Apologies – Email subscribers will have lost the auto updates from sometime on Friday until this morning. Key posts you may have missed include:
Three reviewing the Devon County Council report on how it dealt with the John Humphreys and the part played by EDDC:
The latest news on sewage pollution:
https://eastdevonwatch.org/2023/01/30/spoof-blue-plaques-to-simon-jupp-unveiled/
And:
The UK is on course to be the world’s worst-performing big economy this year, according to the International Monetary Fund.
Who crashed the economy? – Owl
Mehreen Khan, Oliver Wright www.thetimes.co.uk
In an update to its growth outlook, the IMF delivered a hefty blow to Britain’s prospects despite brightening global conditions, with a 0.9 percentage point downgrade to the UK’s annual growth projection year.
It expects the economy to contract by 0.6 per cent in 2023, which would make Britain the slowest-growing big economy in the world. The Russian economy is expected to grow by 0.3 per cent this year after a 2.2 per cent contraction in 2022.
The IMF has upgraded its global growth forecasts in response to plummeting global energy prices and hopes that inflation will fall faster than expected. Britain is notable for being the only big economy expected to contract, according to the forecasts, while next year’s growth is expected to rise to 0.9 per cent, 0.3 percentage points up on the IMF’s last forecast in October.
Britain’s underperformance relative to its peers is the result of “tighter fiscal and monetary policies and financial conditions, and still-high energy retail prices weighing on household budgets”, the IMF said.
The outlook is a blow to the government before the spring statement in March, with Jeremy Hunt, the chancellor, under pressure to provide relief to households as market energy costs reduce government borrowing needs.
Hunt pointed to comments by the governor of the Bank of England that any recession this year was likely to be “shallower than previously predicted”. But he added: “These figures confirm we are not immune to the pressures hitting nearly all advanced economies. The UK outperformed many forecasts last year, and if we stick to our plan to halve inflation, the UK is still predicted to grow faster than Germany and Japan over the coming years.”
The UK is the only economy in the G7 not to have reached its pre-pandemic size and has suffered the worst inflation rate of its peers in the past year. The economy is forecast to enter recession within months, with the downturn expected to last until the end of the year. The IMF said UK households were suffering from “stretched budgets” while high interest rates were raising borrowing costs and slowing down the housing market. The Bank of England is expected to raise rates again on Thursday to get a handle on high inflation.
Overall, the IMF raised its global growth forecast by 0.2 percentage points to 2.9 per cent this year after an expansion of 3.4 per cent last year. The upgrade is largely the result of China’s emergence from its Covid-19 lockdown and a fall in the record energy costs that plagued the world economy last year.
“Adverse risks have moderated since the October [forecast]”, the IMF said. “On the upside, a stronger boost from pent-up demand in numerous economies or a faster fall in inflation are plausible. On the downside severe health outcomes in China could hold back the recovery, Russia’s war in Ukraine could escalate and tighter global financing conditions could worsen debt distress.”
Europe and the US have recorded better than expected falls in inflation and signs of robust economic output at the end of last year. Global growth is expected to accelerate to 3.1 per cent next year, a slight downgrade from the IMF’s autumn projections.
Some water companies still use dowsing to detect leaks – It’s magic, Owl
Rhys Blakely www.thetimes.co.uk
Thames Water and Severn Trent Water still use dowsing rods to hunt for leaks, even though scientific studies show that they do not work.
Water dowsing, also known as water divining which dates back to at least the 16th century, involves a person holding two L-shaped or one Y-shaped rod in front of them. The rods, sometimes known as witching sticks or wands, are supposed to twitch or cross to indicate the presence of water underground.
There is no known force in physics that would account for how buried water would move the rods, and scientific trials have shown that dowsing is no more effective than guessing.
Experts have asked Ofwat, the water regulator, to stop companies spending money on it. Thames Water, which supplies 2.6 billion litres a day, has admitted that about a quarter, or 650 million litres, is lost in leaks. Severn Trent loses about 400 million litres a day. Last year’s official declarations of drought focused attention on the poor state of water infrastructure.
The two companies told New Scientist that their engineers used dowsing rods to find leaks; 15 water companies told the magazine they had abandoned the method. A spokesman for Thames Water said dowsing rods were used to find leaks, and to verify results from other equipment. “Some people they work for, some people they don’t. If they work for you, you come to trust it,” he said. “People are sceptical of it, and I was sceptical when I first saw it. I started using them because I saw someone else use them and I have found leaks.”
Severn Trent said that a small number of its “expert engineers . . . may still carry dowsing rods with their equipment.” However, it added that it did not issue them as it did not consider dowsing rods to be effective.
Experts have attributed belief in dowsing to confirmation bias: the tendency to forget times when the method failed and celebrate it when it appears to work.
Professor Richard Wiseman, a psychologist at the University of Hertfordshire, said that it was plausible that some dowsers picked up on signs from the environment, such as green patches of vegetation, to be led to water sources. “I’m not sure that there’s any evidence that this happens, but it doesn’t seem impossible,” he said.
“In studies where there are no environmental cues, it fails.” he added.
Something known as the ideomotor effect may also play a part in the phenomenon of dowsing. This happens when somebody moves without meaning to and might explain why divining rods seem to twitch and move of their own accord.
The use of water dowsing by water companies made the headlines in 2017 when a couple in Warwickshire called out engineers from Severn Trent and were surprised to see them “walking around holding two bent tent pegs to locate a pipe” near their home in Stratford-upon-Avon. They told their daughter Sally Le Page, who was a scientist at theUniversity of Oxford.
Ten of the big 12 water companies in Britain told her at the time that they were still using the technique. She described them as trying to “use magic to do their jobs”.
“Care in the community” needs care staff in the community – “Home alone” might be a better description. – Owl
Andrew Gregory www.theguardian.com
Rishi Sunak will vow to rapidly slash long waiting times for urgent NHS care with a promise of thousands more beds, 800 new ambulances and an expansion of community care backed by a dedicated fund of £1bn.
The health service is engulfed in its worst-ever crisis, with urgent and emergency care in particular under unprecedented pressure in recent months. The prime minister will describe his blueprint for resolving the problems as “ambitious and credible”.
However, the Guardian understands the £1bn dedicated fund being pledged to finance the strategy is not new money. It will come out of cash announced last year for health and social care in the autumn statement. There were also no precise details on who will staff new ambulances and beds.
In the two-year plan for England, the government and NHS England will promise 800 new ambulances, including 100 specialist mental health vehicles, and 5,000 more hospital beds.
A major element of the strategy is to expand urgent care in the community, keeping people away from hospitals and seeing more treated at home.
Same-day emergency care units will open in every hospital with a major A&E. Ministers hope this measure will see thousands of people each week avoiding an overnight stay in hospital.
There are also plans for pilots of new approaches to NHS step-down care, with patients receiving rehabilitation and physiotherapy at home in some instances. Over the weekend, the government said 3,000 “hospital at home” beds will be created before next winter, with the aim of about 50,000 people a month eventually being cared for at home each month.
There is an increasing reliance on virtual wards to combat NHS pressures, which see patients treated from home while monitored by medics via daily visits or video calls.
Sunak will visit an A&E unit in the north-east of England to highlight the new strategy. “Cutting NHS waiting times is one of my five priorities,” he will say. “Urgent and emergency care is facing serious challenges but we have an ambitious and credible plan to fix it.
“It will take time to get there but our plan will cut long waiting times by increasing the number of ambulances, staff and beds – stopping the bottlenecks outside A&E and making sure patients are seen and discharged quickly.”
However, NHS leaders expressed doubts that initiatives such as creating more virtual wards to keep people out of hospital would succeed in reducing pressure while there remained a workforce crisis. There are currently 133,000 vacancies in England alone.
“We desperately need action to tackle the vast workforce shortages, staff exhaustion and burnout,” said Saffron Cordery, interim chief executive of NHS Providers.
Patricia Marquis, the Royal College of Nursing director for England, said: “Without investment in staff, this plan won’t make a difference.”
Matthew Taylor, the chief executive of the NHS Confederation, said: “The NHS has been at the mercy of a sluggish and short-term approach from the government in its response to the crisis facing emergency services this winter.
“The NHS needs the right numbers and mix of staff in place if it is to truly recover the performance of emergency care and other services long term.”
East Devon Watch 