Daily Archives: 11 Dec 2023

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11 Dec 2023

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Planning applications validated by EDDC for week beginning 27 November

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11 Dec 2023

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‘Open season’ for developers in East Devon

It is “open season” for housing developers in East Devon as the council can’t show the government it has at least five years’ worth of land for new homes. 

Will Goddard, local democracy reporter www.radioexe.co.uk 

That’s the view of local councillor Jess Bailey (Independent, West Hill and Aylesbeare), who spoke of her frustration this week. 

Because it can’t prove it has identified land for new housing for five years means the council’s policies for locating new developments are deemed out-of-date for deciding whether to grant planning permission. 

[See also this article on the Tory Poison Chalice to put the Conservative Government policy in the context of the local Conservative pro-development legacy – Owl]

Cllr Bailey said: “I am concerned that effectively East Devon is declaring an open season for developers [who think] ‘don’t worry about planning policies because we haven’t got a five-year land supply.’

“The responsibility for this state of affairs must lie with the Conservative government and its flawed algorithm, which is putting so much pressure on East Devon. 

“What I really want to focus on is what East Devon District Council can do to put in maximum effort to resist speculative development when faced with this government’s algorithm.  

“I’m certainly not saying that we start refusing everything, but what I am saying is that we draw on everything that we can to ensure that we’re in the best position to refuse applications that are not in accordance with our planning policies, regardless of the five-year land supply.” 

Most councillors at the meeting agreed with Cllr Bailey and voted to ask all Devon district councils and the Local Government Association to agree to a legal challenge to “robustly” resist speculative development and uphold councils’ policies for where new houses should be built. 

Cllr Vicky Johns (Independent, Ottery St Mary) said: “Three-quarters of our area is covered by AONB [an area of outstanding natural beauty], and yet that is not taken into account at all in any way, shape or form when we’re allocated the housing that we’re supposed to put in.  

“We’ve already built all we’re supposed to have built and yet we’re still being told we need to build more, and build more, and build more. 

“I do agree that all the councils in the area should club together… and ask the government why they’re stating we have to do this when we don’t have the capacity to do it. It’s ridiculous.” 

Cllr Olly Davey (Green, Exmouth Town) added: “It’s understood as of January 2023, nearly 40 per cent of English local authorities could not demonstrate a five-year housing land supply, so the position EDDC finds itself in is by no means uncommon.” 

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Tories facing general election wipeout with just 130 seats, says polling guru

[But help is at hand for Simon. Under a proposed “career transition” scheme he could receive free advice with tasks such as writing a CV from a designated career coach. bbc.co.uk]

Rishi Sunak’s Conservatives are facing their worst ever result at the general election and could be left with just 130 seats, according to Professor Sir John Curtice.

Adam Forrest www.independent.co.uk 

The country’s top polling guru warned of the bleak situation faced by the Tories as they head into winter with the news dominated by infighting over the prime minister’s Rwanda deportation plan.

Prof Curtice said Mr Sunak’s party would be “lucky to win [many] more than 200 seats” and could see an even worse result if its dire poll ratings continued.

“If these patterns were to be replicated in a general election, the outcome for the Conservatives could be bleak indeed – maybe as few as 130 seats, the worst outcome in the party’s history,” he wrote for The Sunday Telegraph.

The outcome would be even worse than the 165 seats the Tories were left with in 1997, when the party, then led by John Major, was thumped by Tony Blair’s Labour – which won a landslide 179-seat majority.

With Labour enjoying a consistent polling lead of close to 20 points, Prof Curtice said voters appear to have “stopped listening” to the Tories on the big issues.

He warned Mr Sunak that his recent anti-immigration push had “not gone well”. The elections expert said it looked like the Rwanda bill “could divide the party just as [Theresa] May’s ill-fated Brexit deal did in 2019”.

On the major split currently looming in response to Mr Sunak’s plans, Prof Curtice wrote: “Divided parties rarely prosper at the polls. In pursuing their disagreements with Mr Sunak over immigration, Tory MPs should realise they are potentially playing with fire.”

He added: “Even though the polls have repeatedly indicated that the government’s Rwanda policy is relatively popular – at least among those who voted Conservative in 2019 – the first polls since this week’s developments suggest they also are unlikely to move the electoral dial.”

He continued: “We should not be surprised. Although many 2019 Conservative voters are unhappy about the level of legal and ‘illegal’ immigration, those who feel that immigration has gone up a lot are not especially likely to say they will not vote Conservative again.”

There is speculation at Westminster that Mr Sunak may be forced into a snap election in the early part of 2024 if he struggles to get his Rwanda bill through parliament.

But cabinet minister Michael Gove insisted that Mr Sunak’s government is “not contemplating” holding an early general election if the Rwanda bill is voted down. Asked if it was an option, the senior Sunak ally told Sky News: “No, we’re not contemplating that.”

A group of unnamed Tory MPs have told The Mail on Sunday that they would like to get rid of Mr Sunak – with some even keen to bring back Boris Johnson as leader.

Dubbed the “pasta plotters”, a small group of anti-Sunak MPs and strategists were said to have met at an Italian restaurant to plan “an Advent calendar of s***” for the current Tory leader over the Rwanda issue this December.

“Whatever you feel about him, one thing no one can question is [Mr Johnson]’s effectiveness as a campaigner,” one red-wall MP told the newspaper. But with Mr Johnson out of parliament, the so-called pasta plotters are said to be uncertain who could realistically replace Mr Sunak.

Damian Green – chair of the One Nation wing – offered a warning to any right-wing rebels pouncing on the Rwanda issue as a way to get rid of Mr Sunak.

“Anyone who thinks that what the Conservative Party or the country needs is a change of prime minister is either mad, or malicious, or both,” he told the BBC’s Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg.

Mr Green added: “It is a very, very small number doing that [plotting to oust Mr Sunak].”

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PPE bought via ‘VIP lane’ was on average 80% more expensive, documents reveal

“The British public are sick of being ripped off under the Conservatives. Billions of pounds of taxpayers’ money have been squandered … when it could have been spent in our schools, hospitals and police.” – Rachel Reeves, the shadow chancellor.

Rowena Mason www.theguardian.com 

PPE was on average 80% more expensive when the government bought it from firms referred through a special “VIP lane” by Conservative ministers, MPs and officials, new information has revealed.

The Good Law Project, which has long been investigating PPE deals during the Covid pandemic, said internal government documents showed that the unit price paid for items under VIP lane contracts was up to four times higher than average.

The organisation highlighted one example as being the cost of PPE delivered by Meller Designs, a fashion company at the time co-owned by the Tory donor David Meller, which was referred through the VIP lane by Michael Gove’s office. Meller Designs was awarded six PPE supply contracts worth £164m during the coronavirus pandemic.

In three of these contracts with Meller Designs, the government paid between 1.2 and 2.2 times the average unit price. The average price for medical gowns was £5.87 but the gowns bought from Meller Designs cost £12.64. About £8.46m worth of the equipment supplied by Meller Designs was later found to be not used in an NHS setting.

A spokesperson for Meller Designs said: “Meller Designs approached the government in March 2020 and offered to supply PPE for the NHS and other essential public services.

“We are extremely proud of the role we played at the height of the Covid-19 crisis and managed to secure more than 100m items of PPE – including masks, sanitiser, coveralls and gloves direct from the manufacturers – at a time when they were most needed. This PPE was used in hospitals and by emergency services throughout the country.

“In responding to the national emergency, we were able to rely on our many years’ experience of sourcing, testing and quality control of a wide range of products.

“As a company Meller Designs has been in business for more than 100 years but we can honestly say this was one of the most difficult and important contracts we have ever been asked to respond to and we would like to thank all our colleagues who worked so hard to make it happen.”

Responding to the PPE figures, Rachel Reeves, the shadow chancellor, said: “The British public are sick of being ripped off under the Conservatives. Billions of pounds of taxpayers’ money have been squandered … when it could have been spent in our schools, hospitals and police.

“That is why Labour will appoint a [commissioner] to go through pandemic contracts line by line and whenever they have failed to deliver, we will clawback every pound we can for the public.”

A Department of Health and Social Care spokesperson said its priority throughout the pandemic “was to save lives and we acted swiftly to procure PPE at the height of the pandemic, competing in an overheated global market where demand massively outstripped supply”.

“Due diligence was carried out on all companies and every company was subjected to the same checks,” the spokesperson said.

Separately, the Conservative peer Michelle Mone said she was wrong to publicly deny involvement in a PPE firm now under investigation by the National Crime Agency (NCA).

Lady Mone released a YouTube documentary in which she and her husband, Douglas Barrowman, launched a fightback “because we have done nothing wrong”.

Mone had lobbied ministers, including the communities secretary, Michael Gove, and officials for PPE Medpro to win contracts and it went on to obtain £200m in deals to supply masks and medical gowns. Her lawyers subsequently denied to the Guardian repeatedly that she was involved in the firm.

The DHSC is suing PPE Medpro for the full return of the £122m it paid for the surgical gowns but never used, claiming they were unsafe for use in the NHS. The company is defending the claim.

The NCA has been conducting an investigation into PPE Medpro since May 2021, which is continuing.

Gove said he could not comment on matters under NCA investigation but insisted it was wrong for anyone to suggest that ministers were doing favours for their contacts.

He told the BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg on Sunday: “Ministers did not take individual decisions about who should receive contracts … teams of civil servants assessed the worthiness of any contracts put forward.

“The suggestion that somehow ministers were seeking to deliberately do favours for or line the pockets of other individuals is totally unjustified because the decisions were only taken after a proper coherent and fair procurement process.”

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Housing crisis poses threat to survival of rural communities – CPRE Report

www.cpre.org.uk

An affordable, healthy home is the foundation for a decent life. But our new report shows that rural communities in England are facing an existential threat from an acute and overlooked shortage of genuinely affordable housing.

The report, entitled ‘Unraveling a crisis: the state of rural affordable housing in England’, launched today and lays bare the impact of this crisis on real people, along with what is needed to fix it.

Read the report

‘Chronic shortage’ of affordable housing

A chronic shortage of genuinely affordable housing is creating huge social housing waiting lists and forcing people out of the communities they know and love. This worrying crisis is being fed by record house prices, stagnating wages and an increasing number of second homes and short term lets.

The countryside, where levels of homelessness have leapt 40% in just five years, is being drained of skills, economic activity and vital public services.

There is an extreme disparity between rural house prices, which are higher than those in other parts of the country, and rural wages, which are much lower. House prices in the countryside increased at close to twice the rate of those in urban areas in the five years to 2022. While the average cost of a home jumped 29% and is now £419,000, rural earnings increased by just 19% to a total of £25,600.

89-year waiting lists

More than 300,000 people are on waiting lists for social rented housing in rural England, an increase of over 10% since 2018. At the current rate of construction, it would take 89 years to offer a home to everyone on the waiting list. Current planning policies allow for the building of new ‘affordable’ housing costing anything up to 80% of market value. This means that in many rural areas the ‘affordable homes’ being provided are often anything but.

Local authorities have not replaced social housing at the rate properties have been sold under the Right to Buy policy, leading to a chronic shortage of housing for people who need it most.

Damaging short-term lets and second homes

In Cornwall, where more than 15,000 families are on social housing waiting lists, the number of properties for short-term let, (at much higher prices than social rents), grew by 661% in the five years to 2021. Half of the families on social housing waiting lists in South Lakeland could be accommodated in local properties available exclusively as holiday rentals. Devon has seen 4,000 homes taken off the private rental market and 11,000 new short-term listings since 2016.

The government has legal powers to protect council housing purchased under the Right to Buy scheme from being sold off at market rates or as second homes. Our research is the first published study to look at the overall coverage of these so-called ‘Section 157’ powers.

We found that these powers only apply to half of all rural parishes in England. They exclude whole counties such as Bedfordshire and Cambridgeshire, and also large towns. There are several large towns, particularly in south west England, where there is a particular lack of affordable housing.

‘Decades of inaction’

CPRE’s Chief Executive Roger Mortlock said:

‘Decades of inaction have led to an affordable housing crisis that is ripping the soul from our rural communities. Solutions do exist and the next government must set and deliver ambitious targets for new, genuinely affordable and social rented rural housing, curbing the boom of second homes and short-term lets.

‘Record house prices and huge waiting lists for social housing are driving people out of rural communities, contributing to soaring levels of often hidden rural homelessness. We need urgent change to ensure we don’t end up with rural communities that are pricing out the very people needed to keep them vibrant.’

Urgent recommendations

The report contains a list of recommendations that CPRE believes will help to solve the severe housing crisis in the countryside. It includes calls for the government to:

  • Redefine ‘affordable housing’ to directly link to average local incomes
  • Increase the minimum amount of genuinely affordable housing required by national planning policy and implement ambitious targets for the construction of social rented homes.
  • Support local communities to deliver small-scale developments of genuinely affordable housing and make it easier for councils to purchase land at reasonable prices, enabling the construction of social housing and vital infrastructure.
  • Introduce a register of second homes and short-term lets, with new powers for local authorities to levy additional council tax on second homes.
  • Extend restrictions on the resale of ‘affordable housing’ to all parishes with fewer than 3,000 inhabitants to ensure local workers can continue to use properties, rather then allowing them to become second homes or holiday lets.

Read the full report

Read our 2023 affordable housing report here. We’ve also created a jargon-busting explainer, to help readers interpret the report and understand some of the key policy mechanisms.

An affordable housing scheme in Cornwall Kevin Britland / Alamy Stock Photo