Daily Archives: 4 Mar 2024

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4 Mar 2024

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Planning applications validated by EDDC for week beginning 19 February

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4 Mar 2024

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The UK Government is reported to have wastefully spent or dubiously allocated £125.5m since 2019

Scandalous spending tracker

That’s right, the UK Government has scandalously spent £125,554,393,254 since 2019.

As Chancellor and now Prime Minister, Rishi Sunak has had responsibility for government spending for almost all of this period.

Posted by Best for Britain www.bestforbritain.org 

It’s easy to become numb to the scale and frequency of the Government’s fiscal ineptitude and dodginess, and all at a time when ordinary people struggle to pay bills and public services are crumbling.

The total does not include the catastrophic hit to public finances from the Government’s Brexit deal which has crippled businesses, slowed economic growth, and is estimated to be costing around £100bn per year. Similarly, the total does not include the titanic economic cost of the disastrous mini-budget which increased bills for mortgage payers across the country and which ended Liz Truss’ premiership after 6 weeks.

It does, however, include figures like the devastating £290m sunk on the Government’s cruel, unworkable and unlawful Rwanda Deal. It also includes a whopping £2.3bn spent on cancelled parts of HS2, and £50m spent on a new helicopter for top Tories. 

We’ll keep it updated as new revelations come to light so check back to get the latest eye-watering figure. What’s clear is that every day this government remains in power is more money wasted. Find out what we’re doing about it at GetVoting.org.

The data

The total figure is an estimate using publicly available data. You can find the full list of scandalous spending along with sources here. 

We’ve categorised each entry as either a Crony Contract (such as giving government contracts to Conservative chums), a Duff Deal (like blowing billions on stuff that doesn’t work) or an Outrageous Outgoing (including spending silly money on interior design).

Keep informed

Make sure you keep up to date, join Best for Britain’s mailing list and be the first to hear about our work and campaigns.

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4 Mar 2024

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Dismay as UK government halts cash for world-renowned Covid programme

Does this government reinforce success? Invest in preparedness for the next pandemic? Of course not. – Owl

It changed the treatment of Covid-19 patients across the globe, saved thousands of lives by pinpointing cheap, effective drugs during the pandemic, and earned Britain widespread praise from international groups of scientists.

Robin McKie www.theguardian.com 

But now government support for the UK Recovery programme is to end. In a few weeks’ time, central financing for the programme will halt. The scheme will only be able to continue thanks to funding from a group of US-based philanthropists.

The move has dismayed senior scientists who say it is another worrying example of the UK’s life sciences sector being short-changed by government. “We knew Recovery had huge potential and that was realised in a very short period during Covid. But now that dream is being unrealised,” said Prof Peter Horby, one of the co-founders of Recovery.

And it is not just the value of Recovery that has been ignored as the pandemic has ended, added Horby. “Britain did some of the world’s best clinical trials, vaccine development, and genomics work, but a lot of that has just been thrown away or starved of investment. Yet we badly need to be alert to the dangers of future pandemics.”

Recovery – the Randomised Evaluation of Covid-19 Therapy – is a drug-testing programme that, at the height of the pandemic, involved thousands of doctors and nurses working with tens of thousands of Covid-19 patients in hospitals across Britain. Trials were carried out in intensive care units and wards crammed with seriously ill patients.

“In day-to-day, regular clinical medicine, it’s absolutely critical to work out the difference between what you think might work, what actually works – and what doesn’t,” said Prof Martin Landray, Recovery’s other co-founder. “Recovery did exactly that.”

The programme managed to pinpoint four effective medicines, while conclusively showing that eight overhyped drugs were not. For example, the anti-malarial drug hydroxychloroquine – widely touted by Donald Trump as a Covid-19 treatment – was shown to provide no help for patients. By contrast, dexamethasone, a cheap treatment for inflammation and arthritis, was found to reduce deaths by a third among patients on ventilators in ICUs. No other nation came close to matching these achievements.

“Other countries, including Canada and the US, have made it clear they are extremely envious of what Britain did with Recovery and are preparing to spend considerable sums in setting up similar schemes – at a time when we seem to be losing interest collectively in the programme. And I think that is a shame,” added Landray.

Recovery in the UK will survive thanks to Flu Lab, an American philanthropic organisation dedicated to battling the future flu epidemics, with the programme being extended to investigate new treatments for flu as well as Covid under the new deal.

The decision by the UK government not to continue to support Recovery comes against a worrying background, which has seen Britain fall badly behind other countries in conducting clinical studies, where new medicines are tested on volunteers to make sure they are safe and work, and to monitor any side effects. The Swiss firm Novartis recently scrapped a large trial of a cholesterol drug in Britain, for example.

“We’ve been dropping down the league table when it comes to doing trials so that we are now below Italy, Poland, France and many other countries. The state of the NHS is part of the problem but it is nevertheless worrying,” said Horby.

“I welcome the government’s ambition for the UK to become a scientific superpower but if you look at what is happening today, we seem to be heading in the wrong direction.”

This point was backed by Landray, who warned that it was crucial the UK was prepared for the arrival of future pandemics. “You don’t get ready to fight the next war by disbanding the army just because it’s peacetime,” he told the Observer.

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4 Mar 2024

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Is Simon Jupp ready to “step up to the plate”?

Jeremy Hunt has given over £100k to local Tory party in effort to retain seat

Jeremy Hunt has been forced to contribute more than £100,000 of his own money to his constituency Conservative party to bolster his chances of re-election, official records show, amid warnings that he is set to lose his seat.

Aletha Adu www.theguardian.com 

Hunt’s Godalming and Ash constituency is a target seat for the Liberal Democrats, and a Survation poll projects that he is on course to become the first chancellor in modern times to lose at a general election.

Electoral Commission records show that he has given £105,261 to the South-west Surrey Conservative association over the last five years.

The chancellor’s personal donations to the association under the last three Conservative prime ministers stand in stark contrast to the total £4,447 he gifted under the leadership of Theresa May and David Cameron.

The most recent accounts for Hunt’s local association have warned that its “balance sheet is at a less than satisfactory level”. A note stated that members’ annual subscriptions were due to increase this year.

Donations to the chancellor’s association were down by almost 50% in 2021. South West Surrey received only £42,693 in donationsthat year, down from over £80,000 in 2020.

A Labour source said: “This tells you everything you need to know about the state of the Conservative party, with the chancellor seemingly spending more time dishing out personal cheques to prolong his political career than fixing the economy his government has wrecked.

“And on the same day the chancellor is talking about clamping down on money being wasted, he might want to look at how he is spending some of his own money.”

Hunt said on Sunday: “I hope to be chancellor after the election.” However, the poll in his constituency shows the Lib Dems on 35% of the vote, the Tories on 29% and Labour on 22%. When local voters were asked to outline the issues that would determine how they would vote, health and the NHS was top, while only 4% said tax was a key issue.

Daisy Cooper, the deputy leader of the Liberal Democrats, said: “It’s no wonder that Jeremy Hunt is on the brink of his losing his seat when people across Surrey are furious they can’t get GP appointments, that their hospitals have been left to crumble, and water firms are still allowed to pollute their rivers.

“In the chancellor’s own back yard, food bank demand is surging after his government failed to get a grip on the cost of living crisis. Liberal Democrats are fired up in Surrey to oust Conservative MPs who have taken people for granted.”

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Does South West Water have a cunning plan?

Correspondence with Karen Crawford, Exmouth resident and year round swimmer, reveals how South West Water (SWW) could be “gaming” the much trumpeted tougher regulations to their, but not our, advantage.

Water companies now have to fit emergency discharge monitors (EDM) on combined sewer outfalls to report spills and their duration (not volume). This will be a metric which politicians will use to demonstrate that our rivers and bathing waters are “improving” and water companies will use to award bonuses and avoid penalties. 

SSW claim that they are investing £38m in Exmouth and Sandy bay to reduce pollution.

It seems that, so far, an impressive £14m has been invested in upgrading the main Exmouth discharge pipe out to sea from Sandy Bay/Straight Point. 

Do you remember seeing this strange floating structure off Straight Point in 2022?

This means that much more treated water can be discharged in normal circumstances and raw sewage in times of overload. Possibly four times as much.

However, improvements to the Maer Lane treatment works are only at an initial or “concept” stage for starting in 2028. I.e.there will be no increase in treatment capacity until at least then, realistically a lot, lot later. And we continue to build more houses.

Meanwhile, SWW is giving priority to upgrading the pumps at surrounding sewage pumping stations. These are tanks used to collect local sewage which is then pumped to the treatment works. Improving the pumps means they will be able to reduce the discharges at 5 or 6 EDM sites by increasing capacity to send more sewage directly out to sea through the trunk main. So 5 or 6 potential discharges could be reduced to a single, combined one, instead.

Remember, SWW committed to building treatment works for the new development locally at Cranbrook but changed their mind and used Countess Weir. Now, Maer Lane and Countess Weir have no spare capacity at all. Both treatment works discharge at the first sign of rain.

So investing in increasing the pipe capacity from Maer Lane into the sea and upgrading the pumps at pumping stations, is a quick win for the government and SWW but doesn’t do anything for us or the environment.

Sandy Bay has already gone from “Excellent” to “Sufficient” bathing water quality in just a few years. 

It all seems a bit topsy-turvy to Owl who would have thought that the first priority would be to increase treatment capacity.

Evidence can be found here.