A new bus timetable which ‘substantially’ reduces services in the Ottery St Mary area comes into force from Sunday, July 31. 

Philippa Davies www.sidmouthherald.co.uk

The changes affect Stagecoach’s 4/4A/4B routes between Exeter and Axminster via Cranbrook and Honiton, which currently run between Exeter and Ottery every 30 minutes in both directions. 

Service 4 will operate between Exeter and Cranbrook only. Two new routes, 44 and 44A, will serve Honiton and Axminster.  

Service 44 will operate hourly, Monday to Saturday daytime between Exeter and Honiton via Cranbrook (London Road), Rockbeare, Marsh Green and Ottery St Mary, with some journeys also serving Gittisham.  

Service 44A will run every two hours in each direction Monday to Saturday between Exeter and Axminister, via Cranbrook (London Road), Whimple, Ottery St Mary, Honiton and Wilmington. 

The buses will also finish earlier and there will be fewer services on Sundays and public holidays. 

Jess Bailey, the county councillor for the Otter Valley, said: “The substantial reduction in bus services to Ottery St Mary and the surrounding area comes as a real blow. Not only will it cause huge problems for the many people who rely on the service but it will force people back into their cars, which flies in the face of the climate emergency.” 

In other changes affecting the wider area, service 9A will no longer serve the Seaton to Lyme Regis route, which will be covered by another operator. The 9/9A/X9 Monday to Saturday evening service between Exeter and Sidmouth will be reduced from hourly to every 90 minutes, and the evening service between Sidmouth and Sidbury will be withdrawn. 

The changes are part of a Devon-wide review of Stagecoach’s services which aims to ‘provide a sustainable bus network now, so that we can grow services over the long term.’ 

Regional managing director Mike Watson said: “In addition to this, with the current nationwide shortage of bus drivers, we need to concentrate our resource on the services where demand is greatest to ensure that vital journeys and connections are maintained and to provide a network that best meets the changing needs of the communities we serve. 

“We will be working together with national and local government to attract more people out of their cars and onto more sustainable public transport. The more people who switch to bus, the stronger our networks will be.”

 

Truly shocking, “NHS safe in our hands” ? Clearly not, as all candidates for next PM want to shrink the state – Owl

A former GP with heart problems travelled nearly 300 miles to access emergency healthcare after deciding the wait nearer home was too long.

BBC News www.bbc.co.uk

Dr Alison Durkin spent hours waiting to be seen on Monday in an ambulance outside the Royal Cornwall Hospital.

When she felt worse the next day, she travelled from Helston to find a hospital with no queues and is now in a serious condition in London.

The Royal Cornwall Hospitals NHS Trust apologised for the distress caused.

The Hospital, near Truro, declared an internal ‘critical incident’ this week due to “acute pressure” on beds.

‘Wouldn’t be here now’

Mrs Durkin said she was seen by a junior doctor on Monday evening and returned home, but when she woke up on Tuesday feeling worse, she and her husband Ross decided to travel from Helston to find emergency care.

He said: “The first thing we did was to check the situation at Plymouth and that was no better, so geographically we headed up country, Exeter was much the same, Bristol Royal infirmary had 88 people waiting in A&E.

“The only answer was to go to and find a hospital where there wasn’t a massive queue outside and where she could actually get decent quality of care.”

Mrs Durkin was admitted into Charing Cross Hospital, where she remains in a serious condition.

Mr Durkin said if they had not taken matters into their own hands, he feared the worst: “I’m not sure whether she’d still be here to be honest, it’s not an easy thing to say.

“It wasn’t a hard decision to make because we knew that if we did nothing, the potential outcome was she wouldn’t be here now,” he added.

Mrs Durkin was assessed in an ambulance outside the Royal Cornwall Hospital on Monday evening

The Royal Cornwall Hospitals NHS Trust apologised for the distress caused to Mrs Durkin and her husband.

“Our staff are working exceptionally hard in very difficult circumstances and will always make sure patients are assessed on their arrival at our emergency department and those most critically ill will be admitted right away,” it said.

Cornwall Council, the body responsible for social care in the county, said it was “working closely with partners across the health and care sector to support people to leave hospital as soon as they can”.

It said recruitment in the sector continued “to be an issue”.

Liz Truss has sought to breathe new life into her faltering Conservative leadership campaign with a flurry of uncosted tax cut promises worth billions of pounds, as the five remaining candidates took part in their first mass debate.

Liz Truss bids to save Tory leadership campaign with new tax cut pledges

Peter Walker www.theguardian.com 

Truss, who has the third highest number of Tory MPs’ votes – behind Rishi Sunak and Penny Mordaunt, promised to scrap a planned rise in corporation tax and suspend green energy levies, costing more than £20bn a year overall.

The unexpected offer, on top of an existing pledge by the foreign secretary to reverse a rise in national insurance, worth another near-£11bn a year, came as the would-be successors to Boris Johnson joined a Zoom Q&A hosted by the Conservative Home website.

Thursday’s second round of voting by Tory MPs, a process that will eventually whittle the candidates down to a final two with the winner then chosen by party members, saw Truss lagging well behind Sunak, the former chancellor, and Mordaunt, the surprise package of the race so far, who is now the bookmakers’ favourite.

After criticism of a somewhat flat campaign, Truss used a question about the cost of living crisis to set out significant new tax cut proposals.

“We immediately need to start putting money back into people’s pockets, we know families are struggling to make ends meet at the moment,” she said. “I would reverse the national insurance rise; I opposed it in cabinet at the time because I thought it was a mistake, I think it’s even more of a mistake now when we’re facing such strong economic headwinds.

“I would also have a temporary moratorium on the green energy level to cut £153 from people’s energy bills. And I would also not do the corporation tax hikes because I think it’s vitally important that we’re attracting investment into our country.”

Truss, along with some other candidates, had previously said she would reverse the national insurance increase, intended to help improve social care.

It has been estimated that scrapping the planned rise in corporation tax from 19% to 25% next year would cost about £15bn a year. Suspending green levels on energy bills would cost an estimated £5bn a year.

Labour has condemned an “arms race” of uncosted tax cut pledges among candidates. Sunak has said he would wait to stabilise inflation before cutting any taxes.

In a boost to Truss, shortly after the debate the attorney general, Suella Braverman, who was eliminated from the contest after finishing last in Thursday’s MPs’ vote, reiterated her call for supporters to switch to the foreign secretary.

Braverman is ideologically close to Kemi Badenoch, the former levelling up minister, who along with backbencher Tom Tugendhat is still in the contest, and came fourth in Thursday’s vote.

But in a robustly worded message to supporters, Braverman urged them to “look realistically at the numbers” and back Truss, the other candidate seen as being firmly on the right of the party.

“Liz and Kemi are not both going to make it into the final two,” Braverman wrote. “So a decision needs to be made to back one of them. The one we should back, I’d argue, is the one who can get to the final round: Liz can, Kemi cannot.”

In the ConservativeHome debate, Mordaunt, who has been the subject of a spate of negative briefings since emerging as a favourite, said she hoped for “a positive contest”. She said: “I don’t want mudslinging. Without that teamwork, we can’t deliver.”

In her closing speech the international trade minister pitched herself as the candidate who could take on Labour.

“We need to win at the next general election, and what all the polling shows is that you can only win with me,” Mordaunt said. “Every poll in our party, and in the country, I top it. I win against Keir Starmer in London; I poll the highest in both red wall and blue wall seats; I lead with women, with young people; and I also have the best reach in Scotland.

“So I have some question for you: do you want to win the next general election, or do you want to hand everything that we have achieved to the Labour party?”

“Whoever wins out of this contest in the end, they have an uphill climb.”

The five candidates still standing for the leadership of the Conservative party were in action in a TV debate broadcast on Channel 4 on Friday night. Here are the five key takeaways:

Martin Belam www.theguardian.com 

Tom Tugendhat was the only one able to answer freely

Given the opportunity to answer “Yes” or “No” to the question “is Boris Johnson honest?”, Tom Tugendhat was the only person able to do it. He got warm applause for simply saying: “No”.

Kemi Badenoch came closest, saying “Sometimes”. Rishi Sunak, Penny Mordaunt and Liz Truss all refused to be drawn into the one word answer, and prevaricated.

Τugendhat essentially played the role of the minority party candidate in a multi-party debate, free to just speak his mind, call out the hypocrisy in everybody else, all the while safe in the knowledge there’s virtually zero chance he will end up elected.

Truss has a delivery mantra problem

Truss tried to focus again and again about delivery in every department, saying that her trade deals with Australia and Japan had been considered impossible, and that she had stood up to Vladimir Putin. But it all felt heavily scripted from her.

Badenoch and Tugendhat felt more off the cuff, and Sunak was a more fluid performer here than he has been on the radio over the last 48 hours. Truss felt rigid and dogmatic.

Sunak’s Treasury experience is a potential asset – but not with party members

In a crucial exchange that was mostly Sunak vs Truss, the foreign secretary told the former chancellor that Covid was a once-in-a-century occurrence, and that the government should look accordingly at paying it back over a longer term. Sunak was clear, saying: “The best way for people to have money in their pocket is to get a grip of inflation.”

Again and again during the debate he demonstrated a better command of the numbers and Treasury brief, but you still ended up with the feeling that a man instinctively fiscally conservative is being pushed into a corner and portrayed as a leftist for not wanting to cut taxes

Trans rights questions are not going away for Mordaunt

The culture warriors in the Conservatives have identified the question of trans rights as a wedge issue they can use against Labour, but Mordaunt’s apparent different standpoints over the years have made it awkward for her too.

The trade minister claimed to be baffled that anybody found her position unclear. It may not be high up the agenda when you poll voters on what they care about, but expect to see this get asked of the women standing to be PM again and again.

There was little love in the room for any of the candidates

Applause was sporadic, and mostly directed either at Tugendhat, or when Sunak was singing the praises of an NHS worker who had asked a question. At the end Krishnan Guru-Murthy asked for a show of hands of the floating voters in the audience who had been persuaded to be more likely to vote Conservative. Ten hands went up at most.

It wasn’t a feral BBC Question Time audience, but at times, particularly when issues around trust and Partygate were being touched upon, the disdain for the audience with politicians was palpable. Whoever wins out of this contest in the end, they have an uphill climb.