underground store that is acceptable to local people, that is geologically stable, and which is big enough to store the 750,000 cubic metres of nuclear waste that we will have accumulated once all our current reactors are in operation,” said Prof Claire Corkhill of Sheffield University. “That will take another decade at best. Only then would I be happy to know another eight nuclear power plants were going to be built in the UK.”

In 2019, the UK relaunched its efforts to get agreement to build an underground nuclear waste facility. So far residents in four areas – three in Cumbria and one in Lincolnshire – have entered the voluntary process to explore whether it would be possible to have the store built in their neighbourhood. Drilling to test how subterranean water flow might damage a facility in each area will be carried out in the near future. Then, if the rocks there are found to be suitable, geologists will have to estimate if a sufficiently large underground store could be built in that location.

“We could find an area has good rocks but … not sufficient space to store all the waste we need to bury,” added Corkhill. “Then we might have to try to find a second, or entirely new site. This is not an issue we can rush.”

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Did you catch this weekend headline?

Sajid Javid: I was a non-dom for six years but now pay my full share.

(Between 2000 and 2006, before he began his political career.)