Daily Archives: 24 Apr 2023

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24 Apr 2023

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Breaking: New anti-pollution campaign group launches Tiverton today, Exmouth tomorrow, Exeter Wednesday

River Exe under threat from pollution and ‘human activity’ 

Friends of the River Exe (FORE), will be launching this week with open meetings in Tiverton, Exeter, and Exmouth.

The launch meetings will be held from 6 pm – 8 pm on Monday, April 24th, in Tiverton at St George’s Church Extension, on Tuesday, April 25th, in Exmouth at the Railway Club, and on Wednesday, April 26th, in Exeter at the City Gate Hotel.

Lewis Clarke www.devonlive.com

The River Exe is under threat from pollution and human activity, with heavily polluted water, stripped banks, and depleted wildlife, a new campaign group has warned. The new organisation, Friends of the River Exe (FORE), will be launching this week with open meetings in Tiverton, Exeter, and Exmouth. FORE aims to bring together diverse grassroots organizations and people who live, work, and play along the Exe and its tributaries to be a voice for the river.

“These first meetings will be to gather communities to plan how best to protect, restore and celebrate our river,” said Mary Culhane, one of the organisers. “We’re excited about this chance to pull together all the amazing groups, people, and organizations that exist along the River Exe and believe that together we can really make a difference in tackling this horrendous crisis.”

The launch meetings will be held from 6 pm – 8 pm on Monday, April 24th, in Tiverton at St George’s Church Extension, on Tuesday, April 25th, in Exmouth at the Railway Club, and on Wednesday, April 26th, in Exeter at the City Gate Hotel. Speakers will include Franny Armstrong, a filmmaker who made Age of Stupid and Rivercide, and campaigners from Friends of the River Wye, a pathbreaking campaign contesting pollution in the Wye from sewage and intensive poultry farms.

The group is angry that sewage was discharged into Devon rivers over 2,068 times in 2021, totalling over 20,853 hours of sewage discharge in just one year. But Friends of the River Exe believe the river can be restored to full ecological health, benefiting birds, fish, invertebrates, and humans who depend on the Exe for life and happiness.

The group is inspired by organisations forming to fight for their rivers in many other catchments in England. From gathering together as a force for change to signing up as citizen scientists to test the water, to celebrating the river with a Festival of the Exe in September 2023, the organizers hope to hear what citizens feel moved to do and would like to be a part of.

Franny Armstrong, who grew up near the River Exe in Devon, said: “Do we sit back and watch such a natural wonder being destroyed? Or do we step up, get together, and fight to protect, restore and celebrate our river, for ourselves and for future generations? Come and join us.”

Free places can be reserved at Tiverton, Exmouth, and Exeter events through Eventbrite. Friends of the River Exe hopes that this initiative will bring the community together to save the river and make a significant difference in its restoration.

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24 Apr 2023

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Planning applications validated by EDDC for week beginning 10 April

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24 Apr 2023

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Holiday hotspots are the butt of the ‘affordable’ housing joke

‘Affordable housing” is a joke. The term is so subjective as to render the 80 per cent of market value definition useless. Housing is increasingly unaffordable to many, whether it comes at a 20 per cent “discount” or not. It is a problem particularly exacerbated in holiday let and second-home hotspots.

Carol Lewis www.thetimes.co.uk

In places popular with second-home owners house prices are likely to be more indicative of the income levels of the incomers than the resident population. This is why a more logical way of defining “affordable” would be to peg it to local earnings rather than local house prices.

Take Southwold on the Suffolk coast, where the average new-build home is £396,151; with a 20 per cent discount that’s £316,921. The median local salary is £22,856, so for housing to reflect local wages (4.5 times salary) a new home would have to be priced at £102,852 — a difference of 208 per cent, or £214,069, according to data provided by the property portal OnTheMarket.com.

Southwold’s Liberal Democrat councillor, David Beavan, says one so-called affordable house in the town is now being sold on the open market because no local could afford it — “unless they earned more than £80,000 a year”. He claims the three-bedroom shared-ownership home in the Old Hospital was earmarked for residents but which would cost £1,500 a month, has sat empty for nearly two years.

Southwold is far from the worst affected. For instance, in the Cotswolds the average affordable home costs £582,088 — 486 per cent more than the average resident could borrow — while the mortgage available for an average local income is just £99,356.

The issue was discussed in the Lords last week; peers argued for an amendment to the levelling-up bill to peg affordable housing to local earnings.

It was recently announced that second-home owners will be forced to seek planning permission before renting out their properties as holiday lets. It is a well-meaning intervention supported by many in holiday hotspots, but there are those who say it could push house prices up even further.

Chris Norris, policy director of the National Residential Landlords Association, has told me that the proposed changes could backfire, with homes that have an established use as short lets — or, in future, with planning permission — trading at a premium. In effect this will force prices up in some holiday locations and accentuate the two-tier property market between second homes/holiday lets and local homes.

So what’s the punchline? The definition of affordable housing needs to be re-thought and linked to local salaries rather than local house prices. The setting up of community land trusts (communitylandtrusts.org.uk) needs to be encouraged and supported. These community-owned organisations own the land on which they build genuinely affordable homes based on what residents earn. Add to this a concerted effort to build more housing, particularly of the social kind.

Admittedly it isn’t exactly hilarious, but being able to afford a home shouldn’t be.

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24 Apr 2023

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More on Richard Parr, Tory candidate who ran illegal landfill site

Not only is he campaigning to “stand up for our environment” but he is also pledging “to deliver the right homes in the right places”.

He should know, because he is also a major developer and will become a beneficiary of the South West Exeter urban extension plan. 

He and his partner Helen Lee applied for outline planning permission in March 2015  [Teignbridge 15/00921/MAJ] for major development of Matford Home Farm. This was granted in Nov 2020.

They submitted a more detailed design and access statement (glossy brochure) application a year later in Nov 2021 [Teignbridge 21/02604/MAJ] which is still under consideration.

The proposals for this site provide up to 250 homes, relocation of existing farm shop  use [Parr’s Farm Shop] with additional employment units of up to 560m2, 3 travellers pitches and recreational opportunities for future residents and neighbours.

According to the Design and Access Statement ,the overall area has been promoted through the planning system and forms part of the South West Exeter Development Framework adopted by Teingbridge District Council and the current Local plan.

Caveat: this is still an outline plan and as we all know, once outline permission has been granted, as it has been in this case, developers have a habit of making successive changes. The final result is all too often very different especially with regard to total numbers (upwards) and provision of “affordable” housing (downwards).

Major development in Matford which in effect creates a new ‘town’ on outskirts of Exeter has been described as “changing the countryside forever”, see www.devonlive.com

The coalition led EDDC of the past three years inherited a local plan devised and driven through by successive Conservative administrations based on a high growth scenario. The 18 year housing target in the 2013-2031 EDDC local plan is a minimum of 17,100. This is an increase of 63% over what is needed purely to satisfy demographic trends. 

In this short period the coalition has withdrawn from the secretive Greater Exeter Strategic Plan (GESP).

GESP was the strategic plan to spread Exeter’s housing needs more widely with its neighbours: Teignbridge; East Devon and Mid Devon. A draft allocation plan was published in 2019 (since withdrawn from the public domain). However we know that East Devon was set to take a disproportionate share of the total which amounted to a 150% uplift to the already eye watering local plan, and would continue to 2040.

Looks like Matford Farm is part of Teignbridge’s early contribution.

Those voting to keep East Devon in GESP in August 2020, were all the Conservatives present and all the self-styled “Independent Group”. These were the remainder of Ben Ingham’s group of “Independents” who did not join the Coalition or form Cranbrook Voice. The other unaligned “Independent” from the Ingham Group, Cllr Peter Faithfull, also voted to stay in the GESP. You can see how your councillor voted here.

The Coalition has also  paused reviewing the local plan now that the government does not intend to impose central targets, pending clarification.

A couple of weeks ago Owl wrote an article pointing out that despite losing 50% of their seats on the council in the space of eight years, in choosing Phil Skinner as leader, they were signalling “no change” to the discredited “Build, build, build” policies of the “Old Guard”.

If a return to the “Old Guard” is what you want, Richard Parr looks to be  your man.