Matt Hancock is under mounting pressure to explain why the government failed to protect care home residents at the outset of the Covid pandemic, as he sought to salvage his reputation after Dominic Cummings accused him of lying.

Heather Stewart www.theguardian.com 

The health secretary claimed for the first time it “wasn’t possible” to test all care home residents for Covid before they were discharged from hospital last March, because the testing capacity was not yet available.

But the shadow social care minister, Liz Kendall, said that explanation “simply doesn’t stack up”.

“There were over 530,000 tests carried out in the UK by 20 April, yet they couldn’t test 25,000 people discharged from hospitals to care homes, after we saw it sweep through care homes in Italy, France and America?” she said. “The reality is, they wanted to free up the beds and they didn’t prioritise older people.”

She accused Hancock, who previously claimed to have thrown a “protective ring” around care homes, of changing his story to “wriggle out” of responsibility.

On Wednesday, during seven hours of evidence to MPs, Cummings accused Hancock of promising ministers that all care residents in England were tested before being discharged back to their homes and then lying about this.

Hancock denied the claim and a No 10 spokesperson said on Thursday night : “The prime minister has full confidence in the health secretary and will continue working with him to protect public health and save lives.”

The UK has one of the world’s worst coronavirus death tolls: more than 127,000 people have died including more than 40,000 care home residents.

Data from Public Health England (PHE) released on Thursday found the transfer of patients with Covid from hospital to care homes resulted in 286 deaths. It said 96 outbreaks in care homes were related to this problem – about 1.6% of all care home outbreaks – and that the vast majority of these were identified during a matter of weeks in March and April 2020.

While PHE said the number of care home outbreaks seeded by hospital patients being discharged with the virus was “relatively small”, the “potential for their preventability … must be fully acknowledged”.

Many at Westminster believe Hancock may have been saved from being reshuffled out of his post by Cummings’ attack because the prime minister will not want to appear to be following the prompting of his embittered former aide.

Hancock’s defence at a Downing Street press conference came after Boris Johnson’s former chief adviser repeatedly took aim at the health secretary. In particular, he claimed Hancock had lied to the prime minister, falsely telling him care home residents would be tested before being discharged from hospital.

Hancock did not directly refute that claim at the press conference. He said his “recollection of events” was that “I committed to getting the policy in place but it took time to build the testing”.

He added: “I then went away and built the testing capacity … and then delivered on the commitment that I made.” He also defended his 100,000-a-day testing target, which Cummings claimed had distorted government priorities.

Cummings, who was ousted from No 10 in November, said that despite Hancock’s promise in March, testing of hospital patients being moved to care homes “only happened very partially and sporadically” – meaning Covid “spread like wildfire inside” them.

The Conservative MP Dan Poulter said Hancock’s remarks suggested there should be an immediate inquiry into Covid-related deaths in care homes.

Poulter, who is vice-chair of the all-party-parliamentary group on Covid, said: “It is one of the most troubling aspects of this pandemic that the elderly have borne the brunt despite being the most vulnerable in society. We must ensure these mistakes are not repeated and that care homes are never again treated as an afterthought in pandemic planning.”

Allies of Hancock have reacted furiously to Cummings’ testimony, saying he frequently briefed journalists against the health secretary and falsely took credit for his successes. One friend suggested Cummings may have had a grudge against Hancock since the pair were both Conservative advisers during the coalition government a decade ago.

Johnson himself dismissed Cummings’ claims on Thursday, saying they didn’t “bear any relation to reality”.

Cummings claimed the prime minister was unfit to lead the country through the pandemic, still regretted ordering the first lockdown last spring and had stubbornly rejected scientific advice last September. Cummings told stunned MPs at his marathon hearing that “tens of thousands of people died, who didn’t need to die”.

In response to questions during a trip to a hospital in Essex, Johnson denied that his delay in ordering a second lockdown last autumn against the advice of scientific advisers led to unnecessary deaths.

The prime minister said he had grappled with the question of whether to enforce another lockdown, which he knew would be a “very, very painful, traumatic thing for people” and had to “set that against the horrors of the pandemic”.

He insisted: “At every stage, we’ve been governed by a determination to protect life, to save life, to ensure that our NHS is not overwhelmed, and we’ve followed to the best we can the data and the guidance that we’ve had.”

Hancock faces his own grilling before the health and technology committees in June, where he is likely to be quizzed about the situation in care homes and the availability of personal protective equipment.

The shadow health secretary, Jonathan Ashworth, also wrote to Hancock on Thursday, claiming he had been “disrespectful” towards the families of Covid victims by dodging critical questions at an earlier hearing before MPs.

Update on our local “Golden Opportunity” and cornerstone of economic growth as our LEP, Heart of the South West (HotSW), would have us believe. – Owl

Another 1,700 workers are to be hired over the next year to help build the Hinkley C nuclear power plant in Somerset

By Dave Harvey Business Correspondent, BBC West www.bbc.co.uk

The new roles will bring the total working on the site to more than 7,000, according to EDF, the French energy firm leading the project.

The plant is due to open in June 2026 and not in 2025 as planned and will cost between £22bn and £23bn.

But critics have pointed out that Hinkley’s energy will be expensive.

Why does Hinkley need these extra people?

When the power station plan was first approved, EDF predicted the workforce would peak at around 5,000.

Although construction never stopped at Hinkley during the pandemic, work certainly slowed down.

Every day, thousands of workers are brought in by fleets of buses but necessary social distancing cut the numbers on each bus, making it harder to get them in. On site, new Covid safety rules mean every job takes a little longer.

Firms supplying parts and raw materials have also fallen behind. Overall, EDF admitted the project has gone about six months behind schedule.

The plant is due to open in June 2026 and not in 2025 as planned and will cost between £22bn and £23bn.

Those planning the construction have also changed their approach.

Originally, they had planned different types of work in sequence: first big groundworks, then civil engineering like huge concrete structures, then electrical and mechanical systems.

Now they can do many of these jobs at the same time, speeding up progress, but requiring more people.

Where will they all come from?

The company promised that at least a third of its employees would be local. During the original row over planning for Hinkley, opponents claimed that local people would only get unskilled, low-paid jobs.

EDF insisted they would hire and train people in Somerset, and they have spent millions with local colleges doing so.

Since 2016 the company has trained 14,000 people via schemes such as a new welding skills centre at Bridgwater College.

Tracie Skinner is one of the most recent trainees. At 45, she has had several different jobs, but thinks the welding qualification will open up better job opportunities.

“It’s a new skill full of possibilities,” she said.

Tracie Skinner is a trainee welder on a course paid for by EDF Energy at Bridgwater College

“I’m not sure where it’s going to lead me. I might end up as the Banksy of welding, or working out at Hinkley, or wherever.”

About 9,000 people like Ms Skinner have registered with EDF’s Hinkley job agency.

When contractors on the project need people, they ask the on-site agency to find them first, rather than advertising nationwide. As a result, about 35% of the workforce is local.

Local companies have also won contracts to work on the project, through a match-making scheme run by the Somerset Chamber of Commerce.

One of them is a small electrical firm called Elecsis, based in Bridgwater, which makes hi-tech switching gear for electrical control systems.

I first met Chris Pratt, the managing director, at a breakfast meeting run by EDF for local firms in 2012.

After nearly a decade of waiting, listening, then designing and pitching for work, he has finally got a contract.

This time I met him in the middle of the huge building site, examining the building where his equipment will eventually go.

“It’s going to be quite something when the boys actually get on site and start fitting,” he told me.

“The design work alone has taken 18 months, being involved with a nuclear power station takes some doing.”

Who is paying for it all?

EDF. The original contract signed with the government in 2016 agreed that any cost overruns would be paid by EDF, not the UK Government or British electricity bill-payers.

The price for Hinkley’s electricity was fixed in a so-called “strike price” at £92 per megawatt hour, rising with inflation. That will not go up beyond that limit, even if the costs of building Hinkley Point C rise.

But critics have pointed out that Hinkley’s energy will be expensive.

The latest offshore wind farms have agreed strike prices of around £40 per megawatt hour.

Roy Pomfrey lives near the plant and has been a member of the Stop Hinkley campaign since the beginning.

“This increase is just evidence that EDF have made a complete pig’s ear of their calculations from the start,” he told me.

“If we’d put the money into renewables from the outset, we would already have a return on our investment.

“Renewables are already, at most, half the price of Hinkley, and while Hinkley will only get dearer, the cost of renewable energy will only come down.”

When will it be finished?

The latest forecast date for Hinkley Point C to generate electricity is 2026.

That is nearly nine years after the switch-on originally predicted in 2007 by EDF’s UK chief executive, Vincent de Rivaz.

Many of the subsequent delays were political, as the Conservative/Liberal Democrat coalition government agonised over nuclear power and haggled with EDF over the price.

But there have also been construction problems, and then the pandemic set it back another six months.

Eventually, Hinkley Point C will provide 7% of the UK’s total electricity

Now the company clearly hopes to accelerate out of lockdown.

Eventually, Hinkley Point C will provide 7% of the UK’s total electricity and catering for up to six million homes.

The full 2021 Hinkley Point C Socio-Economic Impact report can be read here.

Plans for Hinkley Point C were announced more than a decade ago and they gained government approval in 2016.

Hinkley Point A ceased producing electricity in 2000, while Hinkley Point B will be decommissioned no later than July 2022 due to its age.

A self-serving witness can still give evidence that is both damning and true.

www.theguardian.com

A year ago, Dominic Cummings gave a press conference from the garden of 10 Downing Street to explain why he, as the prime minister’s most powerful adviser, should be allowed to breach lockdown rules when ordinary citizens were confined to their homes. His explanation, involving the claim to have tested his eyesight by driving with his family in the car, was famously improbable.

That episode damages Mr Cummings’ credibility as a witness before a committee of MPs seeking to learn lessons from the government’s handling of the pandemic. No one who watched Wednesday’s testimony was left doubting that he intended to settle scores and divert blame away from himself. He apologised for mistakes that were made, but as a prelude to self-exculpation, even over that family trip to County Durham. His regret was not having acted sooner to contradict a prevailing government view last March that the virus should be allowed to run through the population, generating natural immunity. He had been right all along, and should have forced the prime minister to act, he said. Well he would, wouldn’t he, as Mandy Rice-Davies might have observed.

A self-serving motive does not render the whole account invalid. Much of it is corroborated by other sources and the evidence of what happened to the country. Even when it was clear that Britain was heading quickly towards catastrophe, the prime minister was either unwilling or psychologically unable to take the necessary action.

As the crisis unfolded, this fundamental flaw in Boris Johnson’s character resurfaced as the cause of confusion, delay and, by extension, unnecessary death. Mr Cummings reports that the prime minister likes “chaos” as a mode of government because it forces others to await his arbitration, thereby bolstering his power. That is consistent with other accounts of Mr Johnson’s modus operandi: maintaining a deliberately weak cabinet, contradicting himself, making false public statements, making policy commitments one day and U-turning the next, procrastinating while the options narrow. That temperamental inadequacy would be problematic under normal circumstances. During a pandemic, it has proved lethal.

Some of the worst failings of government were, no doubt, compounded by mediocrity and a lack of agility throughout Whitehall. Mr Cummings is right to raise the alarm about a civil contingencies apparatus that existed to cope with rare emergencies and failed to perform that one basic function when required. The threat of a pandemic had been known for years, yet the government found itself making up the plan as it went along.

For all the systemic unreadiness and alleged dishonesty of cabinet ministers, the central problem – the broken piece in the machine that escalated every hazard into a disaster – was the man whose job it was to lead. No country went into the pandemic fully prepared. All had to improvise responses and learn from evidence as it emerged. Mr Johnson failed to do that, not just at the start, but throughout last year.

Britain has suffered one of the highest per capita death tolls in the world not only because its organs of state were unready, but because its prime minister was unfit. Mr Cummings is not the most reliable narrator of events in which he played a crucial role. Yet the picture he paints of a prime minister lacking the judgment and character to navigate the crisis tallies with a Downing Street spectacle that the country witnessed last year, lurching from panic to complacency and back again – “a shopping trolley smashing between aisles.” Testimony from a man at the very heart of that disaster might well be skewed by vendetta, but it also contains frighteningly plausible insight into the way Britain is governed. The full picture will emerge only in time, but some judgments are already available based on known facts. “Tens of thousands of people died who didn’t need to die,” Mr Cummings said. Tragically, it was the truth.

Late-night battles, expletive-ridden rants, Jaws references and Spiderman memes – the dramatic details of Dominic Cummings’ seven-hour testimony captivated Westminster on Wednesday.

Heather Stewart www.theguardian.com

But strip away all the chaos and colour, and the bleak picture left behind was of a prime minister utterly unsuited to the historic and unprecedented task he was handed.

Of course, Cummings is a deeply unreliable witness: self-interested, embittered about his departure from Downing Street and inconsistent – to put it generously – about his lockdown-busting trip to Durham.

At times he appeared to be pursuing something close to a vendetta against the health secretary, Matt Hancock, whom he claimed to have repeatedly urged the prime minister to sack, and whom he accused of a litany of lies and other failures.

Yet the broad thrust of his attack on Boris Johnson had the ring of plausibility, mainly because it chimed so squarely with much of what was already publicly known, from the botched early response to the pandemic to Johnson’s refusal to order a September lockdown.

On Wednesday Cummings put that narrative on the record and brought it alive, with added layers of excruciating detail.

He described the prime minister’s dogged refusal to listen to scientific advice or learn the lessons of the March lockdown. He told of Johnson’s repeated references to “the mayor from Jaws” and his tendency to disappear off on holiday or become distracted at critical junctures.

The prime minister was “about a thousand times too obsessed with the media” and “changes his mind 10 times a day, and then calls up the media and contradicts his own policy, day after day after day”, Cummings said.

Instead of a smooth-running machine, with the prime minister at the centre, Cummings claimed the cabinet was barely involved in key decisions, and went as far as saying that Johnson deliberately embraced political disorder.

Cummings said Johnson told him last summer, when the senior aide was threatening to resign, that “chaos isn’t that bad: it means people have to look to me to see who is in charge”.

Perhaps most damning, though, was Cummings’ account of the autumn, when many scientific experts were calling for a circuit-breaker to prevent the virus running out of control after schools reopened.

Unlike in March, when data was hard to come by and the pandemic was extremely novel, there was by now ample information as well as the hard-won experience gained from the spring lockdown.

Cummings claimed the prime minister continued to insist, in the face of all the evidence, not only that another lockdown was not necessary but that the first one had been the wrong move, which he was somehow gulled into.

“There’s this great misunderstanding people have that because it [Covid] nearly killed him, therefore he must have taken it seriously,” Cummings said in a reference to the prime minister’s brush with death in March 2020. “But in fact, after the first lockdown, he was cross with me and others with what he regarded as basically pushing him into the first lockdown. His argument after that was: ‘I should have been the mayor of Jaws and kept the beaches open.’”

Of course, Johnson did eventually order that second lockdown, at the end of October and several weeks later than advised. By this time, Cummings claimed, Johnson was so infuriated that he said he would rather see “bodies pile up” than implement a third lockdown – corroborating a report that the PM has denied.

And, Cummings argued, the bodies did pile up across a year of poor decision-making. The official UK Covid death toll now stands at more than 127,000.

Being prime minister doesn’t just mean the Downing Street address and the cheering crowds: it carries the responsibility of life-and-death choices freighted with historical significance. That’s the reason candidates for the job are often asked: “Would you press the nuclear button?”

Once they disappear inside the big black door of No 10, the nation has no choice but to rely on their judgment as they make those life-and-death decisions. On Wednesday it was hard to listen to the man Johnson chose as his closest adviser and conclude that he made them well.

Matt Hancock repeatedly lied during the pandemic and was guilty of “criminal, disgraceful behaviour” that cost lives, Dominic Cummings claimed yesterday.

(See also  COVID-19: Matt Hancock fighting for his political life after Dominic Cummings’s brutal demolition job – Owl)

Chris Smyth, Whitehall Editor | Steven Swinford, Political Editor www.thetimes.co.uk

The prime minister’s former chief adviser said the health secretary should have been sacked for at least 20 reasons.

The most serious charge laid against him by Cummings is that infection spread “like wildfire” in care homes because he falsely claimed that patients were being tested for coronavirus before being discharged from hospital.

Cummings also claimed that the health secretary repeatedly misled Boris Johnson and ministers and that the cabinet secretary “lost confidence” after finding Hancock was lying.

Sources sympathetic to Hancock dismissed Cummings as a “psychopath” and a “complete snake” who had never challenged the health secretary directly about his claims.

Today the health secretary is planning to make an announcement about plans for Covid-19 at a Downing Street news conference in an attempt to show he is too busy fighting the pandemic to do battle with Cummings.

At the health select committee yesterday, Cummings said that at points he called for the health secretary to be sacked almost every day.

A government spokesman said: “We absolutely reject Mr Cummings’s claims about the health secretary”, adding that Hancock had “worked incredibly hard in unprecedented circumstances to protect the NHS and save lives”.

No 10 said Johnson had confidence in Hancock, although it did not deny Cummings’s claim that the prime minister had considered sacking him.

Cummings accused Hancock of performing “disastrously below the standards the public would expect”.

He said: “I think the secretary of state for health should’ve been fired for at least 15, 20 things, including lying to everybody on multiple occasions in meeting after meeting in the cabinet room and publicly.”

Cummings claimed that Hancock had attempted to blame Sir Simon Stevens, the head of NHS England, and Rishi Sunak, the chancellor, for problems with the procurement of PPE. He said he had asked Sir Mark Sedwill, the cabinet secretary, to investigate the claims and he concluded that they were “completely untrue”. Cummings said that Sedwill then told the prime minister that he had “lost confidence” in Hancock’s honesty and advised that he should be sacked.

“I said repeatedly to the prime minister that he should be fired, so did the cabinet secretary, so did many other senior people,” Cummings said.

An estimated 35,000 care home residents died during the first wave. Cummings dismissed ministers’ claims to have “thrown a protective ring” around social care as “complete nonsense”.

As the NHS prepared for the pandemic in March, thousands of elderly people were discharged to care homes to free up beds. Some homes refused to accept patients who had not been tested for coronavirus but Department of Health guidance on April 2 insisted that tests were not required.

Cummings said yesterday: “Hancock told us in the cabinet room that people were going to be tested before they went back to care homes. What the hell happened?” He said that Downing Street did not understand until April that “many, many people who should have been tested were not tested, and then went to care homes and then infected people, and then it’s spread like wildfire inside the care homes”.

On April 15 fresh guidance stipulated people should be tested before admission to care homes. “All the government rhetoric of ‘we put a shield around care homes’ and blah blah, was complete nonsense — quite the opposite of putting a shield around them, we sent people with Covid back to the care homes,” Cummings said.

While last year Hancock was credited for scaling up testing to carry out 100,000 tests a day by the end of April, Cummings argued this was an “incredibly stupid” stunt. He said that the health secretary had been “interfering with the building of the test-and-trace system, because he’s telling everybody what to do to maximise his chances of hitting his stupid target by the end of the month”.

Cummings said: “He should have been fired for that thing alone: it meant that the whole of April was hugely disrupted by different parts of Whitehall fundamentally trying to operate in different ways, completely because Hancock wanted to be able to go on TV and say, look at me, my 100k targets. It was criminal, disgraceful behaviour that caused serious harm.”

He also accused the health secretary of misleading statements about how the NHS had coped. “In the summer he said that everybody who needed treatment got the treatment that they required,” Cummings said. “He knew that that was a lie because he had been briefed by the chief scientific adviser and the chief medical officer himself about the first peak, and we were told explicitly people did not get the treatment they deserved, many people were left to die in horrific circumstances.”

Last night Hancock said: “I haven’t seen this performance today in full, and instead I’ve been dealing with getting the vaccination rollout going, especially to over-30s, and saving lives. I’ll be giving a statement to the House of Commons tomorrow.”

Neil Parish www.devonlive.com

NEIL PARISH IS THE CONSERVATIVE MP FOR TIVERTON AND HONITON

As I write this, the Environment Bill is about to return for its remaining stages in the Commons. This landmark piece of legislation sets ambitious targets for protecting and revitalising our environment, both here in the UK and internationally. The Bill also presents a prime opportunity for the UK to tackle one of the key drivers of climate change: deforestation.

In 2020 alone, over 11,000 square kilometres of the Amazon were lost to deforestation, the highest in 12 years. That is nearly twice the size of Devon destroyed in a year. Illegal deforestation not only destroys precious rainforests, which act as vital carbon sinks and biodiversity hubs, but dismantles the lands and livelihoods of local communities and indigenous peoples.

The Government has taken bold steps to halt deforestation, including banning the use of certain materials associated with illegal deforestation and demanding larger companies carry out proper due diligence within their supply chains, ensuring they are not linked to illegal forest destruction. While commendable, I believe these measures should be strengthened, and I have tabled amendments to the Bill to do just that.

We must go further to ensure the Bill does not exclude the finance sector, who are in many cases bankrolling deforestation. Global Witness’s Money to Burn report found UK financial institutions, including many well-known high street banks, had invested £5 billion between 2013-2019 in companies that were found to have illegally deforested land. UK pension pots may well be being used to indirectly fund illegal deforestation.

My first amendment aims to cut this funding stream by barring lenders from providing financial services to enterprises that illegally deforest land. Banks, investment firms and pension trusts cannot be allowed to profit at the expense of irreplaceable rainforests and ecosystems.

We must also ensure the lands of indigenous communities are protected. Research has shown more people than ever were killed in 2019 for defending their homes against illegal land clearance. That is why I have tabled a further amendment aimed at ensuring the free, prior, and informed consent of affected indigenous peoples has been obtained, before businesses can fund enterprises which harvest materials from rainforests.

With the United Nations Climate Change Conference and the G7 summit fast approaching, the UK must show global leadership by bolstering our efforts against the degradation of unique forests, while ensuring the lands of indigenous peoples are properly protected. By adopting my amendments, it is my hope the Government can root-out the cause of illegal deforestation and safeguard our environment for generations to come.

The total value of homes sold in the UK is expected to reach £461bn this year, a jump of 46% on 2020, indicating the current housing market boom is likely to continue, according to a new prediction.

Rupert Jones www.theguardian.com

The property website Zoopla said its projections indicated the property market in 2021 was on course to be the busiest for 14 years.

Its figures come on the back of data showing that the sector has defied expectations over the past year to notch up double-digit price growth.

Last week the Office for National Statistics said average UK house prices in March had increased by 10.2% in a year – the highest annual growth rate since August 2007, before the financial crisis hit.

The stronger-than-expected growth has been fuelled by a combination of factors, including the stamp duty holiday introduced last summer, new government guarantees for mortgages, and the “race for space” that has seen many would-be homebuyers prioritise properties with bigger gardens and more room for working from home.

Zoopla – which claims its figures are based on the largest underlying data sample of any UK house price index – said its projections indicated that home sales would reach 1.52m in 2021 – a rise of 45% on 2020. If that were to happen, it would mark the highest level of activity since 2007 and mean that this year was one of the top 10 busiest years since 1959.

Meanwhile, the value of homes sold in 2021 is expected to reach £461bn, said the website. This would represent a rise of 46%, or £145bn in monetary terms, on 2020, when the figure stood at £316bn. It would amount to a jump of 68% compared with 2019.

Demand for family houses is exerting upward pressure on prices, and it is locations away from London and the south-east where buyer interest continues to be strongest.

Zoopla said the “hottest” housing markets – in terms of both price growth and the time taken to secure a sale – were Wales, Yorkshire and the Humber, and north-west England.

In the more central parts of London, by contrast, homes are taking nearly two months to sell, which is two weeks longer than the 2017-19 average, while inner London prices are almost unchanged on a year ago.

Average prices are falling in the City of London (down 2.5% year-on-year), Kensington and Chelsea (down 1.7%), Westminster (down 2.2%), and Hammersmith and Fulham (down 1.4%). These areas have been particularly affected by the global shutdown of international business and leisure travel due to the pandemic, said Zoopla.

An agreement has been reached by non-Labour councillors to run Durham County Council for the first time in a century.

BBC News www.bbc.co.uk 

The alliance, made up of Conservatives, Liberal Democrats, independents and a Green, plans to take over at the council’s annual meeting on Wednesday.

Labour was the largest party following the local elections, with 53 of 126 councillors, but lost overall control.

It said it was disappointed to have been excluded from alliance talks.

However, it added that it remained committed to working with other parties.

Leadership of the council will rotate between the partnership, with cabinet positions shared out.

‘Painful lesson’

Liberal Democrat Amanda Hopgood is due to take charge initially.

A partnership spokesperson said: “We recognise that, subject to a successful annual meeting, this will be a historic moment for Durham County Council.

“Not only will the council be run by a non-Labour administration for the first time, it will also have its first ever female leader.

“In building to this moment, the partners have demonstrated what can be achieved by focusing on the big picture and the best outcome for communities across the county.”

Councillor Carl Marshall, leader of Durham Labour Group, said: “Labour’s first and only priority at this moment in time is to play our part in creating a council that delivers for the people and businesses.

“To be excluded from talks between other political groups is not only disappointing, but it threatens to destabilise the significant progress we have made in laying the groundwork for 30,000 new jobs across Durham.

“Labour heard what people had to say in the May elections. It was a painful lesson, but one we accept and learn from.”

East Devon District Council has re-elected the man ‘who has steered them through choppy waters’ back to his role as leader.

Daniel Clark www.devonlive.com

Cllr Paul Arnott, from the East Devon Alliance, who first took on the role in May 2020, was once again voted in to the position at Tuesday’s annual council meeting by 29 votes to 21 over Conservative candidate, Cllr Colin Brown.

The meeting was held in-person at Westpoint due to social distancing guidance meaning it could not be held at Blackdown House, and lasted just 46 minutes as councillors sped through the ceremonial business of the meeting.

Cllr Arnott, who leads the council, which is run by a coalition of the East Devon Alliance, Liberal Democrats, Greens and some Independents, beat the Conservative candidate in a vote for the leadership, although the margin was tighter than in May 2020 when a similar election occurred.

Nominating him to continue in the role, Cllr Eileen Wragg said: “It is with pleasure and pride that I nominate Cllr Paul Arnott for the next year. The past year has been uniquely challenging to adapt to new systems and ways of working and continue with projects started by previous administrations like Queen’s Drive and Cranbrook. Bold decisions have been made like withdrawal from the GESP and granting consent for the Lower Otter Restoration Project.

“Under Cllr Arnott, huge strides forward have been made, with a willingness to listen and engage, and relationships have improved. He has steered the council through choppy waters with his hand at the helm.

“I hope you support the nomination and we will work together for the people of East Devon and our outstanding environment and put it ahead of political differences. We are being led by a caring councillor who does that and leads by example.”

Seconding the nomination, Cllr Olly Davey added: “As a Green, I welcome the commitment to climate change and sustainability and make it a guiding principle of the council. He has steered us through a difficult year and he has assembled a great team around him and he will take us forward in the way we need to go.”

But putting forward an alternative candidate, Cllr Bruce de Saram proposed on behalf of the Conservative Group that Colin Brown should be the leader. He said: “He is the chair of the scrutiny so we know he plays a positive and ganging role in the life of the council, and he would make an outstanding leader off the council.”

Seconding the nomination, Cllr Philip Skinner added: “Colin Brown would bring a marked difference to the authority and I would like to think other members would get behind him as well.”

But councillors voted by 29 votes to 21 in favour of Cllr Arnott continuing to lead the council, with eight members abstaining and not voting for either candidate.

Following the meeting, Cllr Arnott said: “I have spent a quarter of a century now living in East Devon and am very fortunate to have been everything from a student in Topsham to the parent of a now grown-up family in Colyton. I love this area, and it is a great honour to have been elected by the council to serve for a second term as Leader, not something I will ever take for granted.

“I believe that the majority of people in East Devon, of all ages, are progressive, forward-thinking people, wishing for their local governance to be a national exemplar of transparency and accountability. We have put much in place to achieve this and I wish to thank the very many officers at the council who have joined us on this mission. The work goes on.”

Cllr Arnott said his entire first term of office as leader was conducted on Zoom, and the extra burden of the pandemic on councillors and officers alike, was considerable, and added: “Now, we are hoping for more capacity to make progress with our key aims. The town of Cranbrook needs much attention to help it emerge from some tangled knots remaining from its first ten years. Axminster, so full of potential, will be another focus of the coming year, as Exmouth has been in the past year, and will continue to be. I stand ready to help in whatever way I can for Honiton, where the green shoots of a revitalised town council are now emerging.

“Across the district, from Seaton to Sidmouth, Ottery St Mary to the Blackdown Hills, we want to engage with and help in the culture, leisure, sport and tourism economies. East Devon has so much talent and potential in this, and we want to help this sector thrive.

“There will be financial challenges too. The government said it would cover losses from the pandemic, and unfortunately it has not, in particular leaving us with more than a million pounds in losses with LED. We also have to take on challenges ducked by previous administrations. What to do with our ageing public lavatory provision, or with our car parks?

“In Climate Change issues, we now have a new dedicated officer to help us guide this process, and all emerging policy will need to pass through this filter. We have a new Poverty Action policy, and we will be working with County to help us realise this. And finally, as an absolute priority, we need to put into action challenging ideas for more social and attainable homes for local people. I can’t wait to get on with all this over the next year with colleagues of every political colour.”

Cllr Arnott reappointed Cllr Paul Hayward as the deputy leader of the council, and named an unchanged cabinet from that which is currently running the council.

The meeting also saw Cllr Ian Thomas, a former leader of the council, elected as the new council chairman, winning the vote 36-20 over the Conservatives Cllr Andrew Moulding.

Proposing him to be the new chairman, Cllr Geoff Pook said that as East Devon is a polarised council of near equal number of opposing views, the chair has to be independent of party and of political bias and give every councillor the voice that they represent.

As Cllr Thomas was the leader of the Independents, Cllr Pook said: “He will bring intellect and skill and total independence and integrity and ensure the reputation of the council is both enriched and enhanced.”

Seconding the nomination, Cllr Susie Bond added: “He has a decade long experience and during his leadership gained the trust of all sides, and this offers an ideal opportunity and era of collaborative working.”

On accepting the office of chairman of the council, Cllr Thomas said: “I thank you for the endorsement and it is a great honour to serve the council.”

And on the fact the meeting had to legally be held in person, he added: “Several of us feel some risk and vulnerability here and I am sure someone will come up with a reason why we all have to be here other than a 50 year old law which we hope to change as soon as possible. Let’s do the business professionally and then go home safely.”

Cllr Val Ranger was also re-elected to her role as vice-chair of the council, by 31 votes to 23 over the Conservative Cllr Mike Howe.

Footnote: Worth adding that Owl believes that Cllr Ben Ingham displayed his new/old allegiances by proposing Cllr Andrew Moulding for the role of chair. See “EDDC Tories in denial, they have finally lost what they thought was theirs by right” for interesting references to Cllr Andrew Moulding’s view on “change” (when it suits his argument).

 Help me hold the government to account for Covid-19 care home deaths

At the end of March Cathy Gardner wrote this update on her legal challenge:

“It seems like a lifetime ago that we were granted permission for the Judicial Review. That was on November 19th 2020. At the time, the government’s legal team were arguing against an early court date, which could have been this spring. Since then my legal team have been following up with the court to get a date for the hearing, with no success. We’re now pushing harder because it seems that the delay is now due to the court backlog.

Hopefully I’ll be able to update this page with a date very soon. It still seems likely that the hearing will be later this year, which is frustrating for me and all those affected by the issues in this case. Meanwhile the call for an independent public inquiry is growing louder too. We need to hold our government to account. With your help I have been able to bring this case and with your continued support I know we will get there.”

Thank you

Cathy

Owl has long held the view that “kicking the case into the long grass” may not be to the Government’s advantage. Cathy Gardner obviously thinks the same. Here is another update:

Will Cummings help our case today? – Dr Cathy Gardner

“We will be watching todays hearing with great interest. Dominic Cummings has already hinted at some explosive revelations, including the failure to protect the most vulnerable in care homes. 

We will issue a full update once we have had a chance to digest what he says and its implications for my judicial review. 

Coincidentally we have also just received the defendants ‘defence’ documents, which seem to be attempting to bury my legal team in irrelevant waffle and rewrite history with the benefit of hindsight. 

We remain focussed on the key questions in our claim – who made the critical decisions and why? In the first weeks of the pandemic over 50% of the deaths were residents in care homes. People like my father were not protected: where was Matt Hancock’s infamous “protective ring”?

Thank you for your support, I cannot do this without all of you.”

Cathy

26.5.21

Never mind the small print, let’s get away from it all down the M5. The forecast for the holiday weekend is good. So the least we should expect are traffic jams. – Owl 

Jennifer Williams .www.manchestereveningnews.co.uk 

At some point earlier this month, the government’s website quietly changed.

It appears to have happened on Friday, although ministers claim it dates back to May 14.

Either way, that blink-and-you’d-miss-it update has major consequences for thousands of people.

In Bolton, Blackburn, Bedford, Leicester, Kirklees, Hounslow, Burnley and North Tyneside, all places where cases of the Indian Covid variant have been rising fast, people should ‘avoid travelling in and out of affected areas unless it is essential, for example for work, if you cannot work from home, or education’, it states.

It also specifies stricter socialising advice, warning people to only meet other households outside and to keep to the 2m rule, effectively rolling back to some of the national rules prior to May 17.

But in a technicolour re-run of the rows that played out between local and national government last year, there was no active communication of the change to the local populations affected, no press release, no announcement and zero notification to any of their local systems.

When Manchester Evening News reporter Ethan Davies spotted the change yesterday, we all had to take a step back. Was this something we already knew about, but that all of us had collectively forgotten?

But no. A few messages to local sources quickly showed this was news to them too.

“Nope…that hasn’t been communicated to Greater Manchester,” replied one. “I think it will be news to Bolton too.”

It was news to Bolton. Within minutes a source there had replied to say: “We have only just found out. No public health comms and no public health directors in all the area were aware of the change. We weren’t notified.”

As another official then said: “Which begs the question: do any of the local authorities referenced on the website know and what evidence was used to support this local restrictions guidance?”

The answer seems to have been no.

Last year these kinds of tensions were painfully common when covering the pandemic here – decisions landed from on-high at virtually no notice.

But even at the height of the madness, there was always some warning: local leaders knew shortly prior to the July 31 restrictions being introduced across Greater Manchester, for example; when the various hokey-cokey changes to borough-level measures were playing out, local authorities and MPs were generally consulted, even if they often didn’t like the outcome. Even during the tier three row, there were conversations.

This time, nobody had been told.

As in Greater Manchester, Blackburn’s public health director Dominic Harrison had no idea.

“Local government areas involved were not consulted with, warned of, notified about or alerted to this guidance,” he tweeted this morning.

“I have asked to see the national risk assessment which support this action – it has not been provided to us yet.”

In North Tyneside, director of public health Wendy Burke said the updated guidance had ‘not been accompanied by any communication to the local authority, local residents or businesses’.

Sources suggest the Local Government Association was not aware, MPs were not aware, the Association of Directors of Public Health were not aware…and it hadn’t come up on national discussions between central government and local officials.

“What’s the point of updating the government website when no Boltonian will bother to read it?” asks one senior figure here.

“If no one knows this, then there’s absolutely no chance of compliance.

“Boltonians can’t be blamed for not complying if they don’t know about any local restrictions. What’s puzzling is I didn’t know anything about these local restrictions, but did know that Boltonians have been barred from visiting Scotland, which says it all about the difference in national messaging.

“This is yet another clusterf***, to put it mildly.”

Today, meetings between local and national are escalating. There was already a meeting of Greater Manchester’s emergency Covid committee in the diary – which may end up being best summed up with a popcorn emoji – and sources say chief executives and directors of public health are meeting with Deputy Chief Medical Officer Jenny Harries at lunchtime.

As yet, it remains unclear how the updated guidance ended up on gov.uk, who drafted it and who signed it off.

Nevertheless the government seems, so far, to be doubling down on its latest advice.

Last night Number 10 tried to claim that the guidance had been contained in a speech by the Prime Minister on May 14, although in reality all he said was ‘those living in Bolton and other affected areas, there is now a greater risk from this new variant, so I urge you to be extra cautious’.

The government website was indeed updated on May 14 with ‘additional guidance on new variant’, according to its updates summary, although it was only on May 21 that it was updated with ‘updated guidance for areas where the new Covid-19 variant is spreading’.

This morning cabinet minister Therese Coffey appeared on Good Morning Britain to claim the web page update was ‘just an element of a formality’ around the need for extra caution in Bolton, adding that ‘the partnership has been there’.

Local level would disagree on both counts. Telling people not to travel in or out of their area feels like something a little more draconian than a formality.

As one official here points out, such a move will have an economic impact, including on hospitality.

And on ‘partnership’: “At least northern and southern councils are being treated equally sh*t.”

Or, as another puts it: “This doesn’t bode well for the future if government can’t be clear they need to have agreed a plan with local leaders. Secret pretend lockdowns ain’t going to help anyone.”

Martin Shaw westcountrybylines.co.uk 

The UK elections of 6 May 2021 revealed a fragmented political landscape. Although the results showed, as do most national polls, that the combined support for the opposition parties continues to exceed the Conservatives’, they showed no sign that Labour alone would be likely to oust Boris Johnson’s increasingly authoritarian and nationalist regime in the next General Election. Despite deep corruption and the worst pandemic record of any major Western country, the opposition remains relatively weak, and so divided that the Johnson-style Conservatives look likely to stay in power under the first past the post (FPTP) electoral system . This situation was also reflected in reflected in many councils, such as Devon, the largest in the South West. 

A big Conservative majority based on a minority of votes

Devon is often seen as overwhelmingly Conservative – and the party once more gained a huge majority (65 per cent) of seats. However this was on the basis of a minority (42 per cent) of the vote. The combined votes of Liberal Democrats, Labour and Greens exceeded the Tories’ even without including Independents, many of whom are left-leaning. Yet under FPTP, all four groups lost seats to the Conservatives compared with what a proportional distribution would have given them, as the table shows.

Overall results of the 2021 Devon County Council elections

This outcome was not an outlier. In 2017, the Conservatives won 70 per cent of the seats for a slightly larger minority share. In 2013 and 2009, too, they won comfortable overall majorities for minority votes. Not since 2005, when the Lib Dems tied with them on 42 per cent and actually won a majority of seats, has there been a different outcome.

Support for PR

So the Devon opposition has faced this situation for a decade and a half. Have they made any efforts to counter it – or do they march, election after election, into inevitable defeats born of lack of unity? Theoretically, opposition councillors see the problem. On 29 April 2021, at the pre-election meeting of Devon County Council, I proposed a motion welcoming the Welsh parliament’s initiative to allow councils to choose a reformed electoral system such as the Single Transferable Vote, and asking the UK government to introduce the same option for Devon. All the Liberal Democrat, Labour, Green and Independent councillors – except the leader of the Labour group – supported this.

Seats which the opposition could have won

Yet a week later, these opposition parties stood against each other in the elections, with the sadly predictable results reported above. Since Labour dominates Exeter but is hardly a serious contender outside it (Plymouth being a unitary authority), and the Greens are slowly rising but still significantly weaker than Labour and the slowly declining Lib Dems, there was no way that any sector of the opposition could have broken out and won alone under FPTP.

The plurality of oppositions countywide was reflected in the individual seats, with many 3- or 4-way splits of anti-Conservative votes. Looking at the results seat-by-seat, there were 11 seats which opposition forces could have gained if one or more of the weaker opposition candidates had stood down:

• Lib Dems could have won Chudleigh and Teign Valley, Braunton Rural,  and Tiverton East
• Labour could have won Duryard and Pennsylvania.
• Independent East Devon Alliance (EDA) could have won Axminster, Seaton and Colyton, and Sidmouth.
• Other Independents could have won Northam, Okehampton Rural, Yelverton Rural and Tavistock.

On the figures, some of these ‘gains’ seem near-certainties, while others are more speculative. If the Conservatives had lost all these seats, they would have lost their majority. It is more probable that at least half of these seats could have been gained and the Conservative majority drastically reduced resulting in a big improvement in representation for Devon’s voters as a whole.

Seeds of a Progressive Alliance

Three of the opposition forces, the Lib Dems, Greens and EDA did develop some local understandings which materially assisted their performance:

• Lib Dems gained South Brent and Teignmouth after the Greens did not stand.
• Greens held Totnes after Lib Dems did not stand, and won a seat in the two-member Broadclyst division after they and the Lib Dems stood only one candidate each.
• EDA came close to winning Axminster and Seaton & Colyton after the Greens did not stand, and Sidmouth after both the Greens and Lib Dems did not stand, while EDA not stand in seats where the two parties were contenders.

Local understandings also existed in other places: e.g. in Tiverton, the Lib Dems and Greens contested one seat each, both gaining second place, while in Exmouth, Independents and Lib Dems each contested only one seat in the two-member division, gaining the 3rd and 4th places out of a field of 7, behind two winning Tories.

The need for a comprehensive cross-party agreements in future elections

These understandings are a model for future cooperation, but they were too limited to affect the overall outcome. The Greens were the party most open to them, but the Lib Dems had inconsistent approaches, while Labour insisted on standing in every seat, sometimes with ‘paper’ candidates who won derisory percentages of the vote – but sufficient to cost other opposition candidates seats in close races. In post-election discussions, some Labour members have disowned this approach, imposed by their national party.

However, Labour and some Lib Dem members have also defended standing candidates as widely as possible, on the basis that withdrawing candidates denies the electorate the choice of their particular brands. Yet a wide choice doesn’t necessarily engage voters. In Exmouth, where five opposition candidates challenged the Tories for two seats but none had a credible claim to be the main challengers, turnout was a miserable 30 per cent. In nearby Sidmouth, clearly a close 2-horse race, 43 per cent came out.

Winning is a collaborative affair

In Devon, as nationwide, anti-Conservative voters are ever more outraged by Johnson’s regime, while some Conservative-inclined voters, including those alienated by the current government, will definitely vote for effective opposition or Independent candidates in local elections. It’s plausible to argue that both will be more enthused by potential winners. Many will happily vote for whichever of the opposition forces has a good local candidate who is likely to win.

Winning would surely be made more likely with county-wide collaboration between the parties, mirroring the cooperation in some of the district councils. After 12 years in which Devon has been dominated by a Conservative government which takes the South West for granted and a complacent Conservative County Council, the opposition could gain from a joined-up challenge to the Conservatives in the council chamber and the local media – while preparing the way for a synchronised electoral challenge, negotiated between the groupings, in future local elections.

If you are concerned about the democratic deficit in the UK, please join our free Q&A session “How do we fix our broken democracy”, 26 May, 20:00. Our panel: Klina Jordan, co-founder and chief executive of Make Votes Matter; Mary Southcott, from Labour Campaign for Electoral Reform.; Tom Brake, director of Unlock Democracy and Molly Scott Cato, former MEP (Green Party), economist and activist. See link at bottom of this page.

Owl understands that Cllr Cathy Gardner wanted to step down as Chair of EDDC and did not seek re-election.

Two nominations were proposed to take her place: Cllr Ian Thomas, Independent (formally Conserative ) and Cllr Andrew Moulding, Conservative. Cllr Thomas won. Votes were by a show of hands and Owl doesn’t have precise figures.

Two nominations were proposed for Vice Chair. Present incumbent Cllr Val Ranger, East Devon Democratic Alliance and Cllr Mike Howe, Conservative. Cllr Val Ranger was re-elected (by something like 31 votes to 23).

Two nominations were proposed for Leader. Present incumbent Cllr Paul Arnott, East Devon Democratic Alliance, and Cllr Colin Brown, Conservative. Cllr Paul Arnott was re-elected, but Owl doesn’t have precise figures.

The re-elected Leader confirmed Cllr Paul Hayward would continue as Deputy Leader.

From the meeting Agenda, there appears, unusually, to have been no contests for the other posts such as to outside bodies which are elected at this meeting. 

[Tomorrow we have Dominic Cummings giving potentially explosive and damning testimony on the government’s handling of coronavirus to two select committees. Alternatively, he may simply “crash and burn”. Either way it’s something else to look forward to. – Owl]

us15.campaign-archive.com /

Today in the High Court, Government’s lawyers set out their defence to our legal challenge over PPE contracts handed to “VIP” companies. Government claims that companies in the VIP Lane did not materially benefit from their special treatment, and that it was simply a different route by which they could win contracts.

The evidence tells a different story.

Emails between officials reveal that companies with a political connection were given priority. A key member of the VIP Lane team wrote, ‘Speaking personally, I don’t want a middling VIP lead prioritised over a credible high priority lead any more than you do…However, if two leads are otherwise equal priority and one is VIP, some weighting to the VIP is helpful.’

In another exchange, an official set out how companies placed in the “VIP” Lane should be treated, explaining “Follow standard procedure, but take a little more time over correspondence, ‘hand-holding’ the supplier where necessary”. They followed up to say, ”Personally, I’ve found VIP cases require about three times the time of a standard case.”

What is perhaps most striking about Government’s defence of the “VIP” Lane is its apparent determination to keep quiet the details of the politically-connected beneficiaries – and which Ministers or senior officials referred them. When the National Audit Office, the official spending watchdog, investigated the award of PPE contracts, Government intervened to prevent it from revealing the names of companies in the “VIP” Lane.

If the Government really has nothing to hide, why doesn’t it just come clean? Thanks to information uncovered through this litigation, we will be publishing details of a slew of other “VIPs” very shortly. Watch this space.

Thank you, 

Jo Maugham

Director of Good Law Project

As the Good Law Project’s latest legal challenge to the government draws to a close this week, its founder, Jolyon Maugham, has revealed the extent to which the case has got under ministers’ skin.

Haroon Siddique www.theguardian.com 

The judicial review over contracts for personal protective equipment awarded without competition concludes on Tuesday, almost two months to the day since the barrister received a letter from the government’s lawyers. “I was asked by the government legal department to refer myself to my professional regulator, the Bar Standards Board,” the QC tells the Guardian. Maugham says he refused and invited the government to refer him itself, as he says many others he has irked have done.

“I don’t think they have, which from my perspective is rather a pity because I think they would have got short shrift from my regulator. It would be a little awkward for the government legal department to refer me to my regulator and then for my regulator to clear me. It would look very obviously like what it felt like at the time, namely an attempt to bring the power of the state to bear on the silencing of a very vocal critic.”

The lawyers’ letter was a response to documents leaked to Maugham, which were shared with the press. Having held himself out as someone delivering transparency and accountability, Maugham says: “Behaving consistently with what I set out to do actually is upholding the standards of a courageous, independent bar.”

The Good Law Project was involved in the high-profile Brexit cases concerning prorogation of parliament and the triggering of article 50. Last year it brought judicial reviews relating to the environment and to the exam results fiasco. But it was cases such as the current one brought with the campaign group EveryDoctor, relating to the opaque award of Covid contracts, sometimes to suppliers with questionable relevant experience and/or who were political associates, that thrust it into the spotlight. “That sleaze narrative around this government, I think we can properly claim a significant part of the credit for,” says Maugham.

In Good Law’s annual report, the former Brexit secretary David Davis praises its work in holding the government to account, while Maugham claims government lawyers have told him the organisation is “changing the conversation”, making ministers much more mindful of whether proposed actions are lawful. “It’s a bit like knowing that the bizzies are around if you fancy breaking into someone’s house,” he says, smilingly acknowledging the provocative analogy. “They are mindful of the possibility of consequence in ways that they were not previously.”

Maugham adds: “Privately, government lawyers tell us at the same time they’re sending us letters they are cheering for us to win. These aren’t people who are politically motivated, they just see the decline in the quality of governance in government and they see us pushing back hard.”

The Covid contracts controversy has clearly resonated with the public. This time last year, Maugham says, he was asking Good Law’s director of campaigns if the number of direct debit donors might reach 5,000 by the end of 2020, from fewer than 2,000 at the start of the year and against a target of 3,500. In fact it soared to 11,000, and now there are almost 20,000, he says.

With its headcount also growing – from one employee in January last year to an estimated 25 by the end of this year – Maugham is looking to the future and expanding beyond litigation.

He unexpectedly namechecks David Cameron – “the most unfashionable man in the country at the moment,” he says – as he outlines plans, not to follow the former prime minister into lobbying, but for a “big society”.

Stressing that he wants to work from the bottom up, rather than the top-down approach he says Cameron favoured, Maugham describes his ambition to foster legal structures, such as cooperatives and trade unions, to “help people improve the world around them, help them improve their communities”.

An example he gives is an alternative takeaway delivery service, which could be launched next year. “What we will probably do is trial in a particular community a structure that enables restaurants and drivers to set up a company that operates an app that serves that community and that doesn’t have these vampires in America sucking wealth out of that community,” he says.

If the government’s experience is anything to go by, the likes of Uber Eats and Deliveroo should probably be looking over their shoulders. Reflecting on this desire to empower others and his personal motivation, Maugham recalls his time in psychotherapy in his late 20s.

“I had a wonderful psychotherapist and I remember her saying to me: ‘But Jolyon, it’s such a waste for you to be unhappy, to live an unhappy life.’ That really resonated with me then and it really resonates with me now. That idea that we can find ways to respond to the world around us that will make us happy, we’re not passive participants in fate imposed on us by others, is really important … Without it our lives in a sense can feel wasted. I don’t want that for anyone.

“Although I am deeply cynical about what governments do, and what big money does … I’m profoundly optimistic about human nature. It perhaps feels ridiculously ambitious to think that the law might be able to do something about that, but it’s a hill I’m very happy to die on trying.”

Nearly 400,000 homes will be built on greenfield sites in the south of England over the next five years, according to a new analysis of planning policy.

Andrew Ellson, George Grylls Ryan Watts www.thetimes.co.uk

Huge parts of the countryside could be paved over by councils to meet revised housebuilding targets, the data suggests.

Cornwall alone would have to build more than 11,000 homes on rural land and areas such as Buckinghamshire and Central Bedfordshire will each have to create at least 10,000 plots.

Less development will be needed in the north of England, with half as many new homes per head of population in “red wall” constituencies as in the rest of the country, The Times has found. This is because the government’s formula assumes that more homes are needed where prices are higher. The south also has fewer brownfield sites.

The figures have reignited concerns on the Tory back benches that planning reforms will alienate Conservative voters in the shires while undermining commitments made to the north.

“You can’t level up the north of the country by concreting over the southeast,” said Damian Green, Theresa May’s de facto deputy when she was prime minister.

Theresa Villiers, the former environment secretary, said: “Despite significant changes to the government’s housing algorithm, there is still far too much pressure to build in London and the south. Cramming more and more homes into the south will do nothing to deliver the government’s promises on levelling up the north.”

Tory backbenchers rebelled last year over a “mutant algorithm”, which they believed placed too much emphasis on development in southern areas.

An updated “Standard Method” for calculating housing need was published in December. The new analysis cross-referenced the revised targets against each area’s capacity to build homes on brownfield sites, which local authorities are required to publish. This gave a figure for the number of homes in each local authority that must be built on greenfield sites to meet the targets.

Greenfield land is defined as undeveloped land in a city or rural area that is used either for agriculture or landscape design or left to evolve naturally. Brownfield land is previously developed land that is not in use, such as an abandoned industrial area.

The analysis shows that greenfield sites will be needed to accommodate 193,724 homes in London, 107,000 homes in the southeast and 69,000 in the southwest over the next five years. It also suggests that there will be no need to build on greenfield areas in the northwest, northeast or Yorkshire because these areas will have to build fewer homes and have more brownfield sites.

Jonathan Jones, of the Campaign to Protect Rural England (CPRE), which commissioned the research, said: “The planning bill flies in the face of levelling-up ambitions and will lead to a huge loss of greenfield, including green belt in the southeast and London, while leaving brownfield to rot in the north.

“Access to green space and nature near by has become more and more important for our health and wellbeing but the analysis shows the planning bill would force local authorities to release these spaces in the southeast and London.” Government sources insist that the targets are not binding and they believe that London will under-deliver homes and the north will over-deliver.

“The number spat out by formula is not a target but a starting point,” one source said. “Green belts are protected and will remain protected. It is for councils to decide. It is between them and their voters if they choose to take out a greenfield.”

The revised planning formula requires that more homes are built in areas where house prices are higher, because property costs are seen as a proxy for where people want to live.

A stark illustration of the effect of the new plans can be seen by comparing the demands put on Boris Johnson’s London constituency and Rishi Sunak’s North Yorkshire seat. The analysis suggests that the prime minister’s seat of Uxbridge & South Ruislip would need to accommodate 1,220 homes a year, ten times as many as the chancellor’s constituency of Richmond.

In seats won in 2019 by the Tories across the north and the Midlands, 260 homes will be built per 100,000 people compared with 550 per 100,000 across the rest of the country.

Paul Miner, the head of land use and planning at the CPRE, said: “If you have a pattern of significantly higher levels of housing development in the south than the north, you will see significantly more government investment in infrastructure in these areas to make that happen, such as building new railway lines. A big question is how this will impact the levelling-up agenda if this approach is allowed to continue.”

A spokesman for the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government said: “To compare housing delivery in different parts of the country based on Local Housing Need formula is to misunderstand the nature and purpose of these numbers. That’s not how they work and this analysis is misleading.”

Britain’s energy regulator has approved a £300m investment spree to help triple the number of ultra-rapid electric car charge points across the country, as part of efforts to accelerate the UK’s shift to clean energy.

Kalyeena Makortoff www.theguardian.com 

Ofgem has given the green light for energy network companies to invest in more than 200 low-carbon projects across the country over the next two years, including the installation of 1,800 new ultra-rapid car charge points for motorway service stations and a further 1,750 charge points in towns and cities.

The investment will be undertaken by regional network companies to benefit urban areas including Glasgow, Kirkwall, Warrington, Llandudno, York and Truro. It will also cover rural areas, with some charging points aimed at commuters at train stations in north and mid-Wales.

The regulator hopes the extra investment to make car charging points more convenient will help to address motorist “range anxiety”, which is frequently mentioned as a key reason why drivers are wary about choosing an electric vehicle over a fossil fuel model.

The UK plans to ban the sale of new petrol and diesel cars from 2030 and phase out hybrid vehicles from 2035 as part of its plan to reduce road transport emissions. However, only 11% of new car registrations last year were for ultra-low emission cars.

The regulator’s chief executive, Jonathan Brearley, said drivers “need to be confident that they can charge their car quickly when they need to” if the UK hoped for a “rapid take up” of electric cars, which “will be vital if Britain is to hit its climate change targets”.

The transport minister Rachel Maclean said the investment would add to the 500,000 electric cars already on the UK’s roads “as drivers continue to make the switch to cleaner, greener vehicles”.

The spending initiative, which will add 65p to customer bills for the next two years, will also include new projects to upgrade Britain’s electricity grids so they can power more low-carbon heating and connect to new low carbon energy projects such as windfarms and solar arrays.

Brearley said the investments were a “down payment” on the £40bn of green investment that is expected over the next seven years to power the UK towards its ambition to cut carbon emissions to net zero in the next 30 years.

The CBI, the business lobby group, said on Monday the UK could unlock nearly £700bn in growth opportunities by 2030 by decarbonising the global economy and growing trade as it emerged from the Covid-19 pandemic.

Alongside the regulator’s £300m spending programme, the government has revealed a £166m fund to support new green technologies. The cash injection will include £60m to help develop low-carbon hydrogen, £20m to help roll out projects to capture the carbon emissions from heavy industry, and a further £20m for fund research into “industrial decarbonisation” run by Heriot-Watt University.

The funding for the government’s green industrial revolution will also include £37.5m to help the UK become a leader in technology which can remove carbon emissions from the air. One so-called “direct air capture” project to win government support was put forward by the Sizewell C nuclear plant, which plans to use the reactor’s extra electricity to run the carbon capture equipment.

The energy minister Anne-Marie Trevelyan said the “major cash boost” would target the UK’s most polluting industries to encourage “the technologies we need to rein in our emissions and transition to a green economy” while reducing costs for businesses and boosting investment and jobs.

“Just six months ago, the prime minister set out a clear 10-point plan for creating and supporting up to 250,000 British jobs as we level up and build back greener from the pandemic. Today we’re boosting our armoury for the fight against climate change and backing innovators and businesses to create green jobs right across the United Kingdom,” she said.

Councils across England are likely to start legal battles to claw back ‘millions’ in unpaid taxes, thanks to a ‘landmark’ ruling by the Supreme Court.

Alice Richardson www.manchestereveningnews.co.uk

Local authorities may have been bolstered to launch proceedings against businesses which have failed to pay the ‘fair amount’ of tax, after Wigan council and others took a handful of businesses to court.

The authorities wanted to challenge a ‘widespread’ tactic some companies use to avoid paying business rates – renting out their properties to companies they themselves have set up which are very quickly wound down, liquidated or dissolved.

By law, firms in liquidation or dissolution don’t have to pay business rates and companies are then seen to ‘deliberately drag out the liquidation process for as long as possible’ so they don’t have to pay taxes to the council.

In some cases, the money saved from unpaid business rates is even handed out by the company in pre-agreed shares.

It is this legal loophole the local authorities wanted to close and, in a ‘formidable victory’ for councils across the country, they won.

Supreme Court Judge Lord Briggs said: “The local authorities should be allowed to take it forward to trial. The whole purpose of the schemes was to avoid payment of the rate rather than to transfer the responsibility for its payment. Apart from rates avoidance, the schemes have no separate business purpose of any kind.

“[The] schemes necessarily involve the deliberate abuse of a statutory legal process. There is a triable issue that the original owners remain liable for the rates.

“The local authorities’ claim against the original owners must be allowed to go to trial.”

This paves the way for the councils concerned to argue their case fully in a High Court trial and for other local authorities to do the same.

Matthew Whyatt, of ASW Solicitors, instructed for the case on behalf of the councils.

He said: “The Supreme Court have given a bold and very clear judgement, and the manner in which these business rates schemes were carried out has caused the Supreme Court some concern that many are unlawful, abusive and might merit an investigation for criminality.

“The granting of a lease to a company which is a mere skeleton of incorporation does not succeed in avoiding the liability for business rates. The lessee is not to be treated as the ‘owner’ for business rates purposes.

“These schemes are extremely wide-spread, and the decision of the Supreme Court is a formidable victory for the local authorities.

“The councils are going to continue the fight and will be considering all options available to them. The councils believe that their position is strong and so will be continuing the claims robustly.”

Danny Seasman, also from ASW Solicitors, added: “I would not be surprised if the global cost to local authorities is in the hundreds of millions of pounds, and significant numbers of local authorities now pursue their claims following the success in the Supreme Court.

“During what have been difficult times for local authorities, it is clear that the schemes have deprived numerous local authorities of significant sums for front line services.”

For the other Greater Manchester councils, this result could prove incredibly influential and financially beneficial.

A number of local authorities in the city-region have now confirmed their teams are looking into the impact this could have on them, and whether they will look to pursue any cases through the courts themselves.

A spokesperson for Salford City council said: “Business rates help fund vital public service and we welcome this significant judgement. We are now examining its implications.”

A spokesperson for Stockport council said: “We welcome the judgement and will seek the appropriate advice on what action to take to recover the amounts of business rates which remain unpaid’.

A Tameside council spokesperson said: “We welcome any cases that make business rates fairer for all – requiring business to pay their fair share for services and infrastructure, which everyone benefits from and which cost significant money to provide and maintain. Otherwise the burden for paying for these services must be met by an ever decreasing few, which is neither fair nor sustainable.”

A spokesperson for Trafford council said: “Trafford council welcomes the Supreme Court judgement and will now be reviewing any cases that might be linked to the ruling outcome.”

The ideas to reboot Britain’s pandemic-stricken high streets are coming in. After a record number of shop closures last year during the worst recession in history, stores are being replaced with student flats, gyms and crazy golf courses. But in one corner of south London, there is a different approach: retirement homes.

Julia Kollewe www.theguardian.com 

A retirement village has been built between Balham and Clapham high streets in south London, one of a number of purpose-built apartment blocks for older people that are springing up in town and city centres across the UK after a year of devastation for shopping districts.

Local planners hope that by bringing more people into town centres, these residences will help to regenerate Britain’s high streets.

Dominic Curran, a property policy adviser at the British Retail Consortium, said: “It is a very good idea to get more people living in town centres. We also need more housing for older people over 65, and it absolutely makes sense for them to be living in urban locations. Many will move with a lot of housing equity in their pockets, which will generate spend and footfall for local shops.”

The retirement home idea is running alongside plans to convert empty shopping sites. All over the UK, there are proposals to change derelict high street locations into something else. In Reading, a House of Fraser outlet is being converted into a food hall, bowling alley and crazy golf course, while on London’s Oxford Street a former BHS store has become a Swingers golf centre and food hall. In Edinburgh, the House of Fraser on Princes Street is being developed by the drinks firm Diageo into a tourist attraction promoting Johnnie Walker whisky.

However, Curran said high streets need more housing to survive alongside retail and leisure.

To help struggling high streets, the BRC is calling for reforms to business rates – the tax businesses pay on the properties they operate from – as part of a landmark government review under way. It also said support is needed to address £2.8bn of rent arrears built up by retailers unable to trade from physical premises during the coronavirus pandemic. Retailers make up 5% of the economy yet account for 25% of business rates. Firms have benefited from rates relief during the pandemic but this is set to end on 30 June.

Retirement villages have traditionally been gated communities in the countryside and on the edge of towns but developers have been snapping up retail and office sites that lie vacant in urban areas to build apartment blocks for the over-65s, many of whom want to be closer to bustling city centres for eating out, shopping and cultural pursuits. Several village builders reported that inquiries for retirement housing jumped during the Covid crisis, with more people feeling isolated and lonely.

“Too often retirement villages are built away from local amenities with poor public transport links,” says Liz Emerson, a co-founder of the Intergenerational Foundation, a charity. “We welcome any developments that bring older generations back into the heart of communities.”

Dorothy Fowler, 79, was one of the first to buy an apartment in the Audley retirement village in Clapham that opened at the start of the pandemic in 2020. As soon as Covid restrictions were eased in April, she went out for a restaurant meal with a group of other residents.

“We’ve all become good friends, probably because of Covid,” she says. “We are right next to Clapham South tube and will be able to go to the West End.” Audley also offers to take residents in a van for regular shopping and cultural trips.

As cities are being reshaped, the Social Market Foundation, a thinktank, said retirement housing could play a key role in the town and city centres of the future, especially if there is reduced need for retail and office space.

A record 11,120 chain store outlets closed between January and June last year, while 5,119 opened. The 6,001 net store closures were double the level in the same period a year earlier, as many shops fail to reopen, and the switch to working from home risks permanently lower levels of city centre footfall.

Developers are spoiled for choice. Audley’s chief executive, Nick Sanderson, said the company was offered three shopping centre sites in only one week, as well as “every Debenhams department store” after the retailer’s liquidation.

“Bringing [older communities] back into the centre of things is good for town centres because they are bringing economic vitality when everyone else is working,” he said.

Retirement Villages Group, which is backed by Axa Investment Managers, the French asset management firm, plans to build 5,000 homes for older people across 40 urban sites over the next 10 years. It recently received planning consent for West Byfleet and Chester, which will include some rental homes. “Our strategy going forward is urban,” says Will Bax, the firm’s chief executive.

The pensions and insurance group Legal & General has the ambition to build 3,000 retirement homes in UK city centres in a £2bn project in coming years. Its Guild Living arm has plans for retirement residences on the sites of former Homebase stores in Walton-on-Thames and Bath, and on the site of a former hospital in Epsom, as well as its first London project in Uxbridge on the site of a retail warehouse.

However, not everyone is a fan of retirement residences in urban areas.

Legal & General’s projects for Walton-on-Thames, Bath and Epsom have been rejected by council planners; the company has lodged appeals. Eugene Marchese, a co-founder of Guild Living, has accused Elmbridge borough council of ageism but the council rejected this and insisted that family homes were also “much-needed” in Walton-on-Thames. In Bath, one critic described the company’s plans a “ghetto for the elderly”.

Nonetheless, retirement accommodation will remain part of the conversation over the future of the high street.