Parking charges being reintroduced for hospital staff are a “stealth tax” according to union leaders.

By Miles Davis www.bbc.co.uk

Staff at Royal Devon and Exeter (RD&E) sites and at North Devon District Hospital (NDDH) will have to pay once again for parking from 1 September.

More staff at the main RD&E site will also not be able to park on site as a “green zone” is extended.

Hospital bosses say the sites are among the last in the country to reintroduce parking charges scrapped during Covid.

Staff at RD&E will continue to be able to use the Digby Park and Ride service for free.

‘Unfair’

Helga Pile, deputy head of health at the Unison union, said: “These parking charges are a stealth tax that health workers can’t afford. No trusts should be imposing them on staff especially given the current cost-of-living crisis.

“Not only is such a policy unfair, but staff could quit as a result. This is at a time when the NHS is struggling to fill vacancies.”

Julie Connolly, senior officer for Royal College of Nursing (RCN) Devon said it was “more important than ever” for nursing staff not to have to worry about finding somewhere safe to park or facing additional expense.

She said: “Like many hospitals the demand for parking spaces outstrips supply. Congestion around hospital sites has increased over time and is the cause of stress and frustration for staff, patients and visitors alike.

“In the short and medium term, the Royal Devon and Exeter NHS Foundation Trust needs to continue to work with staff, the local council and other partners to alleviate pressure on parking across all its sites and to ensure the safety of staff arriving at and leaving their work places.”

Staff who live within 1.5 mile (2.4km) of the RD&E Wonford site are currently not eligible for a travel pass to park on the site from 08:00 to 16:00.

From Monday that area, referred to as the “green zone”, will be extended to cover staff who live within 2 miles (3.2km) of the site.

‘Air quality’

The parking charges for staff will be reintroduced from 1 September.

A spokesperson for the trust said: “Free staff parking was introduced at the beginning of the pandemic in 2020, and when national funding was removed in April 2022, the trust chose to continue with free parking to support colleagues.

“We are currently one of the last remaining trusts to offer free parking.

“This will also help us manage demand for our car parks as well as encourage more sustainable travel choices, in order to improve air quality.”

Private landlords in England have made enough money from rising house prices in the last three decades to build at least 3m council homes, research suggests.

Robert Booth www.theguardian.com 

Owners of private rental properties have seen their assets grow in value by £400bn since 1990, equivalent to the amount needed to build more than 50 times the number of council homes that were actually built in England in that period.

The windfall calculation, commissioned by the Renters Reform Coalition campaign group and based on Office for National Statistics data, comes as landlords demand tax cuts to help ease the impact of rising interest rates. The National Residential Landlords Association has said many landlords “simply cannot afford to soak up” rising costs and will have to sell up or raise rents.

The growth in capital values means a landlord in London with five properties owned since 2013 has made £655,000 without even accounting for profits from rent.

Fewer than 54,000 council homes have been built in England since 1990, official figures show. They typically require grants of up to £200,000 per home in London and about £100,000 elsewhere, according to the National Housing Federation.

Fergus Wilson, one of Britain’s biggest buy-to-let landlords until a recent sell-off, told the Guardian that he and his wife, Judith, had bought 13 racehorses and 100 acres of farmland with some of the capital gains from selling dozens of homes they bought in the early 2000s on new estates around Ashford in Kent.

The sale of 15 homes they owned on one street – Grice Close – netted them close to £3m in profits, and another 20 homes on the Park Farm estate made nearly £5m.

“Mrs Wilson bought some National Hunt horses and had them trained with David Pipe – she had 28 winners,” he said. “I’ve got an awful lot of agricultural land. You wonder if you’re ever going to get permission to build houses on it.” The rest of their profits are “floating around” in investments, he said.

Last week, the ONS revealed that 43% of renters in Great Britain were finding it difficult to afford their rent payments. Fourteen per cent of renters said that in the last two weeks they had run out of food and been unable to afford more.

Wilson said he believed workers in the NHS and train drivers deserved to be paid more, but when asked if capital gains tax should be increased he replied: “The landlords would hate me if I said that.”

Half of English private residential landlords have owned a home since at least 2010, according to the research. During that time, the average privately rented home has increased in value by 41%, delivering the owner £76,000 in capital gains on top of profits from rent.

Landlords have on average made 23% “year one” cash profits on rental income from 2014 to 2021, according to separate research by Savills, an estate agent, although rising interest rates have pushed that down for landlords with mortgages.

The windfalls in the capital and south-east England are far greater, according to the analysis commissioned from Positive Money, a not-for-profit advocacy group. Owning a rental property for a decade in those areas would deliver between £100,000 and £131,000 in capital gains, which is taxed at lower rates than income.

“It’s difficult to miss the news stories of landlords complaining they are under the pump at the moment because of rising interest rates and, most absurdly, the government’s forthcoming renters’ reform bill,” said Tom Darling, a campaign manager at the Renters’ Reform Coalition. “[But] landlords have seen a vast expansion of their wealth over the last 30 years.”

But the windfalls are only available if landlords sell up, and those who continue to operate claim that incoming reforms protecting tenants from no-fault evictions and rising interest rates will squeeze their margins.

Chris Norris, policy director at the National Residential Landlords Association, said: “Landlord profits are at their lowest levels since 2007, a clear sign that they are not ‘cashing in’ on the cost of living crisis. What the country needs is a plan of action that recognises the need for more homes of every kind, whether they be properties for private rent, social rent or owner occupation.”

The geographic spread of capital gains is uneven. A typical landlord in the north-east of England has gained £12,000 per home in the last decade, compared with £40,000 in the north-west and £71,000 in the south-west, according to the estimates.

Meanwhile, in the last 30 years the number of households renting in England and Wales has more than doubled to 5m (one in five), census results show.

Amid rising interest rates and expiring fixed-term mortgages, last week the Bank of England forecast that average monthly payments on buy-to-let mortgages would increase by about £275 by the end of 2025.

Asking rents for new lets in London, Cardiff, Aberdeen, Southampton, Glasgow, Manchester and Edinburgh are all at least 10% up on last year, according to the property website Zoopla. Average London rent has increased by £490 a month to £2,001.

Across the UK, all private rents – including those paid by sitting tenants – rose by 4.9% in the 12 months to March 2023, according to the ONS.

Residents in England’s biggest new town have been left furious after developers failed to live up to their promises – forcing them to live without necessities six years on.

Ring any bells locally? – Owl

www.mirror.co.uk (Extract)

Northstowe, located 10 miles from Cambridge, has been left like a ‘ghost town’ with rows upon rows of newly-built houses, but not a single shop, café, pub or even a GP practice.

Around 10,000 homes are planned with a total population of 26,000, making it the largest new town in Britain since Milton Keynes was built in Buckinghamshire in 1967.

The construction started in 2017 and around 1,200 properties have been built, but families still don’t have any basic facilities and have to drive to buy a pint of milk or coffee.

Book loans went down after vehicles halved

The decision to scrap Devon’s mobile library service is being challenged by opposition councillors.

Ollie Heptinstall, local democracy reporter www.radioexe.co.uk

Last week the county council’s ruling Conservative cabinet voted to close the service after hearing user numbers are down and three of its four mobile libraries are coming to the end of their “serviceable lives.”

But several opposition councillors criticised the plans, urging the cabinet to delay a decision, and now the Liberal Democrats have ‘called-in’ the move for further examination.

It means no decision will be taken until October. Before then, the council’s scrutiny committee will consider the plans in further detail and could call on the council’s leadership to change its mind.

Explaining why the service was closing last week, Devon’s cabinet member for communities, Cllr Roger Croad (Conservative, Ivybridge), admitted it was a “sad day” but “inevitable,” explaining that it would cost between £600,000 and £800,000 to replace the three vehicles.

In the last decade, the number of books being borrowed has also fallen, although the fleet has been reduced from eight to four vehicles in this time. It led the council to conclude mobile libraries are no longer “cost-effective” and “not sustainable.”

The annual £217,000 cost of providing the mobile service would go to Libraries Unlimited, a charity that runs the library service across Devon and Torbay, to help sustain existing services amid cost increases in recent months.

A one-off £25,000 for “transition support” would also be spent by the council so that current mobile library users can access alternative library services.

However, Cllr Alan Connett (Lib Dem, Exminster & Haldon), who spoke against the cuts when the cabinet met last Wednesday [12 July], has questioned the authority’s decision-making process.

“A key part of the decision to axe the libraries was that the cabinet said the council could not afford the costs of buying four new vans, said to be up to £800,000. We highlighted that the council could have looked at leasing vans which may have been cheaper,” he said.

“Then council officers announced they had considered that, but there was no mention of it in the report. So how could the cabinet have considered all the options? They did not have all the facts in front of them.

“There is an appearance that a decision had been made to axe the mobile libraries and the arguments then marshalled in favour of that outcome.

“We have called in the decision because we believe there are several aspects of the information used in the decision making which need further examination and scrutiny,” said Cllr Connett, whose group thinks the £25,000 support fund is “too vague.”

A petition calling for a rethink on the plans was also presented to cabinet by Torridge district councillor Cheryl Cottle-Hunkin (Lib Dem), who said more marketing and sponsorship would help keep it going.

Green councillor Henry Gent (Broadclyst) was critical too, calling it a “strange decision when the whole economy is moving towards mobile delivery-based services.”

But speaking at the meeting, cabinet member Andrew Saywell (Conservative, Torrington Rural), said: “The trend is very clear, unfortunately, that less and less people are using this service. And so, we have to look at how we deliver this differently.”

Meanwhile, fellow cabinet member Rufus Gilbert (Conservative, Salcombe) said it was an “incredibly expensive subsidy per head,” adding: “It’d be better to buy the books and post them to them, quite frankly.”

The council says ending the mobile library service is a “reasonable solution to reducing costs” and “will help to secure the wider sustainability of library services in Devon.”

The last journeys by Devon’s mobile libraries are currently expected to be made at the end of December.

Devon’s corporate infrastructure and regulatory services scrutiny committee will examine the closure plans on Thursday 28 September.

Devon oldies’ station didn’t understand regulations

A Devon radio station breached broadcasting rules when it allowed a presenter to go on the airwaves whilst standing as a candidate in a Plymouth City Council by-election.

Alison Stephenson, local democracy reporter www.radioexe.co.uk

The ruling follows a complaint from a listener about the Gavin Marshall Show on DevonAir Gold, during the run-up to a local election in January.

Mr Marshall, an independent candidate for Moor View, submitted his nomination on 13 December last year and, under rules to ensure fairness in elections, wasn’t permitted to broadcast until voting closed a month later.

Following a complaint by a listener, Ofcom concluded that although Mr Marshall’s show was music based with no political coverage or mention that he was standing for council, the broadcast itself disadvantaged other candidates.

The regulator said the rule exists: “to help secure the integrity of the democratic process, and the public’s trust in that integrity, by preventing any unfair electoral advantage being afforded to a particular candidate.”

East Devon Radio, a community station in Exmouth that runs DevonAir Gold as a commercial station broadcasting in Exeter and online, defended its programme by saying “nobody in the ward in Plymouth could hear the presenter on a licensed transmitted radio signal” some 40 miles away from the broadcast area.

The company claimed the rules are “ambiguous” and claimed it had not appreciated that a candidate “was unable to act as a presenter in any part of the UK while in an election period.” It suggested Ofcom should change the wording in its rules because it isn’t clear that the phrase “Candidates in UK elections” covered people standing in local elections.

It had previously breached the same rule in 2013 when a Devon County Councillor presented programmes on its Exmouth station. At the time it said it had “overlooked the rules” and its breach was “an unfortunate error….a hard lesson learned and a mistake we will ensure will not happen again.”

This time round, Ofcom said it had taken into account that Mr Marshall was standing in an election in a different area, explaining: ‘It may have mitigated the potential for harm to an extent, though it did not preclude the possibility of electors in the relevant ward hearing the programme.”

East Devon Radio highlighted the presenter’s experience as a broadcaster and said that he had taken care not to refer to his candidacy in this by-election, or to elections more generally, while broadcasting during the election period, and that he had avoided discussion of political matters and had not referred to Plymouth. It was confident that no material which could have inappropriately influenced UK voters was broadcast.

It explained that to avoid a recurrence, they had put in place additional training and briefed the programme controller and all presenters about the rules on elections in the Broadcast Code.

Ofcom acknowledged that community radio stations faced challenges preparing themselves for broadcasting, but that they have responsibility to ensure they have an adequate understanding of the code.

After being unsuccessful in the January by-election for Moor View, Mr Marshall stood again at the local election in May, where he came third out of five candidates. At the time, he announced that he wasn’t a politican.  “I really struggle with the party political fighting,” he said. “Hence why I feel the time is right to stand as an independent candidate. Locally, and nationally, the party system isn’t working.

“Being independent, I wouldn’t have to take any party line. I will take my constituent’s line. As neither main parties have a main Plymouth right now, the election of just one additional independent councillor will mean that the Independent Alliance can influence meaningful change from next Friday.”

East Devon Radio has been contacted for comment.