A Tory-led council has admitted a series of disastrous investments in risky commercial projects caused it to run up an unprecedented deficit of nearly £500m and brought it to the brink of bankruptcy.

“The Tory cabinet are absolutely complicit in this scandal and with every new revelation their position becomes even more indefensible.”

Patrick Butler www.theguardian.com

The staggering scale of the catastrophe at Thurrock council in Essex – one of the biggest ever financial disasters in local government – is contained in an internal report made to the council’s cabinet, which reveals it has lost £275m on investments it made in solar energy and other businesses, and has set aside a further £130m this year to pay back investment debts.

Thurrock has appealed to the government for an emergency financial bailout and warned that it will have to push through a drastic programme of cuts to local services and staff redundancies, along with a probable fire sale of buildings, land and other assets as it attempts to stay afloat. Council tax rises are also likely.

There was astonishment in the wider local government world at the scale of the financial disaster. “What we are seeing in Thurrock is shocking and unprecedented. I have not seen anything like this in my 30-year career in local government,” said Rob Whiteman, the chief executive of Cipfa, the public sector accountants body.

Thurrock had become one of the most indebted of all English local authorities in recent years after borrowing £1.5bn – 10 times its annual spending on local services – to enable a string of investments in solar energy and other businesses.

Three years of investigations by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism (BIJ) have helped force Thurrock to reveal the full scale of its investments, including hundreds of millions lent to companies owned by businessman Liam Kavanagh to invest in 53 solar farms.

According to the BIJ, Thurrock invested £655m in Kavanagh’s companies, and expects to lose £188m on the deal. It also expects to make a £65m loss on its investment in a company called the Just Loans Group, which went bust in June, and millions more on a series of other deals that turned sour.

In common with many other councils Thurrock attempted to offset the effects of years of austerity cuts to its funding by borrowing cheaply from the Treasury and investing in commercial business in the hope this would provide an alternative income stream. By 2019, English councils had borrowed over £6bn for this purpose.

Concerns over Thurrock’s exposure to risky commercial investments led a panicked government to send in a team of commissioners to run its finances in September. The cabinet report reveals Thurrock’s finances are now in a significantly far worse state than originally thought just a few weeks ago – and could get even worse.

The report predicts a further black hole in its budget of £185m in 2023-24, suggesting that it may have to declare effective bankruptcy. Three councils, Croydon, Slough and Northamptonshire, have gone insolvent in recent years, the former two after running up huge debts on borrowing.

“This is a grave position and at this point the council cannot find a way to finance their expenditure in-year and is unlikely to achieve a balanced budget for 2023-24 without external support,” the report says.

The council’s Conservative leader, Mark Coxshall, issued a statement saying that services would continue to operate as normal for now and staff would continue to be paid. But he also warned that there would be “extremely difficult decisions to come” in what he called “uncertain and unsettling times”.

He added: “These are shocking numbers but the first stage to creating a good plan for recovery is to understand the full extent of the problem. I know that Thurrock residents will be concerned, and rightly so, about what this means for local services. Please rest assured that this report is the first stage of planning for our recovery.”

John Kent, the leader of Thurrock council’s Labour opposition, said Thurrock residents will be paying the price for the Conservatives’ catastrophic handling of the council’s affairs for decades.

“This report lays bare the culmination of six years of Conservative leadership of Thurrock council,” he said. “Just what were those Conservative councillors who make up the council’s cabinet doing? Are we really expected to believe they didn’t notice what was going on under their very noses?

“The Tory cabinet are absolutely complicit in this scandal and with every new revelation their position becomes even more indefensible.”

Trusted local news media titles such as the Exmouth Journal sit right at the heart of local life.

www.exmouthjournal.co.uk

Our journalists hold authority to account on your behalf, covering the courts and council meetings so you know what’s going on in your local area.

And we champion your interests through campaigning and appeals which deliver real results for local communities.  

An important but less talked about part of our offering is public notices. 

These are advertisements, placed in the main by local authorities, which tell you about things such as planning applications or changes to traffic regulations in your area. 

If a local bar wants to extend its opening hours, you’ll find out about it through a public notice in the pages of your local newspaper. 

Sometimes, public notices can generate controversy and get everyone in the community talking about an issue which will affect their lives, such as plans for a large new development. 

That’s just as it should be in a healthy democracy. 

Two years ago, the local news media sector came together through industry trade body the News Media Association to discuss how to give public notices a boost.

Local journalism is reaching more people than ever before, currently 42 million people a month, but much of that audience is now online. 

The challenge for the industry was to bring public notices into the 21st century by harnessing local media’s large and increasing digital audiences while ensuring everyone can still access them in their printed local newspaper.

Today, we are delighted to introduce the result of that work – the Public Notice Portal (PNP), which will transform the way readers interact with public notices. 

The new portal has been built following extensive consumer research, discussions with local authorities and central government.  

The project has also benefitted from technical expertise and £1 million funding from Google. 

Fully searchable by postcode and type of notice, the portal uses maps to show you exactly where notices that affect you are located with pinpoint accuracy. 

Users can sign up to receive notifications about particular types of notices, or notices relating to a specific geography, providing a highly personalised service.   

The portal is completely free to use and is part of your local news media website in addition to operating as a standalone resource. 

Although all the main publishers in NMA membership are signed up to the scheme, the portal is still in beta phase and has not yet been rolled out across the whole industry.

Instead, it is being tested in key areas such as Exmouth before the full launch. 

We expect the portal will in time provide comprehensive coverage of all the public notices being published in the UK, right across the industry’s 800 local news websites.

That will create an enormously powerful new resource for us all to tap into. 

During the beta phase of the project, you have the opportunity to have your say about this transformative technology. 

Visit the portal publicnoticeportal.uk/exmouth-journal, see what you think, and then tell us about your experience. 

The local news media sector is committed to strengthening and enhancing local democracy in whatever way it can. 

We believe that the Public Notice Portal is a critically important part of that mission and will deliver a powerful boost for local communities right across the UK. 

Tiverton & Honiton’s MP Richard Foord has slammed the Government’s ‘botched’ Australia and New Zealand trade deals, warning they risk driving already struggling farmers across the West Country out of business. Speaking in the House of Commons, Mr Foord drew attention to the huge impact being caused by these trade deals – caused by opening UK markets to produce made to lower standards abroad.

Lewis Clarke www.devonlive.com

He also raised the ongoing issues with rollout of the Environmental Land Management scheme (ELMs) which is seeing the Basic Payment, the current farming subsidy, reduced before ELMs payments fully kick in.

Warning of the huge threat these deals post to 64,000 people across the South West who work in Agriculture, Mr Foord called for MPs to have a stronger say in the terms of new trade deals and for protecting UK industries to be central to future negotiating priorities.

His comments come in the wake of former Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs George Eustice similarly criticising the deals, saying they were: “not actually a very good deal for the UK – the UK gave away far too much for far too little in return”.

The debate granted today by the Government was a ‘General Debate’, meaning the motion MPs were discussing was neutrally worded and unamendable. This meant that any vote on it would have no binding impact on the Government’s approach, contrary to a more substantive debate as was requested by the Parliamentary International Trade Committee.

Speaking after the debate, Richard Foord MP said: “It’s clear that this Conservative government either don’t get it, or they simply do not care.

“Their botched trade deals are putting the future of local farmers here in Devon at risk, by allowing lower quality produce to flood our markets. It’s ludicrous that the Government expects them to compete when these deals tie not one, but both hands behind their backs.

“And the trade-off for all the pain and misery set to be inflicted on rural communities by both of these deals? A whopping 0.11% increase to our GDP. This is drop in the ocean compared to the huge turmoil and hurt it will cause for local farmers.

“Even the former Secretary of State has come out and admitted the deals are bad, giving away far too much. No wonder the Government would only give us a hollow debate, which lacked any chance for us to actually change their approach.

“The whole situation is a scandal. We must ensure MPs have the final say on not only the terms of trade deals, but also the negotiating priorities and red lines. This is the only way we can ensure our world leading farming and fishing industries are properly protected.”

He may now be out of the jungle and back in his constituency but “Led by Donkeys” reminds us of his track record in Government.

(Or how the Tories crashed the economy and we came within a whisker of losing our pensions)

The governor of the Bank of England has indicated it was left blindsided by Kwasi Kwarteng’s disastrous mini-budget, describing an “extraordinary process” in which there was “no formal communication” before the chancellor unveiled his measures.

How much did this arrogance cost us all?

Austerity 2.0 – Owl

Richard Partington www.theguardian.com 

In candid evidence to the Lords economic affairs committee, Andrew Bailey said Kwarteng had broken with tradition by failing to brief the central bank, suggesting that even Treasury officials were not fully aware of his plans a day before the event.

“I’m afraid there was parts of it we had no idea what was in it,” Bailey said. Asked by the Lords whether this suggested a slapdash approach from the government when making major changes to tax and spending policy, he said: “There was no formal communication of the sort we normally have. It was a quite extraordinary process in that sense.

“I didn’t say to the chancellor ‘you have to tell me what’s in this fiscal statement’, because, frankly, I would never say that to a chancellor. But then I don’t need to say that in normal circumstances. We have channels of communication.”

He said it had been an “extraordinary time”, as the mini-budget came in the same week as the state funeral of Queen Elizabeth II.

Financial markets were plunged into turmoil after the former chancellor unveiled more than £45bn of unfunded tax cuts largely directed at higher earners, sending the pound plummeting to its lowest level in history, and government borrowing costs surging to the highest rate since the 2008 financial crisis.

The Bank was then forced into an emergency intervention to buy up to £65bn of UK government bonds to halt a run on pension funds and wider financial instability.

Responding to questions from Mervyn King, who was the Bank’s governor during the 2008 financial crisis, Bailey suggested even Treasury officials were not fully informed of Kwarteng’s plans a day before the mini-budget.

“I don’t think Treasury officials were clear what was going to be in it,” he said.

Bailey said the Bank was not informed of Kwarteng’s plan to scrap the 45p additional rate of income tax, which he said was one of two reasons City bankers had given him when explaining the subsequent financial market meltdown. The other was Kwarteng’s decision to sideline the Office for Budget Responsibility.

“What people said to me was they were surprised, substantially surprised, that it was done at that point in time in that context in that situation.

“And people in the markets said those two things had quite a big impact on them in terms of their reaction to it. And their judgment of the direction of UK economic policy and fiscal policy making at that time, which was obviously very negative.”

King said it was normal for a Treasury official to attend meetings of the Bank’s rate-setting monetary policy committee, and they would typically provide guidance to the central bank before major announcements on tax and spending.

King said the MPC had met a day before the mini-budget, and asked whether a Treasury official was present and had provided a broad update on Kwarteng’s tax and spending plans and their economic consequences. Bailey said the official had “told us what they understood to be the situation,” but suggested they did not have a full picture.

Bailey rejected suggestions that the Bank’s time-limited intervention in the bond market after the mini-budget “brought down” the Truss government. “We did not bring the government down. We did a limited operation for financial stability purposes and we did exactly the right thing and ended it promptly.”

UK residents hit by the ongoing energy and cost of living crises may face three-hour winter blackouts over the festive season.

[Owl has been taking part in the Demand Flexibility Service trials over the past couple of weeks which seems to have been effective in reducing peak demand at specified times by significant amounts, equivalent, in Owl’s suppliers case, of taking a gas fired generating station off grid for an hour each time.]

Matt Davies www.inyourarea.co.uk

Although National Grid ESO insisted the blackouts would only be ‘worst case’ measures initiated if gas supplies fall ‘extremely low’, uncertainty around what to expect remains a fear. In a report published in October, operators said the UK losing power was ‘unlikely’, but on Tuesday, an ESO blackout alert caused widespread panic before the energy firm promptly cancelled it, the Mirror reports.

In the alert, ESO said homes would lose power at 7pm due to ‘tight capacity’, but the firm took to Twitter, saying it had withdrawn the ‘Capacity Market Notice’. The removal failed to reassure UK residents, so many have wondered how to proceed if a blackout occurs.

With energy supplies already threatened due to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, costs will likely skyrocket as more people turn on their heating to counteract the cold winter months. In 2017, The UK closed its ‘rough storage’, meaning other states could stockpile supplies more efficiently, but 70 per cent of the British Isles’ gas arrived from the ‘continental shelf’ and Norway in the winter of 2021.

ESO said residents would receive 24 hours’ notice before a blackout occurs, but the extent of the power cuts would depend on the demands of operating firms. However, as they are likely to be ‘rolling’ blackouts, the effects would be divided up, with certain areas cut off at certain times.

John Pettigrew, the CEO of ESO, said power cuts would likely be in the evening, as this is when demands surge. The firm said 4pm to 7pm would be probable – when ‘it’s really cold in January and February’, with vulnerable customers, including care residents, under the responsibility of network operators, the details of which are yet to be confirmed.

With supply failures, customers would usually receive compensation, but this is unlikely to be the case for blackouts of this scale, as the energy firms have planned the cuts and already informed residents. But ESO is thought to have plans to back up the nation’s energy supplies with coal generators, thanks to three firms.

ESO has also launched a ‘Demand Flexibility Service’, offering cash to residents with smart meters if they switch to off-peak energy. Residents who have registered with the service are to receive messages asking them to reduce their outputs or change usage times on specific periods of the day, meaning households may have to switch energy-guzzling appliances off when requested.