It was, Boris Johnson promised in the spring, the route out of lockdown and the best way of “getting our country back on its feet”.

Failings of the £10Bn private sector led omnishambles exposed – Owl

Billy Kenber, Investigations Reporter | Chris Smyth, Whitehall Editor www.thetimes.co.uk

A nationwide system of testing and tracing to identify infections and stop the virus spreading; requiring a small minority to quarantine so that we could “release 66 million people” and allow Britain to return to something approaching normality, Mr Johnson said.

Instead, six months later, the country is back in lockdown and NHS Test & Trace, set up at great expense by a coterie of management consultants and outsourcing giants, has failed in the task the prime minister set it.

Earlier this year the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (Sage) estimated that a successful testing and contact-tracing system could reduce the crucial R number by 0.4, similar to the impact of closing every school in the UK.

By the autumn it concluded it was having only a “marginal” effect. Sir Patrick Vallance, the chief scientific adviser, said that cases were now too high for the system to work and even Mr Johnson expressed his “frustration” and said this week that he was “perfectly willing to accept the failures of Test and Trace”. This is what went wrong.

Scramble to launch

Identifying those who have come into contact with someone diagnosed with an infectious disease and asking them to self-isolate has been an established public health tactic for centuries, and Public Health England began contact tracing as soon as the first coronavirus cases in Britain emerged last February.

Within weeks, however, a lack of testing capacity led the government to abandon these efforts. It took another month before Matt Hancock, the health secretary, announced plans to resume contact tracing. This time, he said, the government would recruit thousands of staff to run a brand new contact-tracing system.

In choosing a centralised approach, ministers followed the path they had taken with testing when it was decided that the only way to reach the scale required was to start from scratch, overlooking the “small boats” strategy of using lots of smaller existing facilities around the country.

In doing so, they ignored calls from local leaders to draw on the expertise of local public health teams, trading standards and sexual health services for whom tackling outbreaks of food poisoning, measles or sexually transmitted diseases was “bread and butter work”.

Like the large “lighthouse laboratories” set up to increase testing, Downing Street elected to hand over responsibility for this new tracing system to private contractors, awarding large contracts to the outsourcing giants Serco and Sitel. The task of running it and launching a planned contact-tracing app went to another veteran of the private sector: the Tory peer Dido Harding.

Baroness Harding of Winscombe, 52, who is married to a Conservative MP and went to university with David Cameron, had limited public health experience. Her corporate career, which included stints at Tesco and Sainsbury’s, was best known for her disastrous handling of a data leak at the telecoms company TalkTalk. Nevertheless, sources said she felt unable to decline the role, which she saw primarily as a logistical challenge, when she was personally asked to take it on by Mr Johnson.

“She is someone who is a very effective doer and she was told to do it through national structures,” a friend said.

The “army” of contact tracers hastily assembled included as many as 18,000 call centre staff paid no more than £10 an hour and in some cases drafted in from providing customer service for a package holiday company. They were to be tasked with calling the close contacts of those who had tested positive for coronavirus.

Alongside them were a few thousand “tier 2” clinically trained staff hired to make first contact with those whose test results showed they had caught the disease. A smaller number of senior “tier 1” staff were recruited to handle complex cases, such as those involving care homes or hospitals.

The online training offered was chaotic and at times appeared ill-suited, with staff required to complete a module on workplace fire safety despite working from home. With no access to the software they would use to read scripts and enter people’s details, staff were unable to practise their roles.

The phoney war

On a Wednesday evening in late May, as the scandal over Dominic Cummings’s lockdown trip to Durham continued to swirl around Westminster, newly hired contact tracers watching the daily Downing Street press conference received some surprising news. Mr Hancock announced that the system would be going live the very next day, four days earlier than the scheduled June 1 date.

The launch the following day was beset by technical problems, with tracers unable to login with the credentials sent out late the night before and Sitel declaring a “critical incident”.

From there, for many staff, the waiting began. Initially data from only certain kinds of testing sites was filtering through and thousands of tracers were left with long, empty shifts with no calls to make. One reported going 20 shifts without speaking to a single coronavirus patient, spending the time upholstering furniture and watching Netflix. It rapidly became apparent that far more staff had been hired than were needed. In briefings with journalists Lady Harding was bullish, saying that it was better to have too much capacity rather than too little.

But fewer and fewer shifts were made available to book, leading some specialist clinical staff to leave in search of steady income from locum jobs elsewhere. By August, as cases died down in the warm summer months, the government announced that 6,000 tier 3 call centre staff would be laid off.

It was the first stage of a gradual retreat from a centralised system, prioritising speed of scale-up, to a localised one prioritising on-the-ground knowledge — a shift that remains incomplete.

‘They’re just bombarding you’

When they did get through, call centre staff were tracing barely half the contacts they were told about, a proportion that has never got much beyond 60 per cent, far below the goal of tracing 80 per cent of contacts within 48 hours of a case being reported.

Things were not helped by the speed with which tests results were being returned and cases were making their way into the system. When they did arrive, coronavirus patients and their contacts could expect a deluge of phone calls. For households with young children, the system’s inability to flag them as linked cases meant they would be repeatedly rung as close contacts of the original case.

“If you have a large family which includes school-age kids, if your husband gets a positive test you’re called as a contact of your husband and then you’re called for every child because they have your phone number and not a seven-year-old’s obviously. Then when you test positive as well you are called as a positive case, your husband is called as a contact of the second positive case in the household and so it goes on every time someone tests positive,” one tracer said.

With no way to flag that all of the cases are in the same household, she said that “if I know it’s a large household I’ve stopped taking phone numbers . . . I just say don’t give it to me, so at least they’re getting repetitive emails rather than repetitive phone calls”.

As lockdown eased, and more contacts were made in everyday life, performance slipped further as ever more of the work fell to the tier 3 tracers. They found that many people simply never picked up, assuming that the missed calls from an 0300 number were unwanted sales calls and ignoring the voicemails being left.

For those that did, compliance with the request to self-isolate for a fortnight was often low. Government surveys have found that only 11 per cent of those asked to isolate by contact tracers are actually doing so for the full two weeks, in what is increasingly seen as a fatal problem.

In recent weeks the service has begun making regular “support calls” to check if someone is still isolating. In early October, Simon Tomlinson’s partner tested positive and one of their two daughters then followed suit, meaning the whole household had to isolate.

“It was just a constant phoning and text messages and emails. They’re just bombarding you,” Mr Tomlinson, 46, said.

“They were calling all times of day. One day we got a text on her phone at 7.05 on a Sunday morning, then some days they would call me two or three times a day. Even when I’ve answered the phone and spoke to them in the morning, they’ve called back again in the afternoon.”

When he explained he’d already spoken that day the caller would continue with their script and ask him to re-answer the same questions checking whether he was continuing to isolate and asking whether he had developed any symptoms, he said.

“It’s just like speaking to robots rather than actual real people. If you don’t answer the phone then they phone every two to three hours leaving exactly the same voicemail.” Mr Tomlinson, who lives in Solihull, estimates that he and his partner, who was listed as the contact number for their two daughters, were contacted by phone, text and email up to 200 times over the course of a fortnight.

“It’s absolutely crazy — just a waste of people’s time and resources,” he said.

Local knowledge

From the outset, there was one part of NHS Test & Trace which drew on local experts. Complex cases in hospitals and care homes were escalated to tier 1 tracers and handed over to local teams employed by Public Health England. They proved far more effective, with success rates of over 95 per cent. But despite this success, the system was slow to hand over a larger role to local authorities.

It took months for local directors of public health to get access to the detailed, postcode-level data on test results and longer for local authorities to get proper access to a central database of cases.

The problem was partly a technical challenge to link up different systems but officials also cited data protection concerns when withholding the kind of data local leaders wanted.

When Leicester became a coronavirus hotspot in June, leading to a local lockdown, the town’s mayor, Sir Peter Soulsby, complained about the lack of specific information on cases. “I made the point personally to the prime minister early in our [local] lockdown that we needed to have the information about positive tests . . . together with ethnicity and place of work and full address,” he said. “And even now we don’t get that full information with the data that’s passed on to us.”

Lady Harding acknowledged the need for a greater emphasis on a local approach, saying contact tracing should become “local by default”, but change came slowly.

Over the summer, the first pilot programmes saw normal Covid cases handed over to the local authorities — separate to local public health teams — for tracing if they could not be reached by national tracers within 24 or 48 hours. The contacts of these cases were then put back into the national system to be called by tier 3 tracers.

These teams, able to go out and knock on doors, proved significantly more successful at reaching people, with success rates of about 90 per cent. They have also proved well-placed to offer the kind of practical help — support accessing government self-isolation payments and getting shopping and medicines delivered by volunteers — which encourages people to comply with isolation.

Sir John Oldham, a former adviser to the Department of Health, said that “the contrast between the central system and the capability and effectiveness of the local public health teams and leadership has been stark. Centuries of experience in contact tracing informs us [that] the local community has to be the hub and should be the immediate focus of reform of Track and Trace.”

In some areas, the local authorities have also been actively carrying out “backwards tracing” where, instead of just seeking to identify who was in close contact with a positive case in the 48 hours before they were tested, staff seek to make connections between cases and trace the likely source of outbreaks.

To do this work, councils drafted in staff who normally performed other duties; in Manchester, firefighters were brought in to boost numbers. But local authority leaders have said they will need more funding from central government if they are to scale up this work.

Others have complained that they are hindered by the speed at which test results reach them. Leicester’s mayor said cases now take an average of six days from testing to being handed to the council for tracing. In eight cases it has taken 14 days, leaving staff no chance of reaching contacts while they might be unknowingly infecting others. Maggi Morris, a public health consultant in the West Midlands, said the council she is working with often hears about cases before they are logged in the national system’s database.

Tussles over access to the Test & Trace database of cases and their contacts also continue. A local service launched in Southend in late October was delayed by several weeks because of difficulties getting access to the data, a local councillor said.

“Quite rightly the national system want to know that people’s data is being handled in a correct manner, and that’s right and proper, but the delays that we were experiencing stopped us from launching earlier,” said Trevor Harp, the council’s cabinet member for health and adult social care.

An autumn rush

As officials were slowly granting local authorities a role in tracing, the return of schools and universities in September brought a huge increase in demand for coronavirus tests. At the same time, the return of universities prompted an exodus of highly trained scientists who had been seconded for six months to help run the lighthouse labs, while the promised expansion of capacity with new facilities in Newport and Charnwood was behind schedule. The combination of events left the system ill-equipped to cope and the resulting bottlenecks in processing tests led to a rationing of testing slots and farcical scenes as suspected Covid cases were told their nearest testing centre with availability was hundreds of miles away. The proportion of test results from walk-in centres that were returned within 24 hours of booking fell from 77 per cent in July to 8 per cent in October.

Meanwhile, the success rate of national contact tracing continued to fall. A spreadsheet error meant that 15,000 cases were initially missed and clinical contact tracers who a few months earlier had whiled away their shifts completing puzzles and reading books now found themselves in huge demand. At present, more than 120,000 people a week are being transferred to the contact tracing service, ten times the figure in early September. In some areas local health teams, without the funding to scale up, have been handing back positive cases who have not been reached because they are overwhelmed.

NHS leaders, witnessing hospital wards filling up as Britain was unable to control cases, have become some of the loudest critics of the tracing system. Last month NHS Providers labelled it as not “fit for purpose” and the NHS Confederation has said its poor performance was costing lives. NHS sources have also expressed irritation at the system’s use of NHS branding when the health service has no role in its administration.

The belated launch of a much-maligned contact-tracing mobile phone app in late September did little to help. A technical problem meant the app gave false alerts to users and those who did test positive could be left confused as to how long to isolate for, with the app giving a different date to the instruction delivered by contact tracers.

As a short-term solution, some call centre staff were upgraded to tier 2 roles, previously filled exclusively by those with clinical training, and were now responsible for making calls to those who had tested positive for coronavirus or the relatives of someone who had just died from the disease.

Existing tier 2 staff were perturbed by the decision, which some described as “potentially dangerous” because of the lack of medical knowledge. “There are things that clinically you pick up on — things like if somebody is quite breathless — where I’ve had to get them to hang up and call 111,” one said. “There have been case workers in the past who’ve had cases collapse on them [during a call] and have had to call an ambulance.”

The service is now looking to rehire some of the previously laid-off workers, with recruitment adverts urgently hunting for those looking to rejoin Test & Trace.

In the meantime, as the system flounders, some institutions and companies appear to have lost confidence in it and are going their own way. Imperial College London has set up its own contact-tracing service and placed an advert for £38,000-a-year clinically trained tracers on six-month contracts. At least one private business is also recruiting someone to oversee contact tracing for its staff.

Jonathan Ashworth, the shadow health secretary, said that “ministers made three big mistakes for which we are now paying the price”, citing use of “a centralised, heavy, top-down system” over “locally led ‘shoe leather epidemiology’ tracing”.

He said that “secondly on compliance, it should be obvious that people would struggle to isolate if financially penalised” — a point also pressed to ministers by Lady Harding, resulting in the introduction of £500 grants in September.

While Mr Johnson praised the system for reaching its target of a capacity of 500,000 daily tests by the end of October, Mr Ashworth’s third criticism is that “it’s still not clear what the strategy is regards testing, other than big headline-grabbing claims”.

Missed opportunities

Looking back, many involved with the system question why more was not done to fix its problems and hand a greater role to local areas in the summer. The problems and the solution, they say, have been obvious for months.

“When the sun was shining, literally, the roof should have been built and it should be watertight. That wasn’t the case,” said Sir Chris Ham, former chief executive of the health think tank the King’s Fund.

“Local authorities, public health teams are trained to do contact tracing . . . and even more important, they know their communities,” he said. “And it’s been very clear . . . in recent weeks and months, unless you are part of a community where you’re doing the contact tracing, then your ability to reach contacts and then support people to isolate is very, very limited.”

Professor Robert West, a member of the government’s Spi-B behavioural advisory group, said the system had fallen short at every stage.

“It’s been a cascade of problems. We’ve not been successful in finding people who are infectious. Then we’ve not been successful in contacting them. Then we’ve not been successful at getting them to self-isolate. That means you end up with a very small number of the people you need in quarantine.”

As the country returned to lockdown, public health experts said it represented a last opportunity to restructure the system and dramatically improve the country’s ability to identify and persuade those likely to have Covid to isolate. A recent report by the Association of Directors of Public Health said: “The simple reality is that the current system is neither ‘fully operational’ nor ‘world-beating’.”

Contact tracers suggested that a publicity campaign was needed to ensure people recognise the 0300 number calling them is NHS Test & Trace and a change to the system “so that we’re not calling people multiple times, constantly calling people — they get fed up of it”.

“Why didn’t they fix it over the summer?” one clinical contact tracer said. “Since May we’ve been saying the same thing, where the hell were they?

“We all joined to try and help and make a difference and I’ve lost confidence in the role because I don’t think it’s helping.

“I need people to pick up the phone to me and not be cross and have some confidence that we’re competent.”

Sir Peter wants the government to hand over all tracing to local authorities. “There is no need for us to jump through the hoops of having a national tracing system,” he said, arguing that it was “failing and chaotic”.

“Mayors and council leaders up and down the land will say if only we were trusted with the information and it came straight to us in a timely fashion we’ve got the resources to do it but also the experience and the local knowledge.”

Sir Peter said that “any local council . . . at a fraction of the cost of the national scheme could easily have scaled up”.

Meanwhile, pressure grows on Lady Harding. She has received praise for her drive and can-do attitude even from critics who questioned whether she has focused on the right priorities. This week she defended her team’s efforts, saying they had “built a system the size of Asda from scratch in five months”. Appearing before MPs on Wednesday, she dismissed the suggestion that the summer months had been wasted, saying they had been used “to great effect to dramatically expand our testing capacity” which grew faster than any other country in Europe. A spokeswoman for the Department of Health and Social Care credited NHS Test & Trace with reaching “1.7 million people who may otherwise have unknowingly spread coronavirus” and said they had worked “hand in hand with local authorities and directors of public health”.

Lady Harding said she was “very supportive” of a “locally led, nationally supported model of contact tracing”.

“We are working really hard,” she added. “We have 150 local authorities working with us on contact-tracing partnerships as we speak and another 150 about to go live and we’re really keen to experiment and pilot with all of those local authorities to do more and more.” Asked why, six months into the pandemic, these schemes were only being piloted, she said “we’re learning all the time”.

Sir Chris Ham argued that perhaps the biggest challenge is not just fixing or restructuring the tracing system but reclaiming the public’s trust.

He said: “Fundamentally, even if we had a fully functioning test, trace and isolating system in place, if each of us is unwilling to play our part in adhering to the rules that have been put in place, then frankly we’re not going to achieve the progress we need to contain the growth of infections and to put us back into a position where the restrictions can be relaxed.”

“The NHS is planning a “get out the vote” style operation to ensure people have two doses of a coronavirus vaccine as it prepares to start immunising vulnerable people before Christmas.“

However, Owl is reading reports that the trial continues: “by the third week of November, half of the patients in the study will have been observed for two months following their second dose. At that point, Pfizer will spend two to three weeks analyzing the data before sending it to regulators for approval.”

Chris Smyth, Whitehall Editor www.thetimes.co.uk 

Hospital fridges are likely to be used to store a Pfizer vaccine that must be kept at -70C if it is approved by regulators, with health chiefs believing that it could be feasible to use existing infrastructure at least to reach health and care staff and care home residents, who will be first in line.

Initial plans envision a relatively limited vaccination programme targeting the most vulnerable, with communication efforts at first focused on urging people to wait their turn.

The NHS “help us to help you” slogan is expected to be deployed to encourage people to be patient, with some involved in planning concerned that sufficient supplies for non-priority groups may not be available for some time.

Jonathan Van-Tam, the deputy chief medical officer for England, predicted last night there would be “very significant demand in the elderly in particular for this vaccine and ones that follow” and that “even with enormous planning from the NHS, it is going to take time to roll that kind of programme out”.

While saying that he was “hopeful but not yet certain that we could begin to see some vaccine by Christmas” he emphasised: “Making vaccines is really difficult. Many things can go wrong during manufacture — indeed, each batch has to be quality assured before it can be released.”

The Pfizer jab requires two doses three weeks apart and Professor Van-Tam stressed that the other “big name contenders” also required two shots, with people not fully protected until five weeks after their first dose.

The Times revealed on Saturday that a Whitehall unit has been set up to promote a vaccine and allay people’s concerns about a new jab. Officials are also planning an individualised campaign involving GPs writing to their patients to ensure people turn up when requested.

Those involved likened this to election “get out the vote” operations, stressing the challenge of ensuring people turn up as requested on two separate occasions. Take up of routine vaccination can fall ten points or so between the first and second dose. “A lot of work is going on to make sure people who come for the first dose also come for the second” a source said, though details are still being finalised.

Once a jab becomes widely available, drive-through vaccination centres are being planned to cope with the huge logistical challenge of administering vaccines to tens of millions of people without it becoming a “social-distancing nightmare”.

Training is due to begin imminently of an army of physiotherapists, midwives and other health professionals who will be used to administer the vaccine after the law was changed to allow a wider group of staff to give jabs.

The armed forces are also expected to be called upon to help with logistics.

Under a provisional ranking drawn up by the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation, care home residents and staff would be first to be vaccinated, followed by all NHS and care workers and people over 80.

People aged 75-80 would be next and jabs would then be sequentially offered to the general population by decreasing five-year age bands, with experts saying that age-based programmes are faster and ensure higher uptake.

Once all those over 65 had been offered the vaccine, it would be offered to younger adults at high risk because of health conditions, which could include diabetes and obesity. Other over 50s would be next in line, with the under 50s at the back of the queue.

This plan is likely to be tweaked when details of the vaccine are finalised, and consideration will also be given to offering priority to those most likely to catch and spread this disease, potentially including people from ethnic minorities and workers such as taxi drivers and shop assistants.

Martin Marshall, head of the Royal College of GPs, said it “makes sense” for family doctors to help distribute the vaccine but said: “There will likely be logistical challenges to overcome, for example around supply and storage of the vaccine — which may require new or additional equipment for some practices.”

Provisional priority list

1 Elderly care home residents and care home staff

2 All those aged 80 and over and NHS and social care workers

3 All those 75 and over

4 All those 70 and over

5 All those 65 and over

6 High-risk adults under 65

7 Moderate-risk adults under 65

8 All those 60 and over

9 All those 55 and over

10 All those 50 and over

11 The rest of the population

Caution turns to elation at ‘a truly seminal moment’

In a human body only the brain is more complex than the immune system. Until you put a vaccine into someone, you have no idea what it will do (Tom Whipple writes).

So when scientists tried to guess how coronavirus vaccines would fare, they had little to go on. The best indication came from the natural immunity conferred by its established virological cousins. And, as anyone who gets the same cold twice can tell you, they don’t confer much.

Virologists, not wanting to oversell what could be the most important vaccine of the 21st century, tried to manage expectations. “The reason there was caution early on probably involved several things,” Dan Davis, professor of immunology at Manchester University, said. “Coronaviruses are not thought to trigger strong long-lasting immunity.”

Then there was the novelty of the technology. “We have tried to make vaccines against many things before, and even when ideas seem good they’ve fallen down. There’s still no vaccine for HIV.”

No one, he said, wanted to predict a magic bullet only to see it turn out to be a more leaden kind.

“For the sake of society, it may have been better to give the message we are in it for the long haul and had to push on,” he said.

But now, we have the answer, and it is better than any predicted: 90 per cent efficacy.

“It’s a huge moment, a truly seminal moment.”

Skate parks and multi-use games areas in East Devon have been shut until Thursday, December 3, under national Covid-19 lockdown restrictions.

East Devon Reporter eastdevonnews.co.uk 

Whitehall and Sport England guidelines have seen facilities in Exmouth, Honiton, Budleigh Salterton, Ottery St Mary, Seaton and Axminster temporarily closed.

Councillor Geoff Jung, coast, countryside and environment portfolio holder for East Devon District Council, said: “I appreciate that users of our skate parks and multi-use game areas will be disappointed, but the safety of our residents is paramount.

Cllr Jung added: “We, as a council, are working very hard to ensure that their health and wellbeing is protected from any identified risks from coronavirus.

“We have endeavoured to follow the government guidance as closely as possible and will continue to do so as further information is received.”

Shut East Devon skate parks:

• Budleigh Salterton (Lime Kiln);
• Exmouth (Phear Park);
• Honiton (Allhallows);
• Seaton (Underfleet).

Closed multi-use games areas in the district:

• Phear Park, Exmouth (x 2);
• Liverton Copse, Cumberland Close, Exmouth;
• King George’s Field, Carter Avenue, Exmouth;
• The Crescent, Exmouth;
• Foxhill, Axminster;
• St Mark’s, Honiton;
• Davey Playing Field, Honiton;
• Thorne Farm Way, Ottery St Mary;
• All Hallows, Honiton;
• Winter’s Lane, Ottery St Mary;
• Greenway Lane, Budleigh Salterton.

The district’s play areas, nature reserves and parks and 20 of its public toilets currently remain open.

Outdoor gyms are off-limits and the area’s LED-run sports centres and swimming pools have also closed until December.

It is not yet the end of the pandemic, but the announcement by Pfizer/BioNTech that their vaccine has been 90% successful in the vital large-scale trials has got even the soberest of scientists excited.

Sarah Boseley www.theguardian.com

These are interim results and the trial will continue into December to collect more data. The two companies – a tiny German biotech with the big idea and the giant pharma company Pfizer with the means to develop it – have not yet published their detailed data, so it is all on trust. And yet, nobody is suggesting the results have been over-egged. It looks as though the vaccine not only works, but works better than anyone hoped.

Most of us will not be vaccinated by Christmas, but it is possible the first shots will be given before the end of the year. The World Health Organization has said health and care workers should be first in line, but some countries including the UK may want to vaccinate their elderly populations first, as long as it appears the vaccine works well in that age group and has no significant side-effects.

Europe, the US and the UK have all pre-bought supplies of the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine – there will be 200m doses going to the EU, 100m to the US and 40m to the UK. But although manufacturing is already well under way, there will not be enough to supply everyone who wants it straight away.

Experts have said that we need more than one vaccine to end the global pandemic. There are several more on the horizon, notably the Oxford University/AstraZeneca vaccine that uses a different technology. The great news for all the vaccine makers out there is that it is possible. A vaccine can actually prevent infections – and not just stop people dying by attenuating the illness they get.

“I very much welcome the news that it appears for the first time that a coronavirus vaccine can provide protection against disease, which is hugely important for public health,” said Prof Andrew Pollard, head of the Oxford vaccine group, which at one time looked as though it might be the first to declare efficacy results.

“For global equitable access, we will need multiple vaccines to be successful and so we continue in our efforts to test the Oxford vaccine and hope to be able to share interim results before the end of the year.”

At Imperial College London, Prof Robin Shattock, who is heading development of another mRNA (messenger RNA) vaccine said it was “not yet the endgame, but hopefully the beginning of global efforts to control this pandemic. A significant light at the end of the tunnel.

“It’s a breakthrough for Pfizer/BioNTech, but also for vaccines in general. It also demonstrates the speed and utility of RNA vaccines technology.”

Remarkably, the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine could be the first vaccine to be approved using the new technology called mRNA, which delivers the genetic code of the virus into the body, rather than any part of the virus itself. Shattock has said it is very safe, for that reason. He was working on mRNA vaccines before Covid-19 struck, seeking to use the technology for other viruses in low-income countries. If it works on Covid-19, he believes it will be a game-changer for the wider fight against deadly viruses.

There is one downside to overcome. The Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine needs ultra-cold chain. That means freezers that can store it at -80C (-112F). Low-income countries do not have them, although UN organisations are already working on supply in case it is necessary.

Right now, the scramble among countries to ensure they get supplies of the first vaccine to show efficacy while taking political credit is on. The US has already tried to stake a claim, with some Republicans, including Mike Pence, the vice-president, asserting that Operation Warp Speed was partly responsible for the success. But Pfizer was having none of it.

“We were never part of the Warp Speed,” Kathrin Jansen, Pfizer’s head of vaccine research and development told the New York Times. “We have never taken any money from the US government, or from anyone.”

Kate Bingham, chair of the government’s vaccine taskforce, is facing questions over whether she will benefit from a $65m (£49m) UK taxpayer-backed investment into a fund run by her private equity firm.

Heather Stewart www.theguardian.com

Bingham, a venture capitalist married to Treasury minister Jesse Norman, has already come under fire over allegations she revealed sensitive information to a private investors’ conference and insisted on hiring costly PR advisers.

She is expected to leave her post at the end of the year, according to a government source who said her contract ran until January 2021 and she had always intended to leave at that point.

Bingham “stepped away” from her role at private equity firm SV Health Investors in May to take an unpaid post as chair of the vaccine taskforce, which aims to ensure the UK population has access to vaccines as soon as possible.

Two months later, SV Health Investors announced it had secured a $65m investment into its SV7 Impact Medicine Fund from British Patient Capital (BPC), which is entirely funded by the UK government.

Accounts filed with Companies House show SV Health Investors earned at least £1.9m in management fees linked to its operation of the Impact Medicine Fund in 2019, before the government invested earlier this year.

The accounts suggest Bingham, as one of the company’s two managing partners in the UK, receives an annual share of profits generated by SV Health Investors, suggesting she could stand to benefit personally from the performance of the fund.

Her appointment to the vaccine taskforce was cited in the press release announcing BPC’s investment.

“In May 2020, Kate Bingham, managing partner, SV Health Investors, was appointed chair of the UK’s vaccine taskforce. In her work for SV, Kate’s biotech investments have resulted in the launch of six drugs for the treatment of patients with inflammatory and autoimmune disease and cancer making her uniquely qualified for the role,” the press release said.

The shadow Cabinet Office minister, Rachel Reeves, said: “It is vital that the government immediately show how they have managed any real or perceived conflict of interest with this appointment. Especially when you consider how many nurses wages $65 million could have paid for.

“We need answers quick. Otherwise this appears to be another in a string of government appointments and contracts handed to friends without due process.”

Nick Dearden, director of campaign group Global Justice Now, said: “There’s absolutely a conflict of interest. It’s deeply inappropriate. If governments in less wealthy countries behaved like this, we’d be lecturing them on ‘good governance.’”

Asked whether the prime minister had full confidence in Bingham, a No 10 spokesman said: “Yes. The work of the vaccine task force is obviously of great importance and we have secured agreements for 350m doses overall of six leading vaccine candidates.”

Labour had asked cabinet secretary Simon Case to investigate claims that Bingham disclosed sensitive information about potential targets for the government’s vaccines push to a $200-a-head private conference.

According to a video of the event obtained by the Sunday Times, she showed financiers a detailed list of vaccines which the UK government was closely monitoring and could later invest in.

Bingham reportedly told the event: “We haven’t necessarily signed contracts with all of them so far. But they’re all in our sights.” Several of the vaccines are owned or funded by publicly traded companies.

Appearing before a joint select committee hearing last week, Bingham denied any wrongdoing and described the report as “nonsense”, “inaccurate” and “irresponsible”.

She insisted her presentation had relied “on publicly available information and said little that expert delegates at the conference could not deduce themselves”.

Bingham, who reports directly to the prime minister, has spent more than £500,000 of taxpayers’ money on hiring PR consultants from a firm called Admiral Associates, rather than rely on civil service press officers, according to leaked documents also obtained by the Sunday Times.

The government has repeatedly been accused of cronyism in its management of the Covid-19 pandemic.

Dido Harding, who was appointed to run the £12bn NHS Test and Trace programme without an open appointments process, is married to Conservative MP John Penrose. Harding is not taking a salary for her role, and an advertisement for her permanent replacement is expected to be placed shortly.

The Department for Business, which oversees BPC and the vaccine taskforce, said: “Kate Bingham stepped back from her full-time role at SV Health Investors when appointed as chair of the vaccine taskforce. She declared her interest in BPC’s investment in a fund run by SV Health Investors, and appropriate mitigations are in place.” A BEIS spokesperson previously said: “As we have already made clear, Kate Bingham’s role as chair of the vaccine taskforce includes appearing at conferences, speaking to media and liaising closely with wider stakeholders.”

TRANSPORT: Improvements along a 7.5km stretch of the notorious North Devon Link Road have been agreed by the Department for Transport, as Daniel Clark reports.

The ‘biggest transport investment in North Devon for a generation’ will begin this month after the Department of Transport has signed off on the major improvements to the North Devon Link Road. The upgrades to the A361 will help unlock the ‘true potential of the local economy in Northern Devon’, with work to begin imminently thanks to £60m of investment announced today by Transport Secretary Grant Shapps. The funding will kick-start major works on the A361, also known as the North Devon Link Road – slashing journey times, boosting connectivity and unlocking housing across the region. The major project, being led by Devon County Council, will boost the local economy by supporting plans for 6,700 new homes in the region, making it easier for people to access job opportunities, and for businesses to get around. Confirmation of the funding is a victory for the Western Morning News, following the ‘We Need It Now’ campaign launched for the upgrades to the road to be delivered as a matter of urgency in August 2017 after a series of tragic deaths on the road. Mr Shapps said: “I am delighted to announce this funding to upgrade a vital gateway between Devon and the rest of the country. These works will boost connections, cut congestion for drivers and improve people’s quality of life. “It is a clear indication of our commitment to levelling up and investing in transport infrastructure. Through these works, we’ll improve people’s ability to travel across the South West while providing thousands with greater access to new homes and new jobs.” Cllr Andrea Davis, Devon County Council Cabinet Member for Infrastructure, Development and Waste, said: “This announcement is fantastic news for local residents and for Devon’s economy. The upgrade of this road is the biggest transport investment in North Devon for a generation. It will help unlock the true potential of the local economy in northern Devon, and with the ongoing impact of the coronavirus pandemic, that is vital at this time. “We have been working tirelessly on this project for a number of years so it’s great to see that effort rewarded with this Government funding. We will now be looking to get work started as soon as we can.” The works will focus on a 7.5km stretch between South Molton and Barnstaple and the route will be modernised with a wider carriageway, which will greatly improve overtaking opportunities, safety and resilience. The road’s capacity and eight key junctions will be upgraded – and to boost active travel, facilities for pedestrians and cyclists will be introduced along the route.

How is Sidbury, as an example, going to cope with this? – Owl

Click to Download SidburyTrafficJam

Grant Shapps, the transport secretary, said that trials of longer trailers “clearly show the benefits for business and the environment”.

Graeme Paton, Transport Correspondent www.thetimes.co.uk

A new generation of “mega-lorries” could take to roads under government plans to cut overall vehicle emissions.

Ministers are preparing to outline proposals that would allow heavier and longer HGVs to operate, enabling them to carry more freight. The Department for Transport (DfT) plans are aimed at cutting down the number of journeys needed to transport goods.

The maximum weight of lorries on British roads would increase by four tonnes to 48 tonnes and trailer lengths would be extended by two metres.

There are concerns that population growth and demand for online shopping is leading to a sharp increase in lorry traffic. Latest DfT figures show that HGVs covered 17.4 billion miles on Britain’s roads last year, a rise of almost 13 per cent compared with the mid-1990s.

Road safety groups have opposed bigger lorries, insisting that the extra length and “tail swing” when turning threatens pedestrians and cyclists. Many cyclists have been killed at junctions by left-turning lorries.

However, the government insists that previous trials show that the larger vehicles cut emissions and accidents by taking more lorries off the road.

Under the reforms, the maximum length of a “semi-trailer” — a trailer without a front axle which is pulled by a lorry tractor unit — will increase. These trailers are limited to 13.6 metres at present but the reforms would create a maximum length of 15.6 metres.

The DfT said that the longer trailers would be able to carry two more rows of pallets or at least three rows of supermarket goods cages on each journey.

An official trial started in 2012 and was intended to last 15 years. However, the DfT is proposing to end it early and reform laws around HGVs to permit all operators to use the longer trailers.

A consultation on the measures will open today and run until the new year. Separately, the DfT will run a second consultation on plans for a trial involving heavier lorries. The change would allow the direct transportation of heavier containers from freight trains to lorries, making it easier to shift cargo between rail depots and road distribution centres.

Grant Shapps, the transport secretary, said that trials of longer trailers “clearly show the benefits for business and the environment”.

In Europe only the Netherlands and Norway allow lorries bigger than the proposed 48 tonnes, with 50-tonne limits. In the US, lorries are limited to 36 tonnes for interstate journeys, but individual states allow higher loads.

A millionaire fashion mogul has lost a bid to save a skate park, tennis court and garage unlawfully constructed on a Devon beauty spot.

Retrospective in AONB turned down by South Hams District Council – Owl

BBC News www.bbc.co.uk 

image South Hams District Council/Apex

Sean Thomas, founder of the White Stuff fashion brand, had his plans to plant 1,000 trees to screen the site turned down by South Hams District Council.

The authority said the construction near Salcombe was “detrimental” to the “highly sensitive” local environment.

It said formal enforcement action would begin. Mr Thomas is yet to comment.

Mr Thomas has six months to appeal against the decision. He may have to tear down the development, the Local Democracy Reporting Service reported.

He built the additions to land adjoining his home in the South Devon Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty (AONB) and alongside the Salcombe to Kingsbridge Estuary Site of Special Scientific Interest.

After complaints from residents about the “eyesore” development, a retrospective planning application was refused in 2019.

In April, Mr Thomas submitted the plans to plant more than 1,000 native trees.

Refusing the proposals, the council report described the constructions as an “incongruous development in a highly sensitive area of the open countryside”.

The district council report said: “The development has a detrimental impact upon the surrounding landscape… resulting in adverse impacts to the natural beauty, special qualities, distinctive character, landscape and scenic beauty of the South Devon AONB.”

Control of highway flood gates in Exmouth will be taken over by East Devon District Council.

Remember in February Council Leader, John Hart’s solution to flooding: encourage a modern day dad’s army of individuals, villages and Parish Councils, where they care, to do more for themselves. Self-help, he said, is going to be the order of the day. – Owl

Daniel Clark www.exmouthjournal.co.uk

Installed on the seafront, the flood gates are considered essential, and if they are not operated, up to 1,500 residential properties plus numerous commercial properties will remain at flood risk during a storm event.

They have been operated by the Environment Agency, but with it facing cutbacks, East Devon’s cabinet meeting on Wednesday (October 28) night it was no longer feasible for them to be the primary responder and in charge of closing the flood gates when storm events are predicted.

Councillors unanimously agreed that it would be sensible for East Devon District Council (EDDC) to be the primary operator of the highways gates, and a community group operating under Exmouth Town Council, will be the primary operators of non-highways gates.

Supporting the move, Cllr Geoff Jung, cabinet member for coast, country and environment, said: “The scheme to get volunteers to work on the gates has worked elsewhere in Devon and this will be very welcome for the residents of Exmouth to be protected from storms and rising sea levels.”

In the event of storm conditions forecast, EDDC would receive a warning from the Environment Agency at least six hours before gate closures would be required.

EDDC would then close the central route, via Alexander Terrace, with gates opposite Morton Road and the Eastern Route, via the Esplanade, and adjacent to the Premier Inn.

The western route, via the Esplanade, with gates adjacent to The Grove, would be the last gate to be closed, as it has the highest threshold.

Once the central and eastern route gates have been closed, EDDC staff would man the western route gates, only allowing vehicles out of the impounding area. Once all vehicles have been removed, the western route gates would be closed.

Once the storm, or series of storms has passed, the Environment Agency will indicate the gates can be opened. EDDC will then open the gates at the earliest opportunity, the meeting heard.

In regards to the non-highway gates, it is envisaged there will be two separate community volunteer groups, one based at the Camperdown area, and another based at the seafront, which will be responsible.

“It is unclear how Boris Johnson came to appoint Kate Bingham to chair Britain’s vaccine taskforce, because there was no formal process. The 55-year-old venture capitalist’s establishment connections are unlikely to have hurt, however.

Her father, Lord Bingham, who served as lord chief justice, was hailed as the greatest English judge since the Second World War. Her husband, Jesse Norman, is a Conservative minister who went to Eton at the same time as Boris Johnson.

Bingham went to school with Johnson’s sister, Rachel, and studied at Oxford at the same time as the prime minister.”

All clear?-Owl

Gabriel Pogrund, Whitehall Correspondent www.thetimes.co.uk

The head of the government’s vaccine taskforce has charged the taxpayer £670,000 for a team of boutique relations consultants.

Kate Bingham, a venture capitalist married to Jesse Norman, a Conservative minister, was appointed to the role by Boris Johnson.

Since June she has used eight full-time consultants from Admiral Associates, a London PR agency, to oversee her media strategy.

According to leaked documents, she has already spent £500,000 on the team, which is contracted until the end of the year. It means each consultant is on the equivalent of £167,000 a year — more than the prime minister’s salary.

Bingham, 55, is said to have “insisted” on hiring them despite concerns they would duplicate the work of about 100 communications staff at the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS), in which her taskforce sits.

The decision was signed off by civil servants, not Alok Sharma, the business secretary.

It has also emerged that Bingham will address a virtual conference of “executives, bankers [and] venture capitalists” held by a California biotech company next year, with tickets priced at $2,460 (£1,870).

A brochure refers to Bingham in her government role and not as managing director of SV Health Investors, a venture capital firm.

It says she will discuss her efforts to “find and manufacture a Covid-19 vaccine”. The disclosures will add to pressure for Bingham to resign.

Last night BEIS declined to give detail of the consultants’ work. They are understood to help Bingham prepare for media appearances, draft statements and to oversee a vaccines podcast on Spotify.

One Whitehall source said: “I don’t know what they do.” Another said: “They’re bossing around civil servants but no one knows who they are, what their experience is or what authority they have.”

A third Whitehall source said the team of consultants helped Bingham with day-to-day “comms works”, such as appearing in interviews and preparing press statements, and had set up a podcast co-presented by Bingham called Covid-19: The Search for a Vaccine.

Yet despite average earnings equivalent to £167,000 a year the consultants have not helped Bingham answer a number of questions stemming from last week’s revelations.

On Wednesday, Bingham told a joint select committee that our report last week was “nonsense”, “inaccurate” and “irresponsible”. Asked if she had disclosed information not in the public domain to the financiers, she told MPs: “No.”

We then sent BEIS a list of statements made by Bingham during the talk, asking for evidence that the information was already public. None was supplied.

It is unclear how Boris Johnson came to appoint Kate Bingham to chair Britain’s vaccine taskforce, because there was no formal process. The 55-year-old venture capitalist’s establishment connections are unlikely to have hurt, however.

Her father, Lord Bingham, who served as lord chief justice, was hailed as the greatest English judge since the Second World War. Her husband, Jesse Norman, is a Conservative minister who went to Eton at the same time as Boris Johnson.

Bingham went to school with Johnson’s sister, Rachel, and studied at Oxford at the same time as the prime minister.

In May, Johnson called Bingham and asked her to take the role, prompting her to say: “I’m not a vaccine expert, why should I be the right person?” Johnson reassured her the skills she had gained working in private equity would help.

On saying yes, Bingham became a more influential public servant than most ministers. She is responsible for investing billions of pounds of taxpayers’ funds in Covid-19 vaccines that could offer a route out of repeated lockdowns as soon as next spring.

The questions about her suitability do not concern her record on delivering vaccines — though last week she was forced to admit Britain will have just four million doses of AstraZeneca’s vaccine by the end of the year, not the 30 million promised by September — but her wider conduct.

Like others parachuted into Whitehall during the pandemic, Bingham has spent her career in the private sector. But she has chosen not to step down from her role as managing director of SV Health Investors, a private equity firm operating in Boston, Massachusetts, and London.

According to Sir Alistair Graham, a former chairman of the committee on standards in public life, such situations create a conflict of interest: “Whose interests does she serve?”

Is it possible to separate her public and private responsibilities?

Last week Bingham offered an answer to that question, when she appeared before MPs after we reported she had shared “official sensitive” information about Britain’s vaccine efforts at the $200-a-head event for US venture capitalists.

During an hour-long talk to the financiers, she had given some of the most detailed insight to date about the UK’s immunisation programme, including confidential data about the government’s investment priorities.

She then used an appearance at the science and health joint select committee on Wednesday to attack our reporting.

Asked whether she had disclosed anything that was not in the public domain, she said: “No. And there have been a lot of nonsense reports, and inaccurate, and I’m afraid to say irresponsible, reports suggesting that I did,” she told Greg Clark, the Tunbridge Wells MP. Her account is understood to have been met with scepticism in Downing Street.

Today, new evidence makes the questions more urgent still. In February, Bingham is due to appear at another elite function: a conference hosted by Biocom, a Californian biotech firm, charging $2,460 (£1,870) a ticket to bring together “executives, bankers [and] venture capitalists”. It promises networking that will “be fruitful for your business ventures this year and for many years to come”.

In brochures, Bingham is advertised solely as head of the UK vaccine taskforce and the literature says she will discuss her work “to find and manufacture a Covid-19 vaccine”.

During her talk to venture capitalists last month, Bingham showed guests a confidential list of 51 vaccines in development. Of these, Bingham told guests, officials had marked 14 as priority one, meaning they expect to place orders worth hundreds of millions of pounds. “We haven’t necessarily signed contracts with all of them so far, but they’re all in our sights,” she said, pointing to a slide in which the relevant treatments were split into blue, representing priority one, or purple, priority two.

For those present this was sensitive information they could use to make investments of their own. Bingham even showed the estimated price of vaccines per dose, based on an analysis prepared by Rx Securities, an investment bank.

She went on to predict that everyone over 50 will have a vaccine available to them by Easter, but produced documents showing that government scientists believe up to 40% of people may reject it.

Parliament, and the general public, would usually expect to be briefed by the vaccines chief before a paying American audience. The business department that hosts Bingham’s team did not quite back her assertion that nothing new appeared in her talk, simply saying there was “little that expert delegates at the conference could not deduce themselves”.

There is also confusion about whether Bingham received approval to give the talk. BEIS said “the fact of her appearance and the content of her presentation received approval”, but officials have since cast doubt on that narrative.

On Thursday we provided Bingham and the department with a list of statements she had made during the talk, which, we contended, had not appeared in public.

The department was invited to provide evidence that such information was already public and, failing that, to retract the claim. It did neither.

A BEIS spokesman said: “As we have already made clear, Kate Bingham’s role as chair of the vaccines taskforce includes appearing at conferences, speaking to media and liaising closely with wider stakeholders.”

The department did not provide details of the process by which she received approval for the talk, or say whether her next appearance at the California conference was appropriate.

Biocom did, though, edit its online description of her upcoming talk to say she would discuss only the “public effort” driving the vaccine programme.

The revelations come amid questions about the role of the private sector in the government’s pandemic response.

Lord Agnew of the Cabinet Office is working to create an in-house consultancy — dubbed “Crown Consultancy” — to cut the government’s dependence on high-charging private sector firms.

Critics of the government have focused on what looks to them like a network of personal appointments. Baroness Harding, the head of the NHS test-and-trace service, is married to John Penrose, another Conservative MP, and landed the role after presiding over a cyber-security scandal at TalkTalk.

Others have focused on value for money as well as transparency: Michael Gove, the Cabinet Office minister, was recently forced to defend leaked documents showing test-and-trace was spending £7,000 a day on consultants.

Research by Tussell, the data provider, shows that the government takes an average of 2½ months to publish Covid-related contracts, exceeding the legal limit of 30 days.

Bingham encompasses all these concerns, but initially attracted only passing interest. That may be due to the ambiguity of her role: she officially reports directly to the prime minister, but sits in BEIS. She is thought to interact with Matt Hancock, the health secretary, as well as Alok Sharma, the business secretary, but is supervised by neither on a daily basis.

Even the membership of the vaccines taskforce is unknown. When a member of the public sought to find out recently, using powers under the Freedom of Information Act, they received three pages of redacted names. An official said: “Please note that some information has been redacted under section 40 [personal information] of the act.”

Some sources are trying to illuminate Whitehall’s dark corridors. One said: “There’s so much money sloshing around, but people just don’t know what’s happening over here.”

Asked to describe the role of the PR consultants, BEIS would not comment.

Last night, Rachel Reeves, the shadow Cabinet Office minister, said: “At a time of national crisis, people don’t want to see huge sums of taxpayers’ money needlessly sprayed on spin doctors or management consultants.

“There needs to be a breakdown of this expenditure and proper justification as to how it actually helps the national effort in tackling this pandemic.”

The PM called the footballer on Saturday night to confirm latest about-face for the government

Haroon Siddique www.theguardian.com 

On the day his political soulmate was being urged to belatedly show some humility after defeat in the US election, Boris Johnson once again bowed to the better judgment of a 23-year-old footballer, in the latest of a series of high-profile U-turns.

After weeks of digging in his heels and refusing to cede to calls to extend free school meals to children from low-income families during school holidays in England, Johnson phoned the Manchester United and England footballer Marcus Rashford on Saturday night to inform him of his change of heart.

The package includes a £170m Covid winter grant scheme to support vulnerable families in England and an extension of the holiday activities and food programme to the Easter, summer and Christmas breaks next year.

The reversal came after a crescendo of criticism, led by Rashford, but also from charities, the opposition, media on both sides of the political divide and even some Conservative MPs, who realised how out of tune their party was with the public mood.

It was the second time the Manchester United star had forced the government to change course this year. On the previous occasion, which last month earned Rashford an MBE, No 10 had initially rejected his plea for it to keep paying for £15-a-week food vouchers for some of England’s poorest families over the summer, only to cave in amid a public outcry.

Just under five months later, the Old Etonian prime minister picked up the phone and again called Rashford, who has spoken of his experience of food poverty growing up in Wythenshawe, breaking the news in what the striker described as a “good conversation”.

Showing diplomatic skills to match his footballing prowess, Rashford said: “There is still so much more to do, and my immediate concern is the approximate 1.7 million children who miss out on free school meals, holiday provision and Healthy Start vouchers because their family income isn’t quite low enough. But the intent the government have shown today is nothing but positive, and they should be recognised for that.”

Among those who hailed Rashford’s role were Save the Children UK, the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health and the archbishop of Canterbury. The tennis coach, Judy Murray simply tweeted: “Rashford 2 Johnston [sic] 0.”

The children’s commissioner for England, Anne Longfield, said: “I welcome these steps towards providing more free meals and healthy diets for children who need them and holiday activities. Families are facing hard times financially and this will help.”

Longfield had previously likened the debate over the issue to something out of the pages of Charles Dickens’ 19th-century novel Oliver Twist. Tory MPs had suggested that extending free school meals would increase dependency or destroy the currency because of the cost.

One Conservative MP, Brendan Clarke-Smith, called for “less celebrity virtue-signalling on Twitter by proxy and more action to tackle the real causes of child poverty”. After the Conservatives’ defeat of a Labour motion to extend free school meals prompted councils, local businesses, charities and community groups to step in to fill the void over half-term, opposition and accusations of virtue-signalling appeared ever further removed from reality. Nevertheless, Downing Street repeatedly declined to praise the organisations, saying only that it did not believe free school meals were necessary outside term.

In a year that has also seen U-turns on the second national lockdown, extending the furlough scheme and A-level and GCSE results, Rashford’s warning that “there is still so much more to do” may be liable to bring Johnson out in a cold sweat.

Of the three demands in Rashford’s petition to end child food poverty, which has attracted more than 1m signatures, the one that remains unfulfilled is: “Expand free school meals to all under-16s where a parent or guardian is in receipt of universal credit or equivalent benefit.” The government is also poised for a battle over the £20-a-week pandemic supplement to universal credit, which is due to end in April.

Longfield and the Trussell Trust were among those who tempered their appreciation for the latest policy about-face by calling for the £20 universal credit increase to be retained. Becca Lyon, head of child poverty at Save the Children UK, said: “Families need to know that they’re not going to be £1,000 down next year, when the increase ends in April.”

Each patient so far admitted to the Nightingale hospitals has cost £1m to treat, an analysis reveals.

Caroline Wheeler and Tom Calver www.thetimes.co.uk

Seven Nightingale hospitals were built, at a total cost of £220m, to ease pressure on the health service during the first wave of the Covid-19 pandemic, but some may never fully open because of a staff shortage. The aim was to provide critical care in the event that NHS hospitals became overwhelmed.

Only two, in London and Manchester, looked after anyone, caring for about 200 patients in total during the first wave.

Despite England being plunged into a second national lockdown amid fears the NHS was reaching breaking point, only the Nightingale in Manchester is currently taking patients. Harrogate’s and Exeter’s are reportedly being used for non-Covid diagnostic care, such as cancer screening.

Chris Hopson, chief executive of NHS Providers, said there are “not the hundreds or thousands of NHS staff waiting to be deployed into those hospitals”.

He added: “In effect, you would have to take them from existing hospitals. Clearly what you want to do is to carry on treating patients in existing hospitals for as long as you possibly can until all of the existing capacity is used and then you flip to your insurance policy of using the Nightingales.

“But as soon as you start doing that, you will start drawing staff from existing hospitals, so the patient-to-members-of-staff ratio will start dropping, which will mean more pressure on quality of care.”

He claims the makeshift hospitals were only supposed to be deployed as a “last resort insurance policy” if the capacity in existing hospitals was reached.

However, Hopson said that the NHS Nightingale hospitals, inspired by the example of Italy’s Covid response, remain on standby to be used for when the last bit of capacity in the health service has been squeezed, adding: “The idea that you don’t need a lockdown because you are not using your Nightingale capacity is not true.”

The revelation comes just days after Sir Simon Stevens, the chief executive of NHS England, revealed that about 30,000 NHS staff are self-isolating or off work because of the coronavirus. The NHS employs 1.3m people in England.

Last week a senior intensive care specialist warned that reopening Nightingale field hospitals during the second peak of the coronavirus risks poaching staff from already overburdened hospitals.

Speaking at a Royal Society of Medicine webinar on Thursday, Dr Gary Masterson, a consultant at the Royal Liverpool University Hospital, said Nightingale hospitals had been a good idea in principle, but added: “I think perhaps the thinking was done before we had any understanding of this disease process.”

He said they were likely to be of little value because it is already hard to find the numbers of multi-disciplinary staff needed for our standard hospitals.

“There was an impression that if you stick a ventilator by a bed you get an intensive care bed space — that’s simply not true,” Masterson said.

“Once you ventilate a patient, these patients are often very, very sick and require advanced therapies.

“We are struggling to staff our normal NHS hospitals with self-isolation, with staff sickness and so forth — how are we going to staff Nightingale hospitals? I really don’t understand that.”

The Birmingham Nightingale, based at the National Exhibition Centre, cost £66.4m and was the most expensive to set up. Despite a capacity of 4,000 beds, it has yet to treat a single patient.

The cost of the Exeter Nightingale, at £23m, included £113,000 in management consultant fees. It opened on July 3 — well after the worst of the first wave — and never admitted a single Covid patient. Along with Harrogate, it has been used for CT scans since the summer.

Manchester Nightingale is finally being used for patients, but not Covid ones. It reopened at the end of last month, but if trusts want to use the £23.4m facility they have to supply their own nurses.

In the first wave the hospital cared for just over 100 patients in total. However, it is not an intensive care hospital, instead it is used for those who “no longer need to be in a critical care environment”.

ExCeL London and the NEC, which had already been earmarked to be decommissioned as hospitals, were set to reopen for events from October 1 until the government delayed the restart date.

Between them the seven Nightingales had a maximum stated capacity of 10,126 beds, around half of which were intensive care. However, because patient numbers were so small or non-existent, the actual number of beds was just 1,700.

Yesterday, the Royal College of Nursing (RCN) warned that nursing shortages across the NHS could lead to staff burnout and risk patient safety this winter.

The nursing union said that a combination of staff absence due to the pandemic, and around 40,000 registered nursing vacancies in England, was putting too much strain on the remaining workforce.

Mike Adams, RCN’s England director, said: “The NHS is now at its highest level of preparedness as it faces the prospect of an extremely challenging winter.

“We already know that frontline nurses — in hospitals, communities and care homes — are under huge strain.

“Anecdotally we’re hearing that in some hospitals they [nurses] are becoming increasingly thinly spread on the ground, as staff become unwell or have to isolate, at the same time as demand on services continues to increase.”

Owl has always regarded the Covid-19 symptom tracker app as being the best tool available to give early indications of change in the pandemic. Over 3 million individuals across the country are sampled on a daily basis and in a consistent way. The only caveat is that these individuals are self-selecting.

The current chart of the evolution of infections on a daily basis is very interesting. It shows that the infection rate began to reduce around 31 October. The infection then appears to have peaked around 4 or 5 November and is now falling. 

With an incubation period of up to two weeks (though there is now some suggestion that it might be only one) there will always be a lag of at least this time between imposing any lockdown control and observing any effect. For the government, there are then additional delays before the testing regime produces results, especially at week-ends.

The changes in the chart, therefore, relate to what has been happening as a result of the imposition of the tier system, before lockdown 2. We can reasonably assume that lockdown 2 will have an additional effect to that of the tier system. We will have to wait to see just how large an effect that is.

Meanwhile the omens are encouraging. 

At Greenacres in Exeter, Paul Frost, 56, a snagging inspector, found his family’s five-bedroom detached Persimmon house lacked fire barriers after a 2018 blaze at a terraced house on the estate quickly spread next door.

After he pushed Persimmon to investigate, the housebuilder found more than a third of homes at Greenacres had the same defect, and it wrote to more than 1,000 people in the southwest, saying their properties needed checking.

Martina Lees, Senior Property Writer www.thetimes.co.uk 

Houses are now being caught in the building safety crisis that has paralysed the market for modern flats in the wake of the Grenfell Tower fire.

Fire risks similar to those in flats have been discovered at thousands of recently built houses. In one case, a bank asked a house buyer for an “external wall system” (EWS1) form, requiring an invasive fire-safety survey designed for tall blocks of flats.

One of the first analyses of the crisis by economists warns it could leave the property market “significantly weaker” than their already grim forecasts due to coronavirus. Capital Economics said up to 900,000 flats — 4.5% of England’s private property market — faced mortgage problems because their blocks lacked EWS1 sign-off. Without this, banks will not lend and owners cannot sell, leaving millions trapped.

Industry figures say a review of the EWS1 form, which flat owners had hoped would unblock the mortgage logjam, is “not EWS2” and will have limited effect.

The scandal is hitting houses too. At the Hamptons, a 650-home Berkeley development in Worcester Park, southwest London, missing fire barriers in cavity walls allowed a block of flats to burn down in 11 minutes in September. Houses on the estate have the same defect.

In one £600,000 terrace, contractors will need a month to fix fire-safety defects, including missing fire barriers. “I feel really nervous living in my own house,” said the owner. St James, the Berkeley subsidiary that built it, said “work will be completed as quickly as possible and signed off by an independent fire engineer”.

At Greenacres in Exeter, Paul Frost, 56, a snagging inspector, found his family’s five-bedroom detached Persimmon house lacked fire barriers after a 2018 blaze at a terraced house on the estate quickly spread next door.

After he pushed Persimmon to investigate, the housebuilder found more than a third of homes at Greenacres had the same defect, and it wrote to more than 1,000 people in the southwest, saying their properties needed checking.

Last year an independent review found Persimmon had overseen a “systemic nationwide failure” to fit fire barriers in its timber-frame properties. The company’s annual profit has topped £1bn in the past two years and it paid its chief executive a £75m bonus in 2018. “For it not to install cavity barriers that cost a few pounds — there’s no excuse,” Frost said. Persimmon is inspecting 16,000 homes and promised to fix those affected.

In Wales, it told hundreds of homeowners in Bryn, Llanelli, and Sketty, Swansea, of the same defects only a week ago.

On a Devon estate by another housebuilder, a retired couple must move out of their new timber-framed terraced house to allow faults, including missing fire stops, to be fixed. “You expect it to be safe. You don’t expect the next-door neighbour’s cooker to kill you,” the wife said. They also own an unmortgageable London flat in a low-rise block with no EWS1 form. “When you’re living in two £0-rated properties, that’s not good,” she said.

A Sunday Times campaign to end the hidden housing scandal calls for a fairer, faster process to replace the EWS1 form. The campaign revealed that 9 in 10 buildings have failed the checks. Leaseholders must then pay to fix cladding, insulation, balconies and wall structures. It can cost £75,000 per flat and take 5-10 years.

Even new-build houses with no known fire risks can be affected. In Birmingham, the sale of a terraced house stalled for two months after the buyer’s lender, TSB, wanted an EWS1 form, said Tania Rawle, 49, the owner. TSB’s valuer asked whether two small panels of cladding on the house, built 10 years ago, were flammable. “I had never noticed them before,” she said.

Fewer than 300 fire engineers can perform EWS1 checks. Rawle said she struggled to find one. “It’s a lender being ridiculously overcautious and potentially harming the flow of properties. And it’s bloody annoying.”

TSB said later that the valuer had requested the EWS1 “in error” and waived the demand. It does not require EWS1 forms for houses “as there is no government requirement”.

The form was designed to reassure lenders on flats in blocks taller than 18 metres (59 ft, or six storeys) after the Grenfell fire, which killed 72 people in 2017, exposed a nationwide failure of building regulations. Since January, when the government tightened safety advice for all flats, some banks have refused to lend even on three-storey brick blocks without EWS1 forms.

Capital Economics said the forms could be required for up to 900,000 private flats — the number in modern blocks over three storeys . The “downside risks are significant” for housing transactions in 2021.

It said: “Problems may become more important next year, as any cladding delays cool housing demand on top of any weakness arising from a fragile economy and the end of the stamp duty cut.”

• Construction of single and two storey side extensions 61 Moormead Budleigh Salterton EX9 6PRRef. No: 20/2401/FUL | Validated: Fri 30 Oct 2020 | Status: Awaiting decision
• Construction of front porch extension Cadhay Cottage Cadhay Ottery St Mary EX11 1QYRef. No: 20/2396/FUL | Validated: Fri 30 Oct 2020 | Status: Awaiting decision
• T1 – Beech, Reduce height by approximately 4m and prune sides to shape accordingly. MDC 100mm Existing height 15m Existing crown spread N-S 13m, E-W 11m Gilbrook House Woodbury Exeter EX5 1LGRef. No: 20/2398/TCA | Validated: Fri 30 Oct 2020 | Status: Awaiting decision
• Construction of 2 storey extension, detached single garage and canopies; re-construction and alterations to existing flat roof extension including amendments to fenestration and cladding (Revision of previously approved 20/0429/FUL) 11 Primley Gardens Sidmouth EX10 9LERef. No: 20/2380/FUL | Validated: Thu 29 Oct 2020 | Status: Awaiting decision
• General pruning of Yew tree that had its crown / height removed in 2016 under application 16/1185/TRE. This application is to remove the growth since the works under 16/1185/TRE with reshaping to give the appearance of a yew tree rather than a hedge, in accordance with the request of the tree’s owner Nicola and David Meyrick of the Coach House EX12 3HS. This yew tree significantly obscures the view of 1 Eastcroft, EX12 3HS – if this application is successful, please could continuous approval be considered to keep this yew tree at the height approved by 16/1185/TRE to avoid new applications every 3 to 4 years as the yew tree grows again. 1 East Croft New Road Beer Seaton EX12 3HSRef. No: 20/2377/TCA | Validated: Thu 29 Oct 2020 | Status: Awaiting decision
• Construction of single storey side and front extensions. 17 Mountain Close Exmouth EX8 2PJRef. No: 20/2379/FUL | Validated: Thu 29 Oct 2020 | Status: Awaiting decision
• Single storey rear extension Wymcot Church Road Whimple Exeter EX5 2TARef. No: 20/2378/FUL | Validated: Thu 29 Oct 2020 | Status: Awaiting decision
• Construction of proposed single storey extension. Hill View Greendown Axminster EX13 7TDRef. No: 20/2367/FUL | Validated: Wed 28 Oct 2020 | Status: Awaiting decision
• Replace render with hung slate on side western elevation. The Old Clink 38 Fore Street Budleigh Salterton EX9 6NJRef. No: 20/2368/FUL | Validated: Wed 28 Oct 2020 | Status: Awaiting decision
• Construction of single storey side extension Westown Cottage BroadhemburyRef. No: 20/2370/FUL | Validated: Fri 30 Oct 2020 | Status: Awaiting decision

• Agricultural storage building Land At Moor Lane PoltimoreRef. No: 20/2366/AGR | Validated: Wed 28 Oct 2020 | Status: Awaiting decision
• Construction of hip to gable extension including side Juliette balcony and rear dormer window. 1 Highfield Sidmouth EX10 8XARef. No: 20/2362/FUL | Validated: Wed 28 Oct 2020 | Status: Awaiting decision
• Construction of rear dormer window to allow loft conversion, new porch and alterations to the garage roof 12 Pine Grove Honiton EX14 2HSRef. No: 20/2355/FUL | Validated: Tue 27 Oct 2020 | Status: Awaiting decision
• Construction of rear dormer window to allow loft conversion 4 Park Way Exmouth EX8 3QERef. No: 20/2354/FUL | Validated: Wed 28 Oct 2020 | Status: Awaiting decision
• Construction of single storey and two storey extensions and front and rear dormer windows. Alterations to first floor side windows. Wayside Venn Ottery Ottery St Mary EX11 1SARef. No: 20/2347/FUL | Validated: Tue 27 Oct 2020 | Status: Awaiting decision
• Use of the property known as Bycott as a dwelling without compliance with an agricultural occupancy condition Bycott Marsh Green Exeter EX5 2HERef. No: 20/2346/CPE | Validated: Tue 27 Oct 2020 | Status: Awaiting decision
• Two storey side extension and new driveway 1 Hawksdown View Seaton 2349/FULRef. No: 20/2349/FUL | Validated: Tue 27 Oct 2020 | Status: Awaiting decision
• Construction of two storey rear extension and alterations to the side windows at the first floor level 7 Briar Close Exmouth EX8 2NLRef. No: 20/2342/FUL | Validated: Fri 30 Oct 2020 | Status: Awaiting decision
• Removal of 5.8m section of hedgerow to create agricultural accessLand Opposite Sunnylands Farm ChardstockRef. No: 20/2343/HRN | Validated: Tue 27 Oct 2020 | Status: Awaiting decision
• Construction of single storey rear and side extensions 139 Chineway Gardens Ottery St Mary EX11 1JLRef. No: 20/2353/FUL | Validated: Tue 27 Oct 2020 | Status: Awaiting decision

• New boundary wall and access gates 2A Sarlsdown Road Exmouth EX8 2HYRef. No: 20/2341/FUL | Validated: Tue 27 Oct 2020 | Status: Awaiting decision
• Raised and altered replacement roof to an existing garage and for an additional external opening within the garage. 8 Birch Road Lympstone Exmouth EX8 5LBRef. No: 20/2331/FUL | Validated: Wed 28 Oct 2020 | Status: Awaiting decision
• T1, Eucalyptus – removal of the four trunks which are growing from the ‘parent’ trunk. To prevent failure. Flat 3 Clyde Lodge 3 Cyprus Road Exmouth EX8 2DZRef. No: 20/2323/TCA | Validated: Mon 26 Oct 2020 | Status: Awaiting decision
• T1 Holly Fell to clear sign T2 Birch (nearest road) Fell as in poor condition T3 Holm Oak Crown Lift 2.1m to give appropriate clearance T4 Lime Crown Lift 2.1m to give appropriate clearance The Deaf Academy 1 Douglas Avenue Exmouth EX8 2AURef. No: 20/2328/TRE | Validated: Mon 26 Oct 2020 | Status: Awaiting decision
• T1-4, Sycamore : fell as agreed with David Colman July 2020 6 Old Home Farm Rousdon Lyme Regis DT7 3YLRef. No: 20/2330/TCA | Validated: Mon 26 Oct 2020 | Status: Awaiting decision
• Increase height of existing chimney stack and add chimney pot Beech Cottage Plymtree Cullompton EX15 2JURef. No: 20/2324/FUL | Validated: Mon 26 Oct 2020 | Status: Awaiting decision
• Retention of 2 no. fascia signs 13 Winchester Close Feniton Honiton EX14 3EXRef. No: 20/2332/ADV | Validated: Mon 26 Oct 2020 | Status: Awaiting decision
• Refurbishment of pool house. Edge Barton Manor Branscombe Seaton EX12 3BNRef. No: 20/2333/FUL | Validated: Mon 26 Oct 2020 | Status: Awaiting decision
• Construction of single storey side and rear link extension and raised decking and associated steps. Alteration to roof of existing lean to. Rosaven House Whalley Lane Uplyme Lyme Regis DT7 3URRef. No: 20/2322/FUL | Validated: Mon 26 Oct 2020 | Status: Awaiting decision
• Refurbishment of pool house including: replacement window instead of door, replacement of tiles, removal of stud wall, creation of new stud wall and replacement of rainwater goods Edge Barton Manor Branscombe Seaton EX12 3BNRef. No: 20/2334/LBC | Validated: Mon 26 Oct 2020 | Status: Awaiting decision

• Removal of existing temporary classroom and replacement with permanent single storey classroom Kings School Cadhay Lane Ottery St Mary EX11 1RARef. No: 20/2311/FUL | Validated: Tue 27 Oct 2020 | Status: Awaiting decision
• Change of use to community workshop and change of door in the North elevation to a disabled access Devon And Somerset Fire And Rescue Service Station Road Budleigh Salterton EX9 6RJRef. No: 20/2316/FUL | Validated: Wed 28 Oct 2020 | Status: Awaiting decision
• Construction of detached garage Spring Acre Spring Head Road Uplyme Lyme Regis DT7 3RSRef. No: 20/2319/FUL | Validated: Mon 26 Oct 2020 | Status: Awaiting decision
• Construction of proposed greenhouse Ware Barn Ware Lyme Regis DT7 3RHRef. No: 20/2310/FUL | Validated: Tue 27 Oct 2020 | Status: Awaiting decision
• T1, sycamore – reduce height by approximately 2m and re-shape side growth by shortening back by 1.5 – 2m to a suitable side branch. Remove low growth on main stem. Reason to allow more light into the house and garden. T2, crab apple – fell. Reason – die-back with thin foliage. 1 Sanditon Station Road Sidmouth EX10 8LLRef. No: 20/2302/TRE | Validated: Wed 28 Oct 2020 | Status: Awaiting decision
• Retention of annex 8 Grange Cottages Rockbeare Exeter EX5 2EPRef. No: 20/2289/FUL | Validated: Wed 28 Oct 2020 | Status: Awaiting decision
• Calving shed Scruel Barton Southleigh Colyton EX24 6SDRef. No: 20/2292/FUL | Validated: Thu 29 Oct 2020 | Status: Awaiting decision
• Construction of single storey rear extension. Ashmead Whimple Exeter EX5 2TSRef. No: 20/2288/FUL | Validated: Mon 26 Oct 2020 | Status: Awaiting decision
• Construction of storage shed for tools and equipment, animal feeds and fuels used in connection with woodland and smallholding activities Woodcroft Copse WestonRef. No: 20/2282/FUL | Validated: Thu 29 Oct 2020 | Status: Awaiting decision
• Proposed conversion of agricultural building to form residential dwelling and associated works Middle Hill House Church Hill Honiton EX14 9TERef. No: 20/2256/FUL | Validated: Mon 26 Oct 2020 | Status: Awaiting decision

• Construction of a single-storey front extension. 108 Churchill Road Exmouth EX8 4DURef. No: 20/2227/FUL | Validated: Mon 26 Oct 2020 | Status: Awaiting decision
• Construction of two storey side extension. 12 Exeter Close Feniton Honiton EX14 3DHRef. No: 20/2213/FUL | Validated: Mon 26 Oct 2020 | Status: Awaiting decision
• Construction of garden shed 27 Northfield Musbury Axminster EX13 8DBRef. No: 20/2197/FUL | Validated: Fri 30 Oct 2020 | Status: Awaiting decision
• Construction of 4 no. timber framed buildings comprising 1 no. shop (use class E), 1 no. office (use class E), 1 no. dog grooming parlour (sui generis) and 1 no. toilet block Millers Farm Shop Gammons Hill Kilmington Axminster EX13 7RARef. No: 20/2178/FUL | Validated: Mon 26 Oct 2020 | Status: Awaiting decision
• Formation of new field entrance Chelsea Farm Feniton Honiton EX14 3BERef. No: 20/2154/FUL | Validated: Mon 26 Oct 2020 | Status: Awaiting decision
• Retention of works: re-plastering repointing main bedroom and landing area/staircase Threshing Cottage Dalwood Axminster EX13 7HWRef. No: 20/2139/LBC | Validated: Tue 27 Oct 2020 | Status: Awaiting decision
• Replacement and enlargement of existing single storey rear extension, construction of new single garage and replacement of existing outbuilding with single storey annex. Minchin Court Farm Minchin Lane Aylesbeare Exeter EX5 2FHRef. No: 20/2107/FUL | Validated: Wed 28 Oct 2020 | Status: Awaiting decision
• Replace existing boiler and install flue in utility room roof Lambpark Farm Churchinford Taunton TA3 7PLRef. No: 20/2099/LBC | Validated: Mon 26 Oct 2020 | Status: Awaiting decision
• Construction of single storey extension to club house Withycombe Rugby Football Club Raleigh Park Hulham Road Exmouth EX8 3HSRef. No: 20/2095/FUL | Validated: Fri 30 Oct 2020 | Status: Awaiting decision
• Construction of annex, shed/store and detached garage (partially retrospective) 2 Higher Bridge Cottages Stoke Canon Exeter EX5 4AXRef. No: 20/1910/FUL | Validated: Thu 29 Oct 2020 | Status: Awaiting decision

• Infill of covered patio area to provide ground floor bedroom, construction of porch, 2 dormers and construction of external wall; repositioning of 2 no. rooflights Fiddles Reach Preston Farm Upottery Honiton EX14 9PFRef. No: 20/1836/LBC | Validated: Tue 27 Oct 2020 | Status: Awaiting decision
• Infill of covered patio area to provide ground floor bedroom, construction of porch, 2 dormers and construction of external wall; repositioning of 2 no roof lights Fiddles Reach Preston Farm Upottery Honiton EX14 9PFRef. No: 20/1835/FUL | Validated: Tue 27 Oct 2020 | Status: Awaiting decision
• Cherry raise the crown by removing the branches (all less than c 75mm diameter) to gain 1.5m clearance of the garage roof. This will leave a slightly unbalanced crown and it is proposed to cut back the limbs on the northeast side of the tree (up to around 125mm diameter). This should leave the tree with around 5m of clear stem. 9 Linhay Close Honiton EX14 2BJRef. No: 20/1697/TRE | Validated: Fri 30 Oct 2020 | Status: Awaiting decision

“On yer bike” – No Sidmouth or Seaton on the transport network – Owl

Daniel Clark www.devonlive.com

Park and ride sites on every corridor into Exeter, enhanced rail services, and a new single ticketing platform to boost the convenience of non-car travel into and around the city are all part of the long awaited Exeter Transport Strategy.

More than 14 months the plan was due to be adopted by Devon County Council, the Exeter Transport Strategy 2020-2030 is finally set to be agreed by the council’s cabinet when they meet on Wednesday.

The strategy set out ambitious aspirations to support healthy, active lifestyles, a growing economy and a positive response to reduce the carbon emissions from transport in Exeter and has been updated to give greater emphasis on reducing carbon throughout the strategy.

The strategy outlines that the balance of travel for Exeter residents has already shifted to a point where the majority of Exeter residents now travel to work by sustainable modes but that they still account for 35 per cent of car-based commute trips to a destination in the city

However travel behaviour differs significantly for commuters living outside the city, with 80 per cent of trips into the city being made by car and in rural areas, where there is limited alternative to car, the car dominance is even more prominent with over 90 per cent travelling to the city by car.

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It recognises the importance of supporting essential business travel and maintain efficient public transport corridors but that as the city is built upon a historic road network, is constrained by limited road crossings of the River Exe and has limited scope for additional widening and capacity improvements and building extra physical highway capacity is probably not possible within the city.

Central to the strategy is ensuring there is a comprehensive, accessible and coherent cycle and pedestrian network in Exeter that connects residential areas with schools, key economic hubs, public open space and transport interchanges so that 50 per cent of trips within the city are being made on foot or by bike.

The Consistent Standard of Sustainable Transport providing a Connected City Region across Exeter

When they meet on Wednesday, Devon County Council’s cabinet are asked to support the adoption of the Exeter Transport Strategy and that the contents in the strategy provide the basis for developing transport projects, and infrastructure in the Exeter and Greater Exeter area.

The plan includes:

• The transport strategy will facilitate decarbonisation of transport in the Greater Exeter city region by providing a sustainable and reliable transport system, allowing people and goods to move around the network efficiently
• Creating a comprehensive, accessible and coherent cycle and pedestrian network in Exeter that connects residential areas with schools, key economic hubs, public open space and transport interchanges so that 50 per cent of trips within the city are being made on foot or by bike
• Progressing opportunities to remove or reduce traffic on some routes to create “green lanes” and support active travel access from villages on the edge of the city
• A new, high-quality strategic cycle link creating a city region strategic leisure network to encourage short to medium distance trips from existing settlements into Exeter and the Exe Estuary Trail
• Supporting enhanced bus frequency on key interurban routes, with an aim of achieving 15 minute bus frequency or better on key inter-urban routes into the city from Cranbrook, Crediton, Cullompton and Newton Abbot. This level of frequency provides a ‘turn-up-and-go’ service where users will no longer feel the need to consult a timetable.
• Enhanced bus corridors and improvements at key junctions, with particular focus will be given to enhancing Heavitree Road to achieve more reliable journey times on a key, busy public transport route to growth in the East of Exeter and achieving an improved environment for residents, pedestrians and cyclists
• Delivery of the cleanest bus fleet with onboard WiFi allowing more productive travel and reduced transport costs with a greater influence on the routes being run.
• The continued improvement of ‘Devon Metro’ rail services improving the connectivity within the city region so that the towns of Cranbrook, Crediton, Dawlish, Dawlish Warren, Exmouth, Honiton, Newton Abbot and Teignmouth are served by at least half hourly rail frequency.
• New rail connectivity to Mid Devon, with a station at Cullompton, will also be investigated.
• In combination, the enhanced rail, bus and active travel links between key settlements and Exeter form the basis of a Connected City Region network
• Park & Ride sites on all key corridors of Alphington Road, A377 to Crediton, B3181 to Broadclyst and A376/A3052 to provide a realistic sustainable travel option for those trips from rural areas into the city that can’t feasibly be served by traditional public transport services.
• Potential of Park & Ride to also provide frequent cross city connections as well as from the city centre out to employment and amenities at Marsh Barton and Sowton / East of Exeter will also be promoted, and bus priority to increase attractiveness of new Park and Ride routes to the city
• Refine and optimise bus routes with enhanced bus priority at major junctions of Exe Bridges, Clyst St Mary and Countess Wear and “Red Routes” on key corridors including Heavitree Road, Pinhoe Road and Cowick Street.
• To protect and enhance strategic rail, road and air connectivity into the city and South West Peninsula so that it retains momentum and continues to offer an attractive place for sustainable growth.
• To work with and support the private sector to develop innovative solutions in the city and in securing external funding for new initiatives and to share data with partners to improve collaboration and support innovation.
• To facilitate an accelerated change in transport conditions in the city and to be more dynamic in testing and trialling of new measures and highway changes.
• To look into innovative car parking strategies in the city centre, which encourages longer stays in the evening and off-peak, whilst discouraging car travel at peak times
• To expand the electric bike hire to provide the largest on-street electric bike scheme in the UK and will continue to expand and electrify the already well utilised car club fleet
• Exeter has an extensive bus network which together provide core elements to build upon to create a single ticketing platform that is right for the attributes of Exeter. The plan aims to introduce a new single ticketing platform and shared mobility to boost the convenience of non-car travel into and around the city
• Improved IT systems to improve real time information, journey time reliability and payment methods.
• The emergence of electric bus funding opportunities, along with electric car club vehicles and bike hire unlock the potential for the delivery of the UK’s first zero-emission transport subscription service.
• Improved resilience, capacity and journey times on rail mainlines as well as ‘working office’ capabilities on new rolling stock, as well as enhanced resilience of M5 J29 – J31 / Splatford Split and to improve access to Exeter Airport by sustainable modes

Dave Black, head of transportation, planning and environment, in his report to the cabinet said: “The Exeter Transport Strategy focuses on improving travel choices, creating better places for people and taking advantage of technology opportunities to influence travel behaviour in a positive way.

“The focus is to address constraints on sustainable transport networks to provide the basis of a connected city region, deliver interventions that contribute to improved quality of life and to utilise technological advancements to integrate services and engage with people to influence how and when they travel.

“The proposals aim to provide an ambitious, but realistic, transport strategy that is embodied in the three key themes.

“Greater Connectivity, which this focuses on travel into the city from outside Exeter’s boundaries, by providing a consistent standard of frequency of both rail and interurban bus routes and delivering strategic cycle trails between key settlements.

“To capture those from the rural hinterland with limited sustainable travel choices, there will be a Park and Ride on all key corridors into the city.

“Greater Places for People, which relates to travel within the city, and focuses on increasing the number of trips made on foot or by bike and urban bus corridors. This will be done through enhancing pedestrian/cycling networks to connect residential areas and villages on the edge of the city to economic hubs, reallocating road space for walking and cycling, creating more attractive public spaces and working with operators to provide a reliable low carbon network of buses.

“Greater Innovation will see the Council looking to work with private sector partners to test and implement innovative technology solutions to make travel easier, encourage mode shift and help the city’s transport networks operate more flexibly and efficiently.

“The strategy has been well supported by the public and is aligned to current priorities in supporting a low carbon economy and healthy lifestyles. An updated Exeter Transport Strategy will ensure a transport strategy that is aligned with current local and government policies and enables the County to be opportunistic when funding becomes available.”

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The plan recognises that outside of Exeter, the towns of Newton Abbot, Tiverton, Cullompton and Honiton will experience significant growth and the new town of Cranbrook will grow to a size similar to Tiverton during the current Local Plan periods, and additional travel demand within these towns and towards Exeter will need to be accommodated sustainably.

But that although car ownership has been rising, car usage is falling, which provides a great opportunity to promote shared mobility, such as car clubs / bike hire and other non-car travel modes, as a lower carbon alternative to car ownership.

“Devon County Council has a strong track record of delivering transport infrastructure in Exeter,” the plan says. “Nevertheless, the transition to a carbon neutral transport system will require an accelerated change and a key challenge will be how best to embrace innovation and invention to support this transition and ensuring the safety of all users in a complex highway environment.”

It says that for the three key themes of Greater Connectivity, Greater Places for People and Greater Innovation, at least 70 per cent of respondents during the consultation phase expressing a level of support for each theme, that there was strong support for Park & Ride, active travel networks, and the rededication of highway space for pedestrians and cyclists in the city centre.

It adds: “Looking forward over the next 20-25 years, the numbers employed in Exeter are expected to increase by another 25-30 per cent. With existing transport networks already at capacity in peak periods and a need to ensure increased demand does not lead to increased carbon emissions, providing capacity for future growth will depend on effective sustainable alternative travel choices and more sophisticated management of existing transport corridors.

“Technology will unlock new ways to manage the network, such as real time wireless methods of corridor control, which could optimise the operation of the network, providing additional capacity and reliability on core highway routes. This could support reallocating road space for an improved walking and cycling environment on other routes.”

When the cabinet meet on Wednesday, they will be asked to give final approval of the Exeter Transport Strategy 2020- 2030.

Opportunities to align the delivery of the strategy with planned maintenance and/or renewals will also be identified, and the integration will ensure better value for money and reduce disruption for users of the transport network.

The government faces renewed calls for the central NHS test and trace system to be scrapped in favour of handing responsibility for contact tracing to local public health teams.

Mattha Busby www.theguardian.com 

Weekly test and trace figures for England show it reached just under 60% of close contacts of people testing positive, the lowest since the service began. It comes as the Office for National Statistics indicated the steep rise in new infections was levelling off in England and stabilising at about 50,000 a day.

Sir John Oldham, adjunct professor in global health innovation at Imperial College London and former leader of large-scale change at the Department of Health, said “lockdown will be a letdown” unless trust was increased through radical reform of test and trace.

“I think this probably includes increasing the number of small labs to decrease turnaround time and, crucially, the results to go to local directors of health and for them to have teams to undertake the contact tracing,” he told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme.

“I’d probably get the resources for that by scrapping the failing central call centres. I think the whole system should be under the purview of public health, which gets us as close to the effective system we had before 2012 NHS reforms. I think they have demonstrated that they have the capability and effectiveness – they are running at 95% contact tracing; the national call centre is at 60%.”

Oldham suggested lockdown could be futile unless there was an effective test and trace system – “such as in South Korea, New Zealand, and Germany” – to keep numbers down after restrictions were relaxed. “This we’ve been continually promised but there has been a failure to deliver,” he said.

He added that trust was paramount as he advocated the use of local contact tracers. “The pandemic is seen as a political campaign with huge promises and slogans. The virus does not tweet back or send out press releases. We just need some truthfulness, transparency about the data and the outcomes and decision making … Greater understanding gives greater trust and greater adherence for what we want people to do.”

Thousands of people were tested in Liverpool on the first day of the mass pilot scheme on Friday. The programme aims to test up to 50,000 people a day once fully operational, said Matt Ashton, the city’s director of public health.

He said: “We are still working on the numbers but we think [there were] about 1,500-2,000 people per testing centre, so really good numbers and really good interest, so it was very encouraging.”

The scheme has drawn criticism from health experts, however, who have described it as not fit for purpose. Allyson Pollock, professor of public health at Newcastle University, said plans to test asymptomatic people went against advice from the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies to prioritise testing for those who were displaying symptoms.

Meanwhile, Chris Lovett, the deputy director of public health for the City of London and Hackney, said his team of six were being asked to reach people in their area whom NHS test and trace had not been able to contact. Of 700 cases transferred in the past six weeks, just under half were reached and brought into the scheme, he said.

“Right at the beginning of the pandemic, our local mayor and many others did ask for local systems to take control of test and trace,” he said.

“At this stage, its going to be very difficult for us to mobilise all the resources necessary to take on the full contact tracing, but certainly working in much closer partnership with local organisations, the councils, the NHS, so we can ensure this important control measure works is what we’re committed to do.

“Our local residents have often said how important it has been to have that local contact, local knowledge and knowledge of what works for our communities.”

Tommy Vietor, a former Obama press aide, responded to Johnson’s congratulatory tweet last night by calling him a “shapeshifting creep”, adding: “We will never forget your racist comments about Obama and slavish devotion to Trump.”

Tim Shipman, Political Editor www.thetimes.co.uk 

When Boris Johnson discussed the presidential election with aides on Friday, he was upbeat about developing a special relationship with the winner. “Joe Biden is one of the few world leaders I haven’t insulted,” he joked.

No 10 officials laughed, but this weekend they are engaged in a diplomatic dance following warnings from those close to the president-elect that Johnson’s past will make that difficult.

Downing Street is wargaming Johnson’s first phone call with Biden to help achieve the best personal and political connection.

It is understood the prime minister will ask Biden to join him in seeking a bold outcome to the UN climate summit the UK is hosting next year and to set up a “D10 coalition of democracies” at the G7 summit in June, which Johnson is to chair.

The PM will point out that both he and Biden have vowed to “build back better” after the Covid-19 crisis.

In a tweet last night Johnson congratulated Biden and his vice president-elect Kamala Harris for taking charge of “our most important ally” and called for them to work “closely together” on “climate change” as well as “trade and security”.

But this weekend, one of Biden’s campaign team accused Johnson of making “racist comments” in the past, compared Britain’s immigration policies to Trump’s and criticised British ministers’ stance towards Black Lives Matter.

“They do not think Boris Johnson is an ally,” the Democratic source said. “They think Britain is an ally. But there will be no special relationship with Boris Johnson.”

A senior US politician who is expected to take a job in the Biden administration recently told a British friend those views were shared by Harris. “If you think Joe hates him, you should hear Kamala,” the senior figure said.

Biden’s ire dates to comments Johnson made during the EU referendum, when he wrote that Obama’s decision to remove a bust of Winston Churchill from the Oval Office was a “symbol of the part-Kenyan president’s ancestral dislike of the British empire”.

Tommy Vietor, a former Obama press aide, responded to Johnson’s congratulatory tweet last night by calling him a “shapeshifting creep”, adding: “We will never forget your racist comments about Obama and slavish devotion to Trump.”

The source said: “Biden’s got a long memory and Boris is not in his good books. Biden and Obama are like family. Many of the people around Biden have been talking about Boris Johnson. The Kenyan remark has never gone away. They see Boris and [Dominic] Cummings like Trump and Bannon.”

Johnson’s relationship with Trump, and his past association with the alt-right strategist Steve Bannon, also make him an object of suspicion to Biden and to the Obama-era advisers who will form the core of his White House team, the campaign source said.

In fact, Cummings, Johnson’s most senior aide, has been withering in private about the president, telling colleagues months ago: “Trump is toxic” and urging ministers to keep their distance from him.

Aides said the mood in No 10 last week was one of satisfaction with the election.

But people around Biden, including Ben Rhodes, an Obama adviser now expected to take a national security role, have argued for Johnson to receive the cold shoulder.

In a TV address on Friday, Biden stressed tackling “systematic racism” as a priority. “Leaders who are not seen as allies on race, there will be big problems for those leaders,” the campaign insider said.

“He doesn’t want to work with people who project those views,” the aide said, and he was “shocked at the dismissiveness of black rights” after Dominic Raab, the foreign secretary, called Black Lives Matter protestors taking the knee, “a symbol of subjugation and subordination” and said that he would kneel only before the Queen or when proposing to his wife.

Britain’s hardline approach on immigration has also unnerved some of the team. “They see some of the policies that Priti Patel [the home secretary] is doing as similar to what Trump is doing on the border here,” the aide said.

The outspoken attack was not a sanctioned briefing against Johnson. But in laying bare the full extent of the Biden camp’s private views of the PM it reveals the mountain he has to climb to develop a close partnership with the new president.

Biden’s priorities on the world stage will be to reconnect with the EU and Nato and rejoin the Paris climate accord. That leaves little room for Britain’s hopes of securing a free trade deal.

There is hope in Downing Street that Biden, having failed to win a landslide and control the Senate, may need to be more conciliatory. “I do wonder if a not-so-strong result will make life easier,” said a cabinet source, who also conceded, however: “There’s a group of people in the Democratic camp who want a very public rejection of everything that Trump stood for. There is always the risk that that includes Boris.”

Johnson’s aides, aware of the tensions, stress common interests. One said: “The PM and Joe Biden share common ground and have a similar outlook on key issues like climate change and on our foreign policy priorities like strengthening Nato and our commitment to build back better from the pandemic.

“We are in the same place on Iran and Hong Kong. We have shared security goals in the Middle East and addressing the challenges posed by China. It is hard to think of any substantive differences.”

Knowing political relations could be strained, backroom staff, civil servants and military leaders are trying to cement relations with their opposite numbers in the US.

The key figure in No 10 is John Bew, Johnson’s foreign policy adviser, who spent time in Washington as Kissinger fellow at the Library of Congress.

“He’s part of the circle around Henry Kissinger, which includes Democrats and Republicans,” a colleague said. “He has close links to senior Democrats around Biden. He will be a pivotal figure. He’s just very well plugged in.”

Simon Case, the cabinet secretary, is also understood to be contacting Ron Klain, tipped to be chief of staff.

Intelligence chiefs will be urged to help persuade Biden that Britain is America’s key security ally. “Our best card is going to be security, defence and intelligence,” a diplomat said. “That’s the main thing we bring to the table.”

The British embassy in Washington, under ambassador Karen Pierce, has good relations with Tony Blinken, tipped as Biden’s secretary of state or national security adviser. They are also working on Larry Strickling, who is helping to develop Biden’s global policy.

Whitehall is also discussing plans to butter up Biden by offering him a state visit next year, tacked on to either the G7 or the climate summit. “There have been informal discussions,” a source said.

Tory circles are awash with speculation about who Biden will send as ambassador. One Conservative with a friend in Biden’s circles, claimed: “I have heard there is a possibility that Obama could be asked as a thank you.”The Biden source said they had not begun to think about that: “We are still working on the cabinet.”

Boris Johnson looks into building tunnel under the Irish Sea

Boris Johnson has signed off on a review to explore the possibility of building a rail tunnel between Scotland and Northern Ireland, despite criticism that the multi-billion pound venture would be impractical. 

[Boris loves to splash other people’s cash. Is this announcement intended to distract attention from the key issues of the day? – Owl]

Clea Skopeliti www.independent.co.uk 

The prime minister has repeatedly spoken in favour of building a fixed link between the countries, with Downing Street confirming earlier this year that the government was “looking at a wide range of schemes across the UK which could improve connectivity”. 

The chairman of Network Rail, Sir Peter Hendy, has asked experts to research the possibility of building a tunnel between Stranraer and Larne.

He told the The Daily Telegraph: “If you look at the distance between Northern Ireland and Scotland it is actually no further than the Channel Tunnel.

“I said to Boris, I am not going to get any further than finding out whether it is feasible, how long it will take and how much it might cost.”

Significantly, any infrastructure built would have to avoid Beaufort’s Dyke, a natural trench between Northern Ireland and Scotland where tonnes of munitions were dumped in the aftermath of the Second World War.

Earlier this year, Labour condemned the plan for a 21-mile bridge as “a distraction”, while one retired offshore engineer blasted the notion as being “about as feasible as building a bridge to the moon”.

Alister Jack, the Scottish secretary, later told MSPs that said the bridge was a “euphemism” for a tunnel.

Sir Peter told the Railway Industry Association annual conference: “The government’s policy is to bring the United Kingdom closer together. The quest for economic growth, particularly in the light of Brexit, is a common desire for Westminster and for the devolved administration governments.”

The review comes after Mr Johnson pledged £100m on 29 road projects during a speech in July on how to kick-start the economy following the coronavirus pandemic.

Politicians from Scotland and Northern Ireland told the transport secretary in March that the multi-billion pound budget would be better spent on vital infrastructure projects.

Michael Matheson, Scotland’s transport secretary, had previously said the review has been “organised with virtually no consultation”, despite transport being a devolved issue. 

He said: “We absolutely want to see improved transport and connectivity links beyond Scotland’s borders – under any constitutional arrangements.

“But this study is clearly part of the Tory government’s wider agenda to undermine the devolution settlement across a whole range of policy areas.”

The former Shandford care home, in Budleigh Salterton, will return to auction in December after it failed to reach its reserve at this month’s sale.

Will this publicly subscribed for asset now go for a song? Are we witnessing the start of the property crash that will surely follow the Covid-19 economic crash? – Owl

Author Becca Gliddon eastdevonnews.co.uk 

The detached 26-bedroom building and grounds was on Tuesday, November 4, auctioned through agent Savills, with a freehold guide price of £750,000.

Abbeyfield, who took over the former care home, said the site – with off-street parking, rear garden, ground, second and first floors and ‘further potential subject to the usual consents’ – will be for sale in December after the auction reserve price has been reassessed.

A spokeswoman for Abbeyfield said: “Abbeyfield plans to reconsider the level of the reserve and return to auction in December.”

The Abbeyfield Society last week revealed how proceeds from the sale of the site will be given to newly-formed registered charity The Shandford Trust, to support older people in need who live within the area of Budleigh Salterton and the villages of East Budleigh, Otterton, Colaton Raleigh and Bicton.

The Trust will be managed by a board of trustees drawn from the local community and one from The Abbeyfield Society.

When the funds become available, a new website will be launched to highlight the charity, its work, who can apply for financial support and how to apply.

The former care home, in Station Road, was permanently closed in March 2020, during the coronavirus lockdown and residents were moved to other care homes.

At the time, Abbeyfield said the decision to close Shandford was ‘with great regret’ and taken after a lengthy review of the service which took into consideration the future of the care home, finding it was ‘not a viable option’ to keep open.

It said the decision to close was the result of a detailed review of the infrastructure, building condition and financial performance of the home.

A community drive by Budleigh residents to set up a Community Interest Company to run Shandford as a not-for-profit venture, with public volunteers and annual subscriptions, attracted ‘significant support’ but did not progress.

For more information about Registered Charity Number 1192048 The Shandford Trust, email shandfordtrust@gmail.com