OF COURSE IT’S HIM: Three separate figures have confirmed to Playbook that the mystery “erudite new columnist” trailed on the front of today’s Mail is, of course, of course, the new Steward of the Chiltern Hundreds, aka Boris Johnson. One of Playbook’s moles says he’s on a “very high six-figure sum” to pen what will be a weekly column.
Artificial intelligence will be used in south-west England to predict pollution before it happens and help prevent it.
By Jonah Fisher www.bbc.co.uk
It’s hoped the pilot project in Devon will help improve water quality at the seaside resort of Combe Martin, making it a better place for swimming.
Sensors placed in rivers and fields will build a picture of the state of local rivers, rainfall and soil.
AI will then combine that data with satellite imagery of local land use.
It will predict when the local river system is most vulnerable to things like agricultural runoff, allowing for measures such as asking farms to hold off on applying fertiliser.
Computer systems company CGI is running the artificial intelligence project with mapping experts Ordnance Survey. CGI said it was more than 90% accurate during a test run.
It’s being trialled in what’s known as the North Devon Biosphere Reserve, a 55-sq-mile (142-sq-km) protected area that includes important natural habitats as well as farmland and small towns.
“We’ll give (the AI) the history,” said CGI’s chief sustainability officer Mattie Yeta. “We’ll give it all of the geographic information, as well as data sets from the sensors for it to learn and develop the predictive mechanisms to be able to inform where these incidents are occurring and indeed when they will take place.”
It’s hoped the project could clean up the seaside resort town of Combe Martin, where the quality of bathing water has long been a concern.
“It’s always been bumping along the bottom in terms of water quality,” says Andy Bell from the North Devon Biosphere Reserve.
Though the water at Combe Martin was last year rated by the Environment Agency as ‘good’, Mr Bell says that was mainly down to dry weather. More typical years, he says, were 2018 and 2019 when it received a ‘poor’ rating, which meant a notice being posted advising people not to swim.
“There is very much a fear in the community of what would happen if the bathing water status was rescinded.” Andy says
“It would impact on the cafes, the restaurants, the B&B’s… people want to come to a clean place to enjoy themselves.”
The River Umber is the main culprit, according to Mr Bell. It reaches the sea through a corridor of lush green algae on the edge of the beach. The Umber is usually little more than a stream but it receives discharges both from a sewage treatment plant and agricultural runoff from farms.
Cleaning up the Umber is seen as a first step towards improving the water quality on the beach and the key to that, according to the artificial intelligence project, is a huge amount of real-time information.
A couple of kilometres upstream from Combe Martin beach, a floating water sensor is being installed in the river. It’s a square black box with solar panels on top and is moored by a cable to the bank.
It automatically transmits a stream of data on six key indicators of water health including acidity (pH), ammonia, the amount of dissolved oxygen in the water and how clear the water is (turbidity).
“It’s a really good overview of water quality,” said Glyn Cotton, the chief executive of environment-focussed technology company Watr, which is supplying the £2,000-a-go ($2,557) sensors to the project.
“If sewage was being discharged upstream we would see spikes in things like ammonia and pH and we can then cross-reference that with temperature and dissolved oxygen levels.”
About 50 connected sensors are being used across the catchment area, a mix of water, soil and rain gauges. Mapping company Ordnance Survey are providing the expertise to integrate that information with location specific data and satellite imagery.
Mapping experts Ordnance Survey are helping integrate the sensors with satellite imagery in the AI model Image source, Ordnance Survey
“We can start training the model using data to get it understanding that when there was a pollution event – whether it was associated with a particular area?” said Donna Lyndsay from Ordnance Survey. “Was there for example a particular rainfall event that washed it all off?”
The hope is that the AI might, for example, advise a farmer to stop putting more fertiliser on his field, if the soil is dry and heavy rain forecast because of the likelihood of it being washed into the waterways.
Preventing raw sewage being discharged by water treatment plants – a practice allowed when heavy rainfall overwhelms facilities – is more complicated. The AI might see it coming after heavy rainfall but that doesn’t mean the water company has the capacity to stopped it being released.
The first phase of the AI project was a desk-based model using historic data, with CGI saying it predicted pollution events with 91.5% accuracy. Now the AI model is being unleashed ‘in the wild’ and the question is whether it can do the same.
“We’re starting very small here (in North Devon) … but the idea is very much to scale up and roll this out to different parts of the UK.” said CGI’s Mattie Yeta.
Snouts still in troughs – Owl
Downing Street has rejected calls to strip Boris Johnson of the £115,000 a year expense allowance given to former prime ministers – after an inquiry found he had repeatedly misled parliament.
Jon Stone www.independent.co.uk
The ex prime minister is facing a ban from holding a parliamentary security pass after a devastating cross-party committee blasted his handling of the Partygate scandal.
But there are now calls that Mr Johnson should be stripped of the other trappings of office, including generous lifetime expenses and gongs for his allies and cronies.
Under rules, former prime ministers are entitled to claim the Public Duty Costs Allowance of up to £115,000 a year, for life, for the “necessary office costs and secretarial costs arising from their special position in public life”.
The system was established after Margaret Thatcher resigned and it currently pays out more than half a million pounds a year on total to former PMs.
In 2020/21 both Tony Blair and John Major claimed the full £115,000 for their work, with Gordon Brown and David Cameron claiming slightly under. Theresa May was an outlier and claimed just £57,832.
“Rishi Sunak must cut off Johnson’s ex-Prime Minister allowance to stop him milking the public purse for his own personal gain,” said Daisy Cooper, deputy leader of the Liberal Democrats.
“Anything less would be an insult to bereaved families who suffered while Boris Johnson lied and partied.”
The senior MP said the report “should be the final nail in the coffin for Boris Johnson’s political career”, branding him “a law-breaker and serial liar, who treated the public and Parliament with total disdain”.
But asked whether the allowance should be rescinded from Mr Johnson, Rishi Sunak’s official spokesman told reporters:
“I’m not aware of any plans to do that.These arrangements are fairly long-standing – it’s not a personal salary or allowance, it’s the reimbursement of expenses for office and secretarial costs.”
No 10 also rejected suggestions that Mr Johnson’s resignation honours list should be rescinded, as called for by some opposition politicians.
“When it comes to honours, that’s a long-standing convention, the Prime Minister has abided by convention, that’s not going to change.”
There are also “no plans” to recoup the cost of Mr Johnson’s publicly-funded legal fees for the inquiry, the spokesperson said.
As well as the secretarial allowance, former prime ministers also continue to receive security protection after they leave office.
And like ministers, PMs are entitled to a severance payment of 25 per cent of their annual salary if they hold office and are not appointed within three weeks. Mr Johnson was entitled to a severance payment of £18,860, according to the Istitute for Government think-tank.
Polling conducted on Thursday by Savanta found that two thirds (66 per cent) of voters agree with the privilege’s committee report’s conclusion that he deliberately misled the House of Commons, with just 19 per cent believing he did not.
The vote to accept and approve the “House of Commons Committee of Privileges: Matter referred on 21 April 2022 (conduct of Rt Hon Boris Johnson): Final Report”, takes place on Monday.
The report is forensic and worth a read.
It will be a free vote and already there is much press speculation on how many Tories will find it politic to be absent.
Supporters of Boris Johnson have vowed to target Conservative members of the privileges committee and Tory MPs who endorse its findings for deselection. They are likely to be very vociferous over the weekend.
For example, Boris Johnson describes the findings as follows:
“The committee now says that I deliberately misled the House, and at the moment I spoke I was consciously concealing from the House my knowledge of illicit events.
This is rubbish. It is a lie. In order to reach this deranged conclusion, the Committee is obliged to say a series of things that are patently absurd, or contradicted by the facts.”
Though a small proportion of the electorate, the influence of Party Members is disproportionate to their number.
It was the membership who chose both Boris Johnson and Liz Truss. So any Conservative voting to approve the report risks upsetting diehard party members, maybe face deselection.
Not voting will send a strong signal to the electorate at large that such an MP is not prepared to “move on”.
Simon Jupp has been a PPS under both Boris and Truss. We wait to see which way he jumps.
The BBC even speculates on whether Rishi Sunak will attend.
That’s the Prime Minister who promised that his government will have integrity, professionalism and accountability at every level.
The council ran up a £500m deficit after gambling hundreds of millions of pounds on risky commercial investments and declared effective bankruptcy in December.
Anyone spot any familiar themes in the official findings? – Owl
Thurrock Council Best Value Inspection Report (extract from “Our Findings”)
“Our inspection has found that Thurrock Council has experienced repeated failures both in the delivery of its investment strategy, and in the delivery of major infrastructure and regeneration projects. These failures have resulted in the loss of substantial sums of public money. When initially faced with these failures, members and senior officers within the Council have attempted to conceal bad news and avoid public scrutiny.
This pattern of failure, and the nature of the Council’s response, has been enabled by dereliction in political and managerial leadership, inadequate governance arrangements and serious weaknesses in internal control.
The Council’s lack of openness and transparency has given rise to a culture of insularity and complacency. Internal challenge has been discouraged, and external criticism and challenge have been routinely dismissed. This has undermined the Council’s ability to learn from others and from its own previous mistakes. It has placed the Council in a state of ‘unconscious incompetence’ and has undermined its ability to secure continuous improvement. Thurrock Council has, therefore, failed to meet the ‘Best Value Duty’ placed on all local authorities.
Urgent change is required. The scale of the financial challenge now facing the Council means it is inevitable that, in addition to making extensive efficiency savings, the Council will have to undertake a significant and rapid reduction in the scope of local services. Many services, which have been relatively well funded over the past decade may, as a consequence, be equipped to do little more than the statutory minimum for the foreseeable future. Leading this transformation will be a hugely difficult task, not least because the Council does not have a good record in delivering major projects. This transformation will need to be effectively managed at both the corporate and service level if the Council is to avoid serious operational failures.“
Southern Water is refusing demands by the information watchdog to publish internal communications between board members relating to discussions about raw sewage discharges.
Not much transparency here – owl
Sandra Laville www.theguardian.com
The company, which was fined £90m in 2021 for discharging billions of litres of raw sewage into protected coastal waters, was ordered to publish 53 documents by the information commissioner at the end of last year because of the “substantial and weighty public interest”.
But the company said they contained “sensitive” internal decision-making processes on a live issue relating to sewage discharges, and has refused to release them. Seven months on from the information commissioner’s order to publish, Southern is taking the case to the first-tier tribunal to appeal against the ruling and to keep the documents secret.
First reported in Private Eye, the 53 documents relate to discussion at board level in 2020 and 2021, including agendas and minutes of meetings of the board discussing sewage spills or storm overflows.
Ofwat, the industry’s regulator, has promised to apply new scrutiny to the boardrooms of water companies.
Southern has tried to cite exceptions under the environmental information request (EIR) rules to defend its decision not to release the documents. But the information commissioner has said the exceptions largely do not apply and there is a public interest in releasing the documents.
The company argued that the documents should remain secret because of “the need to protect Southern Water’s internal processes of deliberation and decision-making and with regard to the sensitivity of the information and the circumstances surrounding the request”. The company said the request for the documents on sewage spills or overflows in 2020-2021 related to live issues and should not be published.
But the commissioner said the public interest favoured disclosing the information, and said there was even greater public interest because the company had pleaded guilty in July 2021 to 51 individual offences of discharging sewage illegally. Evidence presented showed the company had presented a picture of compliance to regulators that was deliberately misleading.
“Set against this backdrop, the commissioner considers that there is a substantial and weighty public interest in understanding what measures the public authority was taking, during the period covered by the request, to improve its performance and put measures in place to prevent a recurrence of the offences,” the information commissioner has said.
Ed Acteson, of the campaign group SOS Whitstable, said: “Southern is repeatedly saying it is going to be more transparent but we are just not sure that is the case.”
He said data on the company’s Beachbuoy app had recently been changed to make it more difficult for the public to see where raw sewage discharges were taking place or their impact.
Last year Southern was accused of “environmental vandalism” after discharging raw sewage for more than 3,700 hours at 83 bathing water beaches during the first eight days of November alone.
The information commissioner said the company operated a monopoly and if customers were dissatisfied with the way wastewater was being handled, they did not have the right to ask another company to handle it instead.
“One of the few powers consumers do have, is to make use of the EIR to seek environmental information such as this and use that information to hold the public authority to account, the information commissioner said.
Southern Water said as there was a court process under way it could not comment.
East Devon Watch 