Rishi Sunak is in the jungle – and the creepy-crawlies have him in their sights

Liz Truss’s disastrous mini-budget cost the country a staggering £30bn – doubling the sum that the Treasury says will have to be raised by Jeremy Hunt this week in a huge programme of tax rises and spending cuts.

Toby Helm www.theguardian.com (Extract)

The independent Resolution Foundation calculates that the Truss government was responsible for about £30bn of the fiscal hole which the Treasury puts at £60bn, and which Hunt will have to tackle in the autumn statement on Thursday.

The thinktank also says the £30bn figure would have been far higher without the U-turns already taken by Hunt on the Truss plans.

The RF’s economists estimate that in her seven-week premiership £20bn was blown by Truss and her chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng on unfunded cuts to national insurance and stamp duty, with a further £10bn added by higher interest rates and government borrowing costs as the markets reacted with dismay to the former prime minister’s dash for growth.

The rest of the fiscal hole, the RF says, can be accounted for by unexpectedly bad economic conditions, which have meant lower growth and lower tax receipts to the Treasury.

The estimates of the cost of “Trussonomics” will intensify a bitter blame game now being played out at the top of the Tory party.

While many Conservative MPs will be angered by more tax rises, the chancellor is expected to make clear that he is, in large part, having to repair damage caused by the last occupant of No 10, who was backed by many rightwing Tory MPs.

Last week Kwarteng tried to excuse himself for some of the blame, saying he had told Truss to “slow down” and warned her that she would only survive for two months in Downing Street if she pressed ahead with her full tax-cutting agenda.In an interview with the Sunday Times, Hunt says Truss was right to want to grow the economy, but wrong to do so without making sure tax cuts were funded. “We’ve corrected those mistakes very quickly and, you know, I think we understand how it is very, very important that … alongside any plan you demonstrate that we’re a country that will pay its way,” he said.

Or is it the failure of the “market model”. (See also railways)

Consumers have been forced to pay almost £100 more for their gas and electricity due to Ofgem’s failure to regulate the energy supply market properly, a new report has found.

Andrew Woodcock www.independent.co.uk

The report by the House of Commons Public Accounts Committee found that the collapse of 29 energy suppliers as prices spiked over the past year cost a total of £2.7bn – or an average £94 for every household in the country.

The government has already budgeted a further £1.9bn to keep Bulb Energy running, with the final cost to taxpayers unknown until the company is sold.

Between the autumn of 2021 and the summer of 2022, wholesale prices for gas and electricity soared to as much as 10 times their normal level. The surge in prices was unsustainable for a number of suppliers, whose charges to customers were capped by Ofgem.

But the PAC report found that problems in the energy supply market were evident as early as 2018, with Ofgem failing to “strike the right balance between promoting competition in the energy suppliers market and ensuring energy suppliers were financially resilient”.

Ofgem’s “failure to effectively regulate the energy supplier market” was exposed by the sharp rise in prices, which led to the collapse of companies providing power to four million households, which had to be transferred to surviving firms.

The committee found that Ofgem’s price cap was “providing only very limited protection to households from increases in the wholesale price of energy”, noting that the regulator believes prices could “get significantly worse through 2023”.

It said that the treatment of vulnerable customers, who already pay higher energy prices, was “unacceptable”.

PAC chair Dame Meg Hillier said: “It is true that global factors caused the unprecedented gas and electricity prices that have caused so many energy supplier failures over the last year, at such terrible cost to households, but the fact remains that we have regulators to set the framework to shore us up for the bad times.

“Problems in the energy supply market were apparent in 2018 – years before the unprecedented spike in prices that sparked the current crisis, and Ofgem was too slow to act.

“Households will pay dear, with the cost of bailouts added to [record-high] bills.

“The PAC wants to see a plan, within six months, for how government and Ofgem will put customers’ interests at the heart of a reformed energy market, driving the transition to net zero.”

The GMB union, which represents many workers in the energy industry, said that the market model had failed consumers.

National secretary Andy Prendergast said: “The government’s remorseless attempt to use the market to regulate energy has been a massive disaster that has left millions of responsible households worse off.

“In reality, the market may be the right solution when it comes to selling tins of beans but has been an abysmal failure when applied to energy. The simple fact is that energy is an essential service and needs to be treated as such.

“Rather than expect the public to pick between suppliers – many of whom appear to have been trading without the necessary capital to underwrite their commitments – people simply want a simple option that gives them the best price.

“Sadly, Ofgem appears to be a regulator that doesn’t regulate . As a result, households are picking up the bill for their costly failure.”

An Ofgem spokesperson said that many of the issues highlighted by the PAC had been covered by the independent report which it commissioned and published earlier this year and whose recommendations it is now implementing.

“The sheer scale and pace of this once-in-a-generation global energy price shock meant supplier failures were seen all over the world,” said the spokesperson. “However, the supplier of last resort scheme acted as a vital safety net for British consumers, ensuring they continued to receive energy when their supplier failed and kept their credit balances. This safety net inevitably incurred costs.

“Looking ahead to this winter, prices remain volatile, however the market is now in a much more resilient position, partly due to robust steps we’ve taken to reduce the risk of future supplier failures and to raise the bar on entry for new suppliers.”

Martin Shaw, chair of the East Devon Alliance on Richard Foord MP Tiverton and Honiton

www.midweekherald.co.uk

It’s over four months now since voters in the Tiverton and Honiton constituency elected Richard Foord, our first non-Conservative MP in a hundred years, in June’s by-election. A few days ago I went along to his well-attended open meeting in Axminster Guildhall, where residents, councillors and supporters from around the area came to hear his impressions of Westminster and to put their questions to him.

The first thing to say is that Richard is a breath of fresh air – a politician who actually answers questions and says when he doesn’t know the answer. Until May, when Neil Parish’s stupid behaviour threw away the Tories’ 24,000 majority, Richard had no idea that he would become our MP. Living in Uffculme, near Honiton, he was rooted in the local community, and has now taken on the concerns of the wider area in the same spirit.

Sadly, the issues which came out in the meeting were very familiar. Bus services between local towns are being cut, yet again. In villages on the A35, residents still can’t cross safely; National Highways is still reneging on a decade’s promises to install crossings. The prospects of EDDC’s ‘levelling-up’ bid for Seaton and Axminster are still completely hazy due to the chaos in government. And the community hospitals in Axminster, Honiton, Ottery St. Mary and Seaton, while saved by our protests from complete closure, still lack beds.

A reader has chided me to ‘stick to local issues’, but Richard Foord made clear that the Tories’ national mess affects everything. When he goes to meetings with ministers, it’s ‘a new bunch of amateurs every week’, often without a clue about the issues, barely listening to their civil servants’ advice, and more interested in ‘self-aggrandisement’ than action.

Most local issues are caused by national failures or need national changes to sort them out. South West Water is pouring effluent into our rivers because the government has failed to get a grip on the privatised water companies, which are diverting the profits from our water charges into excessive salaries and dividends. The Environment Agency is failing to stop farmers polluting our waterways, it was shown this week, because it is starved of funds.

Richard returned repeatedly to the dire state of the South West Ambulance Service. Everyone is being put at risk by this scandal. Lives are also threatened by the inability of local hospitals to meet targets for the prompt referral and treatment of cancer cases. Tens of thousands of Devon people are suffering while they wait months or even years for surgery. The root cause of all of this is that for twelve years, the Tories have failed to raise NHS funding in line with the growing needs of the population.

The latest new prime minister, Rishi Sunak, even refused to smile for the cameras as he entered Downing Street, in order to signal his determination to take ‘tough decisions’. All I can say, from a Devon point of view, is that these decisions must not take real funding away from our NHS, local schools, or our desperately underfunded adults’ and children’s social care, the escalating costs of which threaten the solvency of our county council.

I say ‘real’ funding because the government will make severe cuts merely by not uprating spending in line with inflation. Sunak is also threatening to use this trick to reduce the value of pensions and benefits. When he was chancellor last year, our billionaire prime minister stole £20 a week from claimants. It will be outrageous if he takes a further £10 a week by refusing to give them a proper inflation rise, or undoes the ‘triple lock’ on state pensions that his party’s manifesto and Liz Truss both pledged to honour.

People are going without food, without heating, without electricity. ‘Tough decisions’ should target those who can afford them, not the vulnerable and public services.

Met takes no action over Tory lockdown event attended by Shaun Bailey, clears the way for him to become a peer in Johnson’s “Lavender List”.

Nothing to see here – Owl

www.theguardian.com (Extract)

The Metropolitan police took no action over an apparent Christmas party at Conservative headquarters in London during lockdown in 2020 attended by Shaun Bailey, then the party’s candidate for London mayor, it has emerged.

In a statement, the force said that despite a much-published photograph showing Bailey amid a crowd of seeming revellers, some holding drinks and standing next to a buffet, there was not enough evidence to “disprove the version of events provided by attendees”.

The decision not to take action against Bailey and the two dozen or so party staffers and aides seen packed into a room at Matthew Parker Street in central London, next to a table laden with platters of food, clears the path for the former mayoral candidate to become a peer.

Only a problem if he wins the new seat. – Owl

From the Times Diary, Saturday November 12 2022

The Speaker may need elocution lessons. Sir Lindsay Hoyle has mastered Rhondda and Na h-Elieanan an Iar, but the boundary review has thrown up newly challenging constituencies, such as Caerfyrddin. However, Simon Jupp, MP for East Devon at present, wants a review of the review as he says it will be a “struggle” to say his new seat of Exeter East & Exmouth. “It would be better to have something that rolls off the tongue a lot easier,” he says but, bizarrely, suggests Exmouth & East Exeter. A test of my colleagues’ enunciation exhibits that exclaiming Exeter East and Exmouth is exasperating but Exmouth and Exeter East is equally exacting.

This comment posted on Simon Jupp MP prioritises saving party vote over helping people in crisis gives more insight into the Tory Newton Poppleford campaign effort. – Owl

To be fair Simon Jupp did knock on my door and I’m an ardent and vocal Independent supporter. But of course he didn’t have the local knowledge to know my garden is always festooned with Independent banners come election day. Local knowledge seemed conspicuously absent in the Tory campaign team I spoke to, the party faithful flooded in from Sidmouth, Exeter, Woodbury, even Bampton (and London, Simon?) but I couldn’t find any that came from our Parish? Even their Candidate wasn’t from our parish, and I’m sorry Paul but even getting photographed with a cute donkey was never going to convince us to vote for a candidate cast out by his own parish in 2019. The volume of Tory leaflets, canvassing and Tellers seemed a desperate attempt to take control of our parish and I’m glad their time was wasted.

The government has “no idea” how much water is being taken from rivers and groundwater, according to an Environment Agency (EA) whistleblower, as swathes of England remain in drought despite recent heavy rainfall.

Rachel Salvidge www.theguardian.com 

The whistleblower told the Guardian that the EA’s regulation of water abstraction points for farms, small businesses and private water supplies was “absolutely pointless” because most were not metered and the monitoring that did take place was unreliable.

Abstractions were monitored on a rota system but the agency’s inspections were a “waste of time”, said the whistleblower, because, in most cases, the abstracting individual or organisation would report how much water they had removed based on what they had noted down on a particular day – and “they have to be taken at their word”.

“They’re not going to log an illegal number,” said the insider. “That’s why there’s so little enforcement on water abstraction, they’re not going to dob themselves in.”

The abstraction licensing regime dates back to the 1960s and successive governments have pledged to reform it for more than a decade.

According to the EA’s figures for 2018, the latest year for which data is available, there were 18,193 abstraction licences in force in England, when, it estimated, 10.4bn cubic metres was removed from non-tidal surface and groundwaters.

The Guardian asked the EA for the total number of abstraction points in England and the proportion that are monitored but was not given the information.

Abstractions of less than 20 cubic metres a day became exempt from licensing in 2005 under the Water Act. The move instantly deregulated 22,000 licences, most of which were for agricultural or private water supply purposes.

The EA said: “Abstraction licences have conditions attached to them to ensure the environment and the rights of other abstractors are protected. Our powers and duties enable us to regulate the use of water under existing licences and to decide whether to grant new ones. Where abstraction is damaging the environment, we also have the power to amend or revoke existing licences.”

However, under current rules, if the agency changes the conditions of a licence because the abstraction is damaging the environment, it must pay financial compensation to the abstractor. There are plans to remove this requirement, but not until 2028.

The EA said it “routinely require[s] the licence holder to keep a record of actual abstraction available for inspection at a relevant location. This is in addition to the requirement to provide the Environment Agency with formal records of actual abstraction and compliance inspections carried out by regulatory officers.”

It said it was reforming the abstraction management system to “maximise the amount of water available to abstractors whilst also protecting water ecosystems in line with legal requirements to reduce the risk of environmental deterioration” The EA is “committed to ending damaging abstraction of water from rivers and groundwater wherever it is cost effective to do so”, it added.

However, there are no plans to require abstractors to install water meters. The EA insider said that omission meant the system would remain seriously flawed. “You can change how much water a licence allows, but it’s pointless if there’s no meter to record it,” they said.

From next year, the agency plans to “start investigations to determine the changes that may be required to individual permanent abstraction licences”. Until then, it will “continue to seek voluntary changes to abstraction licences through negotiation and adopting nature based and catchment solutions, where possible”.

Feargal Sharkey, the vice-president of the charity WildFish, is not convinced, saying that “every day things appear more rotten” at the EA and that the regulator is “sacrificing the environment on the high altar of corporate greed”.

Dr Nathan Richardson, the head of policy and strategy at the NGO Waterwise, said: “The Environment Agency has highlighted that we face a shortfall of around 4bn litres of water a day if we want secure water supplies and a healthy environment.

“Given this challenge, it seems pretty fundamental that regulators know how much water is being abstracted, where and when. Without appropriate monitoring and enforcement, abstraction regulation won’t work and it is very difficult to ensure that water is being abstracted legally and used efficiently.”

An EA spokesperson said: “We are taking robust action to end environmentally damaging water abstraction – and we monitor the amount of water in our rivers and groundwater along with assessments of the impact of water abstraction in all of our catchments.

“Licence holders must monitor and record how much water they abstract and our programme of inspections ensures they comply with these strict conditions. We will not hesitate to take enforcement action in cases where conditions are not being met.”

Former Chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng’s Budget fire sale has cost pensions £75bn, according to a report by a US investment bank

[Not his fault by the way, it was the Queen’s funeral and Liz Truss in too much of a hurry. . And you get to pay twice as the budget seeks to fill the fiscal hole. – Owl]

Patrick Tooher www.thisismoney.co.uk 

The near-collapse of the pensions market that prompted a Bank of England bailout has already cost company retirement schemes as much as £75billion, according to a report by a US investment bank. 

The huge loss in value reflects the exposure many private sector pension funds have to liability-driven investment strategies. 

They use LDIs to ensure they can afford future payouts to ten million members of final salary schemes, which pay guaranteed pensions based on workers’ pay at retirement. 

Fire sale: Many funds came unstuck after former Chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng’s disastrous mini-Budget in September sparked an unprecedented sell-off

LDIs deploy leverage – or borrowing – to boost returns from Government bonds, known as gilts. 

But many funds came unstuck after former Chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng’s disastrous mini-Budget in September sparked an unprecedented sell-off. 

JPMorgan reckons the fire sale of assets has cost pension funds between £65 billion and £75billion since August alone. That compares with total assets of £1.7trillion at the start of this year. 

The estimates are based on the bank’s forecast of figures due this week from the Pension Protection Fund, the safety net for the interests of around 5,200 final salary funds. 

But the final cost is likely to be much higher. ‘We reckon about 25 per cent of assets have been lost,’ said Iain Clacher, professor of pensions at Leeds University. 

Supermarket group Sainsbury’s last week revealed it made a £500million loan available to its fund to prevent a fire sale of assets. Its pension fund had already fallen 30 per cent to £8.2billion in the year before the LDI market blew up. 

The BT pension fund, which has increased its LDI use in recent years, says it lost £11billion in the turmoil. The telecom giant’s fund has slumped by more than £21billion since June 2021 as a result of its LDI strategies. 

BT this weekend defended its use of LDIs. ‘Throughout this period, the liability hedging assets performed as intended. They have fallen in value in step with a fall in the present value of our future obli­gation to pay pensions,’ it said.

‘As a result, there was no worsening of the funding position.’

Today, Historic England publishes its Heritage at Risk Register for 2022. The Register gives an annual snapshot of the critical health of England’s most valued historic places and those most at risk of being lost as a result of neglect, decay or inappropriate development. historicengland.org.uk

There are 20+ heritage sites in East Devon including: Woodbury Castle, Bicton Garden, Church of St Lawrence, Clyst St. Lawrence, Church of St Michael, Honiton, Newenham Abbey, Axminster, Dumpdon Camp, Luppitt etc etc. (see map below)

Here, as an example, is the review of the Grade 1 Bicon Park and Garden:

“C18 and C19 country house estate developed from earlier manor. Large park, important gardens and arboretum. Registered park in three main ownerships. The core of the site, including the principal house, has been developed in the post-war era as a land-based college. Continuous pressure for development as the college has expanded has tended to erode the integrity of the designed landscape. The absence of a masterplan to guide and inform development remains a major cause for concern.”

Over the past year, 175 historic buildings and sites have been added to the Register because of their deteriorating condition and 233 sites have been saved and their futures secured.

Restored, rescued, and brought back to life

Many have been rescued thanks to the hard work and dedication of local communities, who have come together to save places.

Charities, owners, local councils, and Historic England have also worked together to see historic places restored, re-used, and brought back to life.

These include two sections of Hadrian’s Wall, the ‘Dome of Home’ at the entrance to the River Mersey, the museum which houses the original manuscript of Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations, and one of only two moving bridges on the River Thames. Click to see larger images

As the threat of climate change grows, the reuse and sensitive upgrading of historic buildings and places becomes ever more important. Finding new uses for buildings and sites rescued from the Register avoids the high carbon emissions associated with demolishing structures and building new.

Duncan Wilson, Chief Executive Historic England

Funding sources

Historic England awarded £8.66 million in repair grants to 185 sites on the Heritage at Risk Register in 2021/22. In addition, 15 sites have benefitted from £3.25 million in grants from the heritage at risk strand of the Culture Recovery Fund during 2021/22. These grants help with emergency repairs to historic buildings and help protect the livelihoods of the skilled craft workers who keep our cherished historic places alive.

Internet Explorer 11 cannot display this chart / image. To see it, please use a different browser eg: Chrome or Safari.

At risk of neglect, decay or inappropriate change

 Examples include Papplewick Pumping Station in Nottingham – England’s only pumping station to still have all its original features, King Arthur’s Great Halls in Tintagel, experimental concrete homes in Essex, and the Tank House in Merseyside – the best surviving example of a late 19th century glass-making tank furnace. Click images to enlarge

Historic England’s Heritage at Risk Register plays a vital role in our ongoing mission to protect and preserve our rich heritage across the country. It helps to ensure that future generations can continue to benefit from everything our historic sites and buildings have to offer. It is also wonderful to see so many heritage sites removed from the Register thanks to the support of local communities – together with Historic England.

Lord Parkinson of Whitley Bay Heritage Minister

Heritage at Risk in your area Interactive map link here

Screenshot of East Devon sites

Government is in such a panic that it is commandeering seaside hotels without any notice or consultation, stretching resources to breaking point.

Will Sidmouth be next? – Owl

From Western Morning News:

A Westcountry council has called on local people to show “patience and understanding” towards asylum seekers arriving in the area to be housed in local hotels.

Seafront hotels in Torquay, Paignton, Ilfracombe and Newquay are being used as short-term accommodation for people who have arrived in the UK, many having risked their lives on perilous crossings of the Channel in small boats.

Yesterday the WMN reported that frustration was growing at the imposition by the Home Office of migrants in Westcountry seaside hotels – with at least one council considering legal action to stop the practice.

Torbay Council says it was not notified in advance about a Torquay hotel now being used and is ready to seek injunctions to stop it happening again. It says services – including children’s services for new arrivals who are registering as being under 18 – are under “severe” pressure.

Meanwhile, the council has issued a statement about the current situation. It said: “The asylum seekers have now arrived safely at the hotel. Please be mindful that not all of these individuals will understand English and they may have had a very difficult experience before arriving here in the Bay. We would be grateful for your patience and understanding at what will be a worrying and confusing time for them.

“We know you will have a lot of questions about this situation, how this happened so quickly and what the council’s involvement is.”

Anne-Marie Bond, chief executive of Torbay Council, said in a statement on Wednesday: “We asked for assurance from the Home Office that there would be no further hotels in Torbay, but despite that request, we learnt on Monday 7 November that a further hotel has been stepped up by the Home Office. This was without any prior notification to us.  

“We have today asked, through our solicitors, urgent questions of the Home Office and we stand ready to issue urgent proceedings upon a response from them. 

“The social and economic impacts of these hotels are significant and the pressure that is being put upon our services, especially our Children’s Services department, is profound. With the first hotel alone, we are managing a significant number of residents who are claiming to be under the age of 18 and this is limiting our ability to undertake statutory services for children and young people.” 

Following the use of hotels in Paignton, Ilfracombe and Newquay, migrants began arriving at the prominent Torquay hotel on Monday. Torbay Conservative MP Kevin Foster said: “It is deeply frustrating to see another hotel in our key tourist areas taken out of use for tourism and converted into longer-term accommodation, with no notice at all to either Torbay Council or me as the MP until we discovered the use via another route.”

Cllr Darren Cowell, deputy leader of Torbay Council, said earlier this week: “As a council we do not have a say in how many asylum seekers are accommodated here as the Home Office makes this decision, along with where they will be staying or for how long. We have put together a multi-agency group that are working to ensure the appropriate help and support is made available.”

Congratulations to Councillor Chris Burhop (Independent) on being elected District Councillor for Newton Poppleford & Harpford to fill the vacancy caused by the death of Val Ranger to keep the Indy flag flying.

The turn-out was a creditable 46% and the results are as follows:

Christopher Burhop (Independent)      560 votes

Paul Carter (Conservative)                  113 votes

Caleb Early (Labour)                           162 votes

[Readers may recall that Simon Jupp elicited this comment whilst “knocking on doors” campaigning for Paul Carter in Newton Poppleford: Could you please start responding to your emails, rather than galavanting round East Devon! People are still in crisis and are still needing help, even though your party is in pieces at the moment, your job still stands!”]

Full result declaration can be found here

Britain’s economy shrank by 0.2% in the three months to September, in what is expected to be the beginning of a long recession.

Larry Elliott www.theguardian.com

In its first estimate of growth in the third quarter, the Office for National Statistics presented a bleak picture of the economy before next week’s autumn statement from the chancellor, Jeremy Hunt.

The Bank of England expects the latest gross domestic product figures to be the start of a prolonged UK recession – as rising interest rates and the cost of living take their toll on activity – lasting until the end of next year. Another negative growth figure for the final three months of 2022 would confirm a technical recession.

The ONS said the performance of the economy in the three months to September had been affected by the extra bank holiday for the funeral of Queen Elizabeth II, which led to weaker activity.

The resignations and firings are equivalent to one nearly every other day of 2022 so far.

The extent of turmoil in Whitehall has been laid bare by figures showing that 147 members of the government have resigned or been sacked since the start of the year.

Jane Merrick inews.co.uk

Mass resignations in protest at Boris Johnson and wide-ranging reshuffles by his successors have led to an unprecedented number of departures of ministers and their MP aides.

Analysis by i of House of Commons Library figures shows that 32 Cabinet ministers resigned or were sacked in 2022 – not including those who were demoted or moved sideways.

Outside of the two reshuffles carried out when Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak first entered Downing Street, there were 70 government resignations or sackings.

Most notable of these ad hoc departures were Sir Gavin Williamson over bullying allegations this week, Suella Braverman as home secretary in the dying days of Ms Truss’s government, only for her to be reinstated by Mr Sunak, and Kwasi Kwarteng’s exit as chancellor over his catastrophic mini-Budget.

The 147 resignations and firings are equivalent to one per nearly two days of 2022 so far.

To put this figure into context, there are at any one time around 185 ministers and parliamentary private secretaries – also known as ministerial bag carriers – on the government “payroll” in the Commons and Lords.

The number includes ministers who left government altogether rather than those who were demoted or moved to another department, but also takes in people who left and returned later under a new PM.

Some of the departures represent the same role – including the resignation of two prime ministers, Mr Johnson on 6 September and Ms Truss on 25 October, and three levelling up secretaries – Michael Gove, who was sacked by Mr Johnson on 6 July, his replacement Greg Clark, who left under Ms Truss, and his successor Simon Clarke, who was sacked by Mr Sunak on 25 October, only to be replaced by Mr Gove in his old job – leading to criticism of a government “revolving door”.

The first resignation of 2022 was on 24 January, when Lord Agnew quit as minister for efficiency and transformation over the government’s failure to get a grip on tackling covid fraud.

In some cases, the same people have left government more than once in 2022. Guy Opperman resigned as a junior work and pensions minister on 7 July, as part of the mass walkout over Mr Johnson’s leadership, but he was reappointed the next day when the then PM agreed to resign.

Mr Opperman then left the government for a second time on 8 September, when Ms Truss was carrying out her first and only reshuffle as prime minister.

Many of the ministers would have received payouts when they left, including £18,860 for each PM, £16,876 for each Cabinet minister, £7,920 for a minister of state and £5,593 for a parliamentary under-secretary, while ministerial aides are unpaid.

However the payouts do not apply if they returned to government within three weeks, and some ministers, including Sir Gavin, have declined the payment.

Labour’s deputy leader Angela Rayner said: “Britain deserves better than this revolving door of Tory chaos.

“The British people are paying the price for 12 years of the Conservatives, who crashed the economy and have made the cost of living crisis worse. We’re barely a few weeks into Rishi Sunak’s premiership and he’s already shown that he only offers the same failure and scandal.

“It’s time for a general election and a fresh start with Labour.”

A Labour government would rip up the planning rules restricting the expansion of onshore windfarms as part of a plan to make the UK a clean energy superpower, the Guardian has learned.

Pippa Crerar www.theguardian.com 

Keir Starmer admitted that he would have to “persuade some communities to get on board” after Rishi Sunak reinstated a ban, dropped by Liz Truss, on new onshore projects amid fears of local objections.

The Labour leader has already pledged to double the amount of onshore wind, one of the cheapest and quickest sources of renewable energy, and quadruple offshore wind by 2030, creating more than 100,000 jobs in the sector and wider supply chain.

Windfarms, in effect banned by David Cameron in 2015, have been controversial in some of the communities where they are located.

However, during a visit to a windfarm in Lincolnshire on Thursday, Starmer pledged to tackle nimbyism over the issue, saying that his government “will not shy from taking head on the choice that has to be made” by easing planning restrictions for onshore wind turbines.

After meeting with industry leaders, workers and apprentices, Starmer argued that the economic potential of onshore and offshore wind was too great and “must not be sacrificed on the altar of the Conservative party’s electoral woes”.

In contrast, he said, Labour would lift the planning ban on onshore wind “because politics is about choices”. He added: “If that choice means some communities adapting to a new landscape, so we can create tens of thousands of good quality skilled jobs, I will not hesitate to make it.”

The proposed planning changes for onshore wind include removing the loophole that allows a single person’s objection to stop an application, bringing planning requirements in line with other infrastructure.

There would also be tough new targets to get planning decisions on renewables down from years to just months and a crackdown on Whitehall blocking developments, as well as a requirement to proactively identify land for renewable energy developments.

Labour claims that their planned investment in wind power, from both the private sector and their new state-owned Great British Energy company, would deliver £93bn of savings to taxpayers in cheaper energy bills, of which almost £16bn would be from onshore wind.

Truss and her chancellor, Kwasi Kwarteng, had promised to change planning rules so that the giant turbines could be deployed more easily in the countryside. But like much of their doomed plan for growth, which also included lifting the fracking ban, it was dropped by her successors.

Cabinet Office minister Oliver Dowden has confirmed that rules that require local consent on planning would stay in place as it was important to strike the right balance between “recognising local feeling” and investing in renewable energy offshore.

It comes after Sunak’s extraordinary volte-face on attending the Cop27 climate summit in Egypt, saying he would attend in order to “galvanise” world leaders to save the planet.

The prime minister also adopted precisely the same language on renewable energy that Starmer has been using for months, declaring that he now wanted to turn the UK into a “clean energy superpower”.

Omicron was the last major variant, identified in November last year but scientists are already looking at what could replace it – Pi.

But the UK’s reduced testing regime could leave officials ill-equipped to confront oncoming issues of new variants.

Thomas Kingsley www.independent.co.uk

It has been nearly three years since Covid-19 was first detected, and changed the world.

The virus that shut down the world would go on to mutate into new variants after it emerged in Wuhan, China in December 2019.

Omicron was the last major variant, identified in November last year but scientists are already looking at what could replace it – Pi.

The Omicron variant initially caused huge concern around the world, not least because it was found to be highly transmissible and the 32 mutations to its spike protein suggested it might resist current vaccines.

But 12 months later, Covid cases are now beginning to fall after a mild autumn wave driven by a cluster of Omicron subvariants, which virologists described as “Omicron’s grandchildren.” These include the BQ.1 and BA.2.75.2 subvariants, as well as XBB.

What is Pi?

Experts are now looking into whether a major new variant could arise through the winter and bring a new wave of infections.

If or when a new variant emerges, it would be called Pi, the next letter after Omicron in the Greek alphabet.

But is it really on the way, or have we finally seen the back of Covid-19 as a world-changing disease? Scientists aren’t yet sure.

At the recent Africa Health Research Institute, leading scientists from the UK, Japan and Australia gathered to discuss the outlook for Covid among other viral diseases such as HIV.

Professor Wendy Barclay, a virologist at Imperial College and member of the government’s advisory committee, Sage, told the Telegraph: “Are we going to see variants arise or future versions of this virus arise which come with more severe outcomes than currently the omicrons do, either because they escape some level of control that the vaccines give, or that they change inherently?

“I still don’t think that’s resolved. I still think we are in a phase where there’s an awful lot that we don’t know.”

How serious could it be?

Professor Greg Towers, of University College London, said he was hopeful that while there might be more changes in the genetic make-up of the virus, they would not result in a return to serious disease.

Professor Alexi Sigal of AHRI said there was debate between those who believed the currently more benign situation was because vaccines and infections had built an effective immunity wall, and others who thought the virus had evolved significantly to be less harmful but that such a shift could happen again in the other direction.

However, he warned that viral evolution could bring us back to square in the fight against Covid.

University of Warwick virologist Professor James Young said that the UK’s reduced testing regime could leave officials ill-equipped to confront oncoming issues of new variants such as Pi.

“We don’t have the testing and surveillance regimes we were running previously. People who are having PCR tests are being sequenced which is giving us the information but I worry it might not be representative enough for what’s going on,” he said.

What is the UK’s current Covid situation?

Estimates published in the first week of November by the Office for National Statistics suggested that infections in England started to fall at the end of October.

Some 1.6 million people in private households tested positive for Covid-19 in the week to October 24, down from 1.7 million the previous week.

Infections in England peaked at 3.1 million during the summer BA.4/BA.5 wave.

But experts are still urging caution was we head into winter.

Dr Mary Ramsay, director of public health programmes at the UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA), said: “It is hugely encouraging that Covid-19 cases and hospitalisations are still in decline.

“This goes to show how effective the vaccine programme continues to be and we thank everyone who has come forward for their latest vaccination so far.

“However, it is still vital that anyone who has not had their booster this autumn does so as soon as possible. Vaccination is still the best way to protect yourself, your family and the NHS, particularly as we head into winter.”

Bristol is planning to scrap the government’s “unrealistic” housing targets in a bid to protect the city’s green spaces. A new study will look at the evidence behind how many new homes Bristol should build over the next two decades, instead of using the government’s targets.

Alex Seabrook www.bristolpost.co.uk

Bristol City Council is writing up its new Local Plan, a hugely important document setting out how the city will grow and where new developments should go up to 2040. The Local Plan includes policies on environment, energy efficiency, disabled access and more.

But currently if the council can’t show in the new Local Plan that it has identified enough land where thousands of new homes can be built, meeting the government’s target, then developers get more leeway and can overcome Local Plan policies, effectively weakening regulations.

Councillor Nicola Beech, cabinet member for strategic planning, said: “The government, in an effort to reach its manifesto commitment of 300,000 homes a year without upsetting their voters in rural and suburban constituencies, takes the figure for the total number of homes that can be built in the UK’s 20 biggest cities and slaps a 35% increase on top of it.

“We have a housing crisis in Bristol and we want thousands of affordable homes built every year, but local government shouldn’t be penalised for not reaching a target that was set by an ex-prime minister, which doesn’t take the land available in each city into account.

“We’re already projected to build thousands of affordable homes in the next few years, a number which will increase as other developments are brought forward. But even if we far exceed our ambitious targets, we, and the other major UK cities, don’t have the land to build enough homes to reach the government’s non-evidence-based targets.”

A motion to scrap the government’s housing target in favour of an evidence-based approach was unanimously passed on Tuesday, November 8. Councillors said the motion was not “anti-development”, and recognised Bristol needed to grow as a city, but “in the right way”.

When the Conservatives won the 2019 general election, a major promise was getting 300,000 new homes built in England each year. This includes giving the 20 largest English cities an extra high housing target, a figure worked out by forecasting how the population will grow, and then adding a 35% uplift on top of that. Bristol’s target is more than 3,300 a year.

Green Cllr Tony Dyer, who proposed the motion, said: “Having a united front on this is important so I’m glad to see the approach proposed by the Local Plan working group has the wider support of councillors across the chamber. Many of the proposed policies are vital for Bristol if we are serious about tackling the climate and ecological emergencies, as well as providing decent homes for those most in need.

“Setting a housing target for Bristol based on evidence — not a Tory party manifesto — will allow us to better protect green spaces, and will help ensure local planning policy has the necessary force to ensure deliver more sustainable, affordable, and higher quality developments in the city, reflecting the voices of locally elected representatives and the residents of the city itself.”

Details of which pieces of land have been earmarked for development should be revealed by the end of the month, in a new public consultation on the Local Plan. This consultation, which could be delayed, will also explore what rules property developers should follow in Bristol.

One issue in the shortfall in new housing is developers not building the homes they have planning permission for. The number of new homes the council grants permission for is vastly higher than the number of homes actually built each year. But no powers currently exist to force developers to build homes once they have received planning permission.

Before the council meeting, Danica Priest, an environmental campaigner, said: “Last year we approved more planning applications than we have since 2007, but still failed the housing delivery test because developers aren’t building fast enough, and we can’t force them to. We have over 13,500 homes with planning permission that haven’t been built. The year before it was 12,000, so it’s getting worse.

“The data from this year’s housing delivery action plan shows it’s a complete myth that there’s an unlimited amount of labour and materials to build, and if we just granted more permissions the developers would build more. They have limited resources and will direct those resources at what will generate the most profit. Right now, that’s building luxury housing on green spaces.

“These developers are using our unrealistic targets to get out of affordable housing requirements. This is unacceptable and will only make our housing crisis worse. The only people who benefit from the high house targets are those who profit off of the housing crisis: property developers, landowners and landlords.”

Note: The quality of bathing water at beaches in the UK is monitored only during the summer months, from May until October. Yet all-year-round water sports are increasingly popular.

And new terminology: “Non-impacting” sewage discharges, defined by Southern Water as those that flow at least five kilometres (three miles) into the sea.

Owl wonders whether South West Water has NISDs (non-impacting sewage discharges).

Southern Water has discharged sewage for thousands of hours over the past week at dozens of bathing-water beaches in England.

George Sandeman www.thetimes.co.uk

Water quality campaigners analysed the company’s data from the first eight days of November and found wastewater had been released 493 times at 83 beaches, for a total of 3,700 hours.

Last year Southern Water discharged sewage into waterways for more than 160,000 hours and each release lasted an average of 8.4 hours, according to the Environment Agency.

The quality of bathing water at beaches in the UK is monitored only during the summer months, from May until October, meaning that the impact of sewage released by Southern Water this month will not be measured.

Ed Acteson, of the campaign group SOS Whitstable, told The Guardian: “The Environment Act was supposed to herald a new era for the environment in Britain. But this is the worst I have ever seen.

“There are 86 bathing-water beaches, and as of yesterday 78 of them were showing sewage discharges and another five had discharges which the company says are non-impacting.

“This is environmental vandalism and most of these discharges are still ongoing . . . It fills us with foreboding for the coming winter months.”

“Non-impacting” sewage discharges are defined by Southern Water as those that flow at least five kilometres (three miles) into the sea.

The company has recently changed its pollution alert map, which can be accessed by the public, to reduce the number of red flags that would have appeared automatically after a discharge. Now only those deemed to be impacting are marked.

The beach at Pagham, to the west of Bognor Regis in West Sussex, is among those affected by the sewage releases this month. It water quality was rated excellent this summer but wastewater has been released for more than 179 hours over the past week.

Sandown Beach, listed by the tourist board as one of the finest on the Isle of Wight, had more than 65 hours of wastewater released.

Nick Mill, the head of Southern Water’s clean rivers and seas task force, said that significant rainfall over the past week had necessitated the release of the sewage. “To protect homes, schools and businesses from flooding, storm overflows act as a release valve to relieve the pressure, allowing excess flows to bypass treatment and enter rivers and the sea,” he said.

“These discharges are heavily diluted, typically 95 per cent rainwater, and are permitted by the Environment Agency. However, we know that these are not acceptable and this is why we are working hard to reduce them.”

The harshness of austerity 1.0 can now be seen to have resulted from a “spreadsheet error”.

Owl’s view: the government and administration of this country has historically suffered from the weight given in argument and debate to the eloquence of expression of a point of view compared to its factual basis. (C.P. Snow “The Two Cultures” is still valid).

Being illiterate is seen as being uneducated, being innumerate or “not good with numbers” on the other hand is not generally seen as a handicap. Indeed, innumeracy may even be worn as a badge of honour. 

Both are equally important and essential as this article demonstrates.

Georgina Sturge www.theguardian.com 

Modern governments rely on numbers. They are the lifeblood of departments, used to judge the success or failure of policies. Politicians use them to legitimise their views and ideas and to scrutinise, expose and attack the other side.

While in the past it might have been enough for public policy to be justified on the basis of “because I say so”, governments can no longer rely on blind faith. They are expected, even required, to back their policies with hard evidence – the unease that greeted Liz Truss government’s mini-budget is a case in point – and we tend to view numbers as the most solid form of evidence there is.

The trouble is that numbers can’t always be trusted, even when they come from official sources. Despite the intention to act on good evidence, governments of all stripes have been continually led towards disaster by the problem of what I call “bad data” – official statistics that are patchy and inaccurate.

Sometimes the dismal state of our data is the fault of under-resourcing and a lack of attention to counting what should be counted. For decades, immigration statistics were based purely on a survey of people arriving and departing from UK air, sea and rail ports. Millions of passengers enter and leave the UK each year and picking migrants out of this enormous haystack has in part been a matter of luck. In the early 2010s, for example, these figures appeared to show an alarming situation where half of all international students were overstaying their visas.

Under Theresa May, the Home Office launched a multi-pronged campaign to identify illegal immigrants, which included closing bogus colleges and introducing right-to-work and right-to-rent checks. New statistics in 2017 concluded the original overstaying estimate for students had simply been wrong, a fault of failing to count people properly – and a sign of how unreliable migration statistics were as a whole. But it was too late for one group that fell on the wrong side of the so-called hostile environment policies: people who had come legally from Commonwealth countries in the postwar era but couldn’t provide enough proof of this when questioned. These victims of the Windrush scandal, uncovered by the Guardian, suffered multiple injustices thanks to an imaginary foe in the numbers and a failure of government record-keeping.

In the mid-2000s, the Labour government was keen to be on the front foot when it came to switching the EU’s farming subsidy from one based on what farmers produced to one based on how much land was capable of being farmed. As it turned out, the patchy state of our land records meant the government had essentially no idea how much land this applied to and, when the new system was launched, the civil service was upended by an avalanche of unanticipated claims. Britain was fined by the EU for the delay to payments caused by this backlog, while farmers themselves faced bankruptcy and, in some terrible cases, took their own lives.

Other times, numbers can mislead because there isn’t necessarily a right or wrong way of counting something, so we end up with a narrow view based on what we think is important at one point in time. Debates about whether prison “works”, whether grammar schools are a good idea, and even whether crime and poverty are going up or down have been going on for decades – and will go on for decades more unless we find better, agreed-upon ways of measuring these phenomena. Data will tend to offer us solutions based on what we decided was important enough to count and measure in the first place.

The people of Ilfracombe, Devon, know this. In the 1960s their railway station was closed, spelling an end to the harbour town’s tourism industry. This was thanks to a sweeping programme of cuts to the railways on the advice of British Rail chair Richard Beeching, whose main criterion for deciding a railway line’s usefulness was the average cost per passenger, per mile, over the course of a year. The trouble was that a yearly average was a terrible reflection of the importance of the railway to summer holiday destinations such as Ilfracombe, which had substantial railway traffic for only a few months of the year.

Politicians are usually not experts in statistical modelling, which puts them somewhat at the mercy of academics and economists who can themselves promote their ideas with far more confidence than is warranted. In one particularly egregious case, a key economic argument of the 2010 Con-Lib coalition government’s austerity agenda was revealed to have originated in a mistake in an Excel spreadsheet. Economists Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff had been recommending lowering the debt to GDP ratio armed with a study in which they claimed to have found that debt of 90% of GDP was bad for growth. Years later, a PhD student discovered that this conclusion only held because the authors had failed to include the last five rows of their data. The authors admitted their mistake – but not before austerity had become a cornerstone of UK economic policy.

Bad data is not something niche or technical; it has real-world costs that can be very serious indeed, no matter which party is in power. The issues that are most important to people are, worryingly, the ones on which we have the worst data: crime, immigration, income, benefits, unemployment, poverty and equality.

Some of our architecture for collecting data is just plain under-resourced and in need of an overhaul, but governments tend to see fixing this problem as a hard sell to the taxpayer. A shift in our political culture would go a long way towards uncertainty no longer being treated as a dirty word. Until then, we the public can keep up the pressure by asking questions, refusing to settle for face value, and demanding explanations. Numbers hold enormous power, but in the end, we must remember that we govern them – not the other way round.

Simon Jupp’s latest newsletter to the press reveals his part in the Tory “Merry-Go-Round”:

Promoted, sacked, promoted again within a month. Simon says he’s been “newly promoted” as the Parliamentary Private Secretary (PPS) to the new Secretary of State for Transport, Mark Harper (Forest of Dean)

Readers will recall that last month Simon “united” behind Liz Truss. As a result he was also “newly promoted” as a PPS to right-winger Simon Clarke when he became Secretary of State for Levelling-up, Housing and Communities. Rishi Sunak sacked Clarke three weeks ago. As PPSs are personal appointments by the minister, Simon Jupp went as well. 

But he has lost no time uniting under a different flag.

So Transport is now Simon’s “thing” and he says: “The current franchise model of running the railways is a needlessly complex and fragmented way of running a network of services.”

But Simon, the privatisation of the railways was the last in the ideological sell-offs initiated by Margaret Thatcher. Though, because she wasn’t keen on this particular one, implemented hurriedly by John Major and completed only a month before he lost in the 1997 Labour Landslide. You were only nine at the time. Truss and Kwarteng were attempting something equally “free market” when you signed up with them.

Under the banner “Back to Basics”, Major’s nostalgic appeal to return to “traditional values”, the Conservative party lost the 1997 election because it was rocked by scandals and sleaze and ended in ungovernable chaos. Seems to resonate with current times! – Owl

Reform is needed to improve Devon’s railways

Simon Jupp MP www.midweekherald.co.uk

Union bosses called off this week’s rail strikes at the eleventh hour. That did mean train services over the weekend and the start of this week were severely disrupted. 

 At the time of writing, all routes have alterations to services. There are no services between Newton Abbot and Exeter, and Salisbury and Exeter – including Cranbrook, Whimple and Feniton. 

Large-scale industrial action on our railways – and its knock-on impacts – have become deeply frustrating over the summer and early autumn. 

Network Rail and train operating companies have both made offers of a pay rise to rail workers. However, in order to deliver a decent pay rise, we do need to deliver reform in the way train operating companies and Network Rail work together. 

 The current franchise model of running the railways is a needlessly complex and fragmented way of running a network of services. Some franchises have even collapsed in recent years, leaving the state the unenviable task of having to pick up the pieces. 

The future of the railways was a major part of the work of the Transport Select Committee over the past two and a half years. I joined the committee shortly after I was elected and I will be able to use my experience on the committee after being newly promoted as the Parliamentary Private Secretary to the new Secretary of State for Transport, Mark Harper. 

 Mark Harper is a South West MP and he understands the challenges and opportunities across our region. As readers will know, regular passenger services on the Dartmoor Line between Exeter and Okehampton have returned for the first time in nearly 50 years. Other planned investments in the region include completing the multi-million pound work on the Dawlish sea wall, dualling the A303 and a new railway station at Marsh Barton. 

 I was pleased to join the Avocet Line Rail Users’ Group for their AGM at the Manor Hotel in Exmouth recently. As I said at the meeting, I’m working with GWR to get a new shelter built at Exton station. The current shelter is beyond useless and needs replacing.