Developers want to build a £25million hotel complex.

The first steps could be taken next week to protect Brixham’s Breakwater Beach area from over-development.

Guy Henderson – Local Democracy Reporter www.radioexe.co.uk 

Members of Torbay Council’s cabinet committee will be recommended to make the council-owned car park beside the beach an ‘asset of community value’, which could mean curtains for recent proposals to redevelop the area.

Listing a place as an asset of community value acknowledges that its main use is ‘to further the social wellbeing or social interests of the local community’. If the car park area is listed, the local community would also get the opportunity to club together and buy it if the council ever decided to sell.

The car park is caught up in plans which were unveiled by developers last summer to ‘transform’ the Breakwater Beach area. Hundreds of local people queued across it to examine the plans when they went on show at the Breakwater Bistro.

Many were furious at what they said was a ‘monstrosity’ which would overshadow the beach and ruin the area.

Earlier this year the designers said they were going back to the drawing board to come up with something more acceptable.

The original £25 million hotel complex would have created a 44-bed hotel, spa and beachside bistro. But the multi-coloured design was compared to the fictional village setting in the children’s TV show Balamory.

Jack Turton, who owns the bistro, said new plans would be drawn up as a result of the feedback he had received. He said his scheme would bring new jobs and more tourists to Brixham.

He said he understood concerns over the beach, and pledged that his proposals would not include any development on the beach. He also warned that the current bistro building had structural issues and would need ‘radical’ redevelopment soon.

“The most important thing is that we get it right,” he said. “We’re not here to just build. We’re trying to do something that suits Brixham.”

Nearly 5,000 people joined an online protest group, and local MP Anthony Mangnall promised to present a petition to parliament. Opponents of the development are planning to be at the cabinet meeting next week.

The Breakwater Beach Community Group has made the application to have the area listed, and council officers are advising the cabinet to say yes.

They say: “We want Torbay and its residents to thrive, and consideration should be given to safeguarding amenities which are of great local significance to the places where people live and work.”

The listing would last for at least five years.

In the application the group says Breakwater Beach is a ‘much-loved local asset’ and the car park area provides important access to it.

The request says: “The beauty of the beach is that it is fairly unspoiled and has an old world charm that draws families back to it time and time again.

“The views from the beach are exceptional. It is, as a result, popular 12 months of the year.”

Justine Greening, education secretary and minister for women and equalities, 2016-18, and Conservative MP for Putney, 2005-19. www.theguardian.com

Last week’s local election results may finally have sunk Rishi Sunak’s Conservative party. It lost all but one of the 11 mayoralty contests, and while Ben Houchen held on in Tees Valley, it was with a diminished majority. Labour were out of sight in winning the Blackpool South byelection with a 26% swing, and more broadly in local elections across England the Tories lost nearly half the council seats they were defending.

These losses are staggering, but so too is the reaction of would-be Tory rebels, the Reform-lite group. They have suggested they will not challenge Sunak now; as Suella Braverman put it, it is Sunak who should “own this and fix it”. It is the height of political self-unawareness – because it is their political gameplan that Sunak’s rudderless No 10 has been attempting to follow. It is as a result of their flawed political judgments that support for the party has plummeted the length and breadth of the country, and across generations of voters – so much so that shockingly, the party only now leads in the over-70s voter age group. The 2024 local election results are their responsibility to “own”, not just the prime minister’s.

Time after time, Sunak has pivoted more sharply towards this group’s uniquely unpopular political agenda, whether in his bizarre conference speech attacking the 30 year failed status quo, raging against the apparently omnipresent “woke” agenda, stoking divisive but headline-grabbing culture wars – or even now threatening to leave the European convention on human rights.

And the more Sunak has danced to the Reform-lite political tune, the worse the party has done in the polls. Far from suggesting that the party should continue with more of the same, Thursday’s election results show that voters are rejecting the very Reform-inspired agenda it has pursued. This direction has so clearly taken the party backwards, to the extent it could barely scrape second place in Blackpool South, the latest byelection disaster for the Conservatives. To suggest, as they now do, that Sunak should try harder with a strategy that has already proved to have failed is self-serving madness.

It’s also bad maths. In places like Blackpool South or London, even combining Conservative and Reform UK voters into a “coalition” of support would be insufficient for winning a general election. In London, after deliberate overnight speculation on Friday that the race would be tight, the Tory mayoral candidate performed even worse than last time. Meanwhile, in Braverman’s own patch of Fareham, the party lost councillors to the Lib Dems. The madness is that when it comes to the national picture, the party finds itself battling for a small pool of voters with the third-placed party, Reform, while abandoning and alienating many more in the centre ground of British politics to Labour, which is first place by a wide margin.

Theirs is a strategy that has tripped up at every hurdle. Today’s Reform-lite Conservatives are losing badly, and more of the same cannot be the solution.

The problem is that they have no positive vision for our country, just a long list of things and people they dislike and oppose as they tilt at any “woke” windmill they can conjure up. These issues are irrelevant and a turn-off for most voters.

Crucially, the promise of levelling up that voters across the country bought into – whether north or south, leave or remain – has been arrogantly ditched by them and Sunak. While continually pointing the finger at “elites”, they nevertheless seem to have little to say on how we fundamentally level up Britain so that everyone can have fair access to opportunities, irrespective of background.

Yet whether you call it levelling up, breaking down barriers, or equality of opportunity, the local election results show that it is the candidate and party that voters believe can practically deliver for them and their families that consistently wins elections in today’s Britain.

In Tees Valley, Houchen managed to hold back the political tide through demonstrably driving greater access to opportunity for local people and giving his own region the chance to be part of Britain’s economic success of the future. In Harlow, where a concerted effort on levelling up has been made by the council, county council and the respected local MP Robert Halfon, the Conservatives held on. Andy Street may have lost the West Midlands mayoralty but he is a politician respected across the party divides as having a track record of delivery. His demand for a moderate, tolerant and inclusive Conservative party is correct and the antithesis to culture-war-driven Reform-lite Conservatives. Unlike them, he should have a role in any future Conservative revival.

By contrast, Reform-lite Conservatives, like Labour’s Corbynites, are far more consumed by making ideological political arguments, theorising about deep-state plots and demonstrating they are disconnected from our day-to-day lives, than setting out proposals on the necessary, ambitious and comprehensive plan Britain needs for driving social mobility.

Stepping back from a Conservative leadership coup they clearly assume would fail suggests they believe they cannot even win the argument within their own party, let alone the wider country. Yet they still plan to wage the equivalent of a coup in public anyway. They may say it’s about forcing Sunak to own the results, but that’s just an excuse. What they really want is for Sunak to continue to carry the can for their own failing political strategy. They are simply getting their excuses in early, unable to see what everyone else in the country can: that they are the people turning off millions of voters from voting Conservative. And the longer this goes on, the more damage they will do to the party, and the harder it will be to regain public trust.

Bluntly, they are the problem the Conservative party now needs to face down if it is ever to electorally prosper again. As long as Reform-lite continues to loudly monopolise the debate, banging on with their futile finger-pointing and vote-losing culture wars, they prevent the wider party from confronting the hard truths about where it goes next.

Conservationists in the Thames Valley have warned they cannot carry out river restoration works because constant sewage discharges are making the water too “unsafe” to enter.

Lucie Heath inews.co.uk

Rivers in the Colne Valley, which sits to the west of London, are being taken over by invasive species that choke aquatic life because volunteers have been left unable to enter the water to clear them, campaigners say.

Lara Clements, a rivers officer working with the Colne Catchment Action Network, told i she has been forced to cancel eight restoration events in the past six months. This accounts for around a third of the events she had organised.

The meetings are cancelled at the last minute when Thames Water’s online map shows that raw sewage has been discharged in the area.

“It’s incredibly unsafe to send volunteers into a river of sewage,” Ms Clements said.

She co-ordinates the removal of floating pennywort, a non-native weed, from rivers in the area. Introduced to the UK from the Americas in the 1980s, the plant is incredibly invasive to the point that it is banned from sale and is illegal to cause it to grow in the wild.

“Floating pennywort outcompetes native aquatic vegetation, so you lose native biodiversity and native wildlife,” Ms Clements said.

“In situations when it gets really bad, it can literally cover the whole river so you can’t see the river… you can end up in a situation where it blocks the light and deoxygenates the entire river so you basically get dead zones.”

Ms Clements said there are certain areas in the region that volunteers have been unable to enter for months due to constant sewage spills from Thames Water.

Thames Water said it was committed to minimising its impact on the environment and that increased investment was needed to meet ageing infrastructure and demand.

Water companies are permitted to release untreated sewage from points in their network known as “storm overflows” during periods of exception rainfall to prevent their systems from becoming overwhelmed and sewage backing up into people’s homes.

But public anger is rising over how often water companies are doing this, and the impact these discharges are having on rivers.

Latest official data show water companies across England spilled sewage 464,056 times in 2023.

Ms Clements said the River Misbourne, a chalk stream that runs through Buckinghamshire, has been particularly affected by sewage spills. In February, i reported that the river had become so polluted from sewage that the local drinking water company, Affinity Water, was forced to temporarily stop extracting water.

An image taken of the river just downstream from Gerrards Cross Sewage treatment works in December last year shows the water completely covered in floating pennywort. Ms Clements said it has still not been cleared as it has been too unsafe to enter the water.

“The environmental incident declared on the River Misbourne has basically meant that carrying out any pennywort removal there is impossible. I have the capacity and the funding to go and do this work, I just can’t do it. The condition of the river is completely unsafe for me to be in it and volunteers to be working around it,” Ms Clements said.

“It’s just really disappointing,” she added. “You can’t predict it… We don’t know what the situation is going to be. We don’t know when a sewage discharge might stop so it’s really hard to work out and strategise what to do and there isn’t a lot of advice available.”

A Thames Water spokesperson said: “While all discharges are unacceptable, the sewage system was historically designed in this way, to relieve pressure and prevent overflow into people’s homes.

“We appreciate how much waterways are loved and enjoyed by everyone, and we are committed to minimising our impact on the environment, but we can’t do it alone. Farming, industry, livestock and more extreme weather also play a role in river health.

“We have published plans to upgrade over 250 of our sites across our region, including Gerrards Cross sewage treatment works. At the vast majority of our sites this will increase capacity and reduce the number of necessary discharges.

“More investment is needed across the entire sector, as infrastructure ages and demand on it increases. That’s why we’ve asked for increased investment in the next regulatory cycle between 2025-30.

“We were the first company to publish an online map providing close to real-time information about storm discharges from all our permitted locations, putting transparency at the heart of what we do.”

Two workers at Ottery St Mary’s Silver Otter Café have earned food hygiene qualifications, thanks to a grant from the town council.

Philippa Davies http://www.sidmouthherald.co.uk 

The council gave £2,278 to the Able2Achieve scheme operating at the café, which supports people with learning difficulties and promotes independence. The money has paid for two laptops and online courses. The first two learners to benefit were Josh and Kerry, who have completed a level 2 food hygiene course and passed the exam.

Helen Holmes, Enterprise Coordinator, said:  “Together we are looking at further courses they can take, plus investigating roles they are now qualified for. We expect our other learners to qualify soon.

“The grant has been a real boost to how much training can be completed and also pays for a number of learners to complete upcoming courses.”

The laptops have also been used to help create CVs for learners with Able2Achieve, and search for jobs and work placements that match the qualifications they are about to acquire.

A spokesperson for Ottery St Mary Town Council said: “We are delighted to be able to support the amazing work of Helen and her team at Able2Achieve.”