“Funding for “vital” research to improve flood forecasts, warnings and defences has been slashed by almost two-thirds since 2009, figures obtained by the Guardian show.

The annual funding for flood research and development, which the government has not published, has fallen from £4.89, in 2008-09 to £1.85m in 2015-16, a drop of 62%.

http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/mar/10/vital-uk-flood-research-funding-slashed-by-nearly-two-thirds

“Many of the workspace opportunities had previously been delayed owing to the previous uncertainties around the office relocation project and the cost of finance; …

Click to access 100316amfcombinedagenda.pdf

Look forward to a LOT of pothole filling in the next few months as (some) East Devon roads are made safe for Tour of Britain cycle riders when the have their Sidmouth – Ottery – Honiton section on Friday 9th September.

We wouldn’t want THEM falling off their bikes or their back-up cars getting broken axles.

“Whilst the local authority was not precluded from granting planning permission in such circumstances it ran the risk that if that direction was positive it would then have granted a planning consent which was infected with illegality, as was the case here. The judge also remarked that he would also have been minded to conclude that no reasonable planning authority, knowing when they formed a resolution to grant planning permission that there was an outstanding request of the Secretary of State to make a determination on a screening direction, would proceed to grant planning permission without knowing the outcome of that screening direction process. Accordingly, the permission was quashed.

http://localgovernmentlawyer.co.uk/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=25999:eia-trumping&catid=63&Itemid=31

Swindon Borough Council is to bring a High Court challenge over a planning inspector’s decision to grant an appeal by a developer seeking to build up to 100 homes on a site.

http://localgovernmentlawyer.co.uk/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=26016:council-to-fight-decision-by-inspector-to-grant-permission-for-100-home-scheme&catid=63&Itemid=31

Owl isn’t hooting about its EU views but has to say that Dave saying MEPs agree with it (whatever it is) is hardly surprising:

they get hundreds of thousands of pounds in pay;

they get hundreds of thousands of pounds in allowances including €275,000 for assistants;

they get massive pensions and pay-offs.

Do you agree with Christmas, Santa Claus?

The somewhat indistinct words at the bottom read:

IRRITABLE OWL SYNDROME

Naughty – but you should have seen the other phrase on offer!

And it does so describe Owl these days!

And what a magnificent bunch they are … so many troughs, so many pigs … so many snouts. Here are the awards in all their glory:

FROM the council in Waltham Forest that for two years hired out a room for “ladies tea afternoons” to what turned out to be a group of burqa-clad Isis supporters, to the council employees in Wigan who were caught sleeping on the job by a TV crew making a documentary about how dynamic they were, here are the gongs awarded by Lord Gnome for the most egregious municipal mishaps – and worse – in 2015…

WEIGHTWATCHER OF THE YEAR:
Michael Jones, Tory leader of Cheshire East council, revealed last month that he had lost an impressive six-and-a-half stone since engaging the services of local physiotherapist Amanda Morris, whom he described as “awesome”. Alas Cllr Jones also announced that he will be stepping down next month. This is a consequence of Eye 1403’s revelation that council contracts for fitness classes, worth £156,000, had gone Ms Morris’s way without a normal tendering process.

PARTY UNITY AWARD:
to Ukip, which triumphantly took control of its first council, Thanet, in May, then quickly lost it as the ’kippers fell out among themselves in a series of bitter personal squabbles.

GONE BUT NOT FORGOTTEN:
former Tower Hamlets mayor Lutfur Rahman, who was barred from office for five years after being found guilty by an electoral court in April of “corrupt and illegal practices”, including vote-rigging and bribery. As the winner of multiple Rotten Boroughs awards over the years, Lutfur will be missed. Somehow it feels that we have not heard the last of him.

WITCHFINDER OF THE YEAR:
When Larne council in Northern Ireland voted to put up a memorial to eight local women who were persecuted and jailed for “witchcraft” in 1711, Alderman Jack McKee of the Traditional Unionist Voice party voted against because he “couldn’t be sure” they were wrongly convicted and was worried the plaque would become a “shrine to paganism”.

SERVICES TO DEMOCRACY:
Disgraced former Guildford Tory councillor Monika Juneja, who narrowly escaped going to prison in June after being found guilty on charges of forgery, deception and falsely claiming to be a barrister, kept up the good work by raising a petition in favour of an elected mayoral system for the town. Thousands of signatures were obtained by Surrey university students, who were paid £1 per signature by Juneja. Monika’s “very close friend”, council leader Stephen Mansbridge, was widely believed to have mayoral ambitions but denied having any involvement in the petition. In October local website the Guildford Dragon revealed that he had, in fact, secretly lobbied the students’ union to back the idea. Mansbridge resigned shortly afterwards.

MONEY AND MOUTH AWARD:
Independent Allerdale councillor Jim Lister’s election leaflets campaigned against “unnecessary windfarms blighting our countryside” – a vexed issue in a borough with more of the useless eyesores than the rest of Cumbria put together. He forgot to mention that six months earlier he’d applied for and won permission for a 113ft turbine on his own farm.

UNINTENDED CONSEQUENCES AWARD:
The deputy leader of South Lanarkshire council, Jackie Burns, was fined for peeing in public outside a nightclub at 2am. He had no choice – there are no public toilets in the Labour council’s area because it has closed them all to save money.

COMBATING EXTREMISM:
Until an undercover Channel 4 reporter discovered the truth, for two years Labour Waltham Forest council hired out a room for “ladies tea afternoons” to a group of burqa-clad women… who turned out to be an Isis supporters’ group.

GREENWASH AWARD:
Bristol’s mayor George Fergusoncelebrated more than 200 electric car charging points having opened in the area since 2012, at a total cost of more than £1m. The Bristol Post discovered that each one was used on average fewer than eight times a year.

COMEBACK KID:
Sixteen years after resigning as a Lancashire county councillor and West Lancashire district councillor when exposed by this column (Eye 987) for deliberately falsifying a local MP’s election expenses, Frank McKenna was re-elected to the latter council in May. In these difficult times the Labour party needs every honest man it can get.

DEARLY DEPARTED AWARD:
Runner-up: Coventry city council’s Labour leadership got out the onions after the sudden death of the council’s deputy leader, solicitor Phil Townshend, saying he had been held in “deep affection… locally, nationally and internationally” and spent more than £8,000 on funeral costs and a reception afterwards… while ignoring the fact that Townshend was the subject of a police fraud investigation into how he had come to acquire the home of an elderly vulnerable woman who was one of his clients. Winner: Nuneaton and Bedworth council said it would be flying the borough flag at half-mast on the day of the funeral of former Labour mayor Bill Deacon as a mark of respect. The flag remained unlowered after someone remembered that dear Bill had been jailed in 1994 for child sex offences.

WHITEWASH AWARD:
to Norfolk county council (NCC) whose children’s services department was rated “inadequate” by Ofsted for the second time in three years. In February one of the department’s managers, Peter Barron, was sacked after the Eye exposed how he had manufactured evidence which led to a child being removed from a blameless foster carer. Despite further Eye stories about Barron’s unethical behaviour, he secured a job managing a private children’s home to which NCC remains happy to send looked-after children. In the wake of the Barron scandal the council’s £1,000-a-day interim children’s services boss Sheila Lock set up an “independent” review chaired by former Middlesbrough chief exec Ian Parker into the council’s treatment of foster carers. Nine months on it is still to report, but has excluded the county’s main body representing foster carers and, according to emails between Lock and Parker seen by the Eye, was at pains to only offer “a small window” for complaints.

FINANCIAL PROBITY AWARD:
Ripon councillor Andrew Williams, who had previously been found guilty of stealing hundreds of pounds raised by the council from the sale of ice-creams during the Queen’s diamond jubilee in 2012, was made chair of… the finance committee.

WORKPLACE SAFETY:
The London borough of Waltham Forestwas fined £66,000 with £16,000 costs for failing to protect staff and public from asbestos on its premises. The council had known about the deadly dust in its basement since 1984 but had done nothing about it until 2012, despite being ordered to undertake remedial work by the Heath and Safety Executive in 2002.

PR TRIUMPH OF THE YEAR:
Runner-up: After a Labour councillor in Stoke-on-Trent was caught using false names to praise his own council in text messages to local radio, Cheshire Eastcouncil’s Tory leader Michael Jonesboasted that on his mobile it was “all me”. It was then revealed that Jones’s clunky tweets were actually written by council press officers. Winner: Wigan council, whose attempt to get some free publicity by participating in a TV documentary about how brilliant and dynamic it was backfired badly when cameras caught council staff asleep on the job, nicking off early to play darts and moaning about their bosses.

BRASS-NECK AWARD:
to Liverpool mayor Joe Anderson, who spent nearly £90,000 of council-taxpayers’ money on legal bills fighting his dismissal from a £4,500-a-year part-time job as a school “learning mentor”. Despite having not actually carried out any duties since 2010, when he became council leader, later mayor, Anderson continued to be paid until 2012. When the school then, not unreasonably, decided to dispense with his non-existent services, Joe (salary £80,000+ p.a.) called in m’learned friends – and lost.

QUOTES OF THE YEAR
“Sometimes it’s difficult to tell the difference between the dead and the living when it comes to Berwick councillors.” – local resident after Berwick-upon-Tweed council held a minute’s silence for a “deceased” former mayor who turned out to be alive and well and living in New Zealand.

“He must be blind.” – Torbay mayor Gordon Oliver’s retort at Lib-Dem opponent Steve Darling’s apparent inability to appreciate the benefits of Tory rule in Torbay. Cllr Darling is blind.

“Just told the local Big Issue seller to fuck off back to Romania.” – Dover Tory councillor Bob Frost makes his contribution to the immigration debate via Twitter.

“Flashy freebies.” – Richmond council’s high-minded Tory leader, Lord True, refusing free Olympic tickets, 2012.
“Thank you very much.” – Lord True accepting free Rugby World Cup tickets, 2015.

“Once you’ve got in your car you might just as well go the extra mile.” – Cardiff Labour councillor Iona Gordon attempts to explain the environmental benefits of closing half the city’s recycling centres, thereby making people drive further to dump their waste.

http://www.private-eye.co.uk/issue-1409/rotten-boroughs

No, it isn’t 1 April!

“The Department of Health, the Whitehall location where MPs could be temporarily rehoused, is governed by Sharia law because the building was transferred to finance an Islamic bond scheme. …

… Richmond House is one of three Whitehall buildings that were transferred to the £200million Islamic bond scheme, which switched their ownership from British taxpayers to wealthy Middle Eastern businessmen and banks.
George Osborne announced the move in June 2014 as part of an effort to make the UK a global hub for Islamic finance. …”

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3422642/MPs-moved-Westminster-barred-drinking-Sharia-law.html

Tucked away on page 155 of the 6 Jan 2016 Cabinet papers is the Monthly Performance Report November 2015 with a hot link to the “Systems Thinking Reports for Housing, Development Management and Revenues and Benefits”.

For our planning officers (or Management Development Team) “Systems Thinking” tells us something very profound: work pressures are still high and complex due to lack of adopted Local Plan; and its adoption will greatly assist with morale and workloads.

The essence of “Systems Thinking” is to think “in the round” or – if you are flogging it as a consultant “holistically”. When doing so, you might think this would include how the policies under review might affect the long-suffering residents of East Devon, who have had to watch this management-speak jingoistic fiasco play out since the first early attempts at drafting of the Local Plan were published for consultation in 2002. Alas, not.

“Systems Thinking” might also tell us that if you don’t answer the exam questions you are not likely to pass the exam!

The principal reasons Inspector Thickett threw out the Draft Local Plan, sent to him in 2014 were: that the housing targets were not based on empirical evidence; there was no 5 year land supply; the plan period was too short (given the time it had taken to draft); and there was no plan for Gypsies and Travellers. Not much systems thinking there then!

In July 2015 we had the Public Examination of EDDC’s exam resit after Inspector Thickett put a halt on all the foot-dragging and imposed a timetable for it.

As a result of this Public Examination, Inspector Thickett has decided to make the decision on the overall housing target himself, presumably after running out of patience. EDDC’s reaction to his other concern – that divvying up 5% of the target to small towns and villages was arbitrary and not based on evidence – has been to simply remove the target. End of problem? Maybe not as some villages will almost certainly be forced to have to have some development (see Chardstock below, and Dunkeswell) unless Mr Thickett can sort that out too.

On the 5-year land supply the developers have written at length explaining that although they might have been granted sufficient (indeed, more than sufficient) planning permissions, there are very good reasons (to them) why build out rates are falling behind. This is not, as most people would claim, to keep house prices artificially high. The developers don’t give any alternative explanation, they just argue that more land should be released for more building ( or non- building, which would mean releasing more land ad infinitum. It should be noted that, as a penalty for not having a Local Plan or a 5-year land supply, the Government adds an extra 20% to this land supply target, so developers could play this out for decades to come!

For many years the draft Local Plan covered the 20 year period 2006 to 2026. For reasons known only to EDDC, the current draft runs for 18 years from 2013 to 2031. The minimum time horizon for a Plan is 15 years. We are now in 2016, having wasted another three years of the revised Plan period. So things are getting tight again, depending on how Inspector Thickett interprets this. Another year’s delay could mean back to the drawing-board – again.

Inspector Thickett himself has decided that, in order to speed things up, he must draft the missing Gypsies and Travellers policy himself. But EDDC has managed to put a spoke in that wheel by announcing that it wants most places around Cranbrook – not, of course, popular with the new locals there!

During the Local Plan Examination another potential show stopper became apparent. This is that EDDC had failed to get Natural England to agree on how EDDC proposes to meet the habitat mitigation regulations to offset all the building, something that is a legal requirement. This is one of those compulsory exam questions that EDDC hadn’t really attempted to answer. Despite being asked by the Inspector to go away and reach agreement with Natural England, it is clear from EDDC’s latest submission (how many resits do you get to take?) that they now expect him to adjudicate between them and Natural England, too. Yet again, not much evidence of systems or thinking!

You might have thought that the Exmouth Masterplan, if it is going to achieve anything substantive, should be an important element of the new Local Plan. But all references to it have been removed from the current Local Plan draft because meeting the habitat conditions in this case would take a couple of years at least. Does “Systems Thinking” include anticipating problems and planning ahead?

Lastly, poor Chardstock! Classified as a village unsuitable for further development up until the last moment (thanks to some nifty footwork from Councillor Andrew Moulding), then suddenly and without explanation reclassified as “suitable for sustainable development”, its fate now depends upon Inspector Thickett’s reading of the local bus time-table!

So let us give Cllr Paul Diviani the last word, from his Christmas/New year message:

“Finally, it gives me enormous pleasure to say that the finalisation of our Local Plan is now within sight and we are anticipating being able to adopt it early next year. This detailed and robust document will help us deliver the aspirations and housing needs of local people, as well as land for employment. It will also help protect our beautiful countryside from unwanted and inappropriate development.”

Or nearly the last word because how much of this plan will be EDDC’s and how much Inspector Thickett’s?

And whose Systems and whose Thinking!

Is that why we are not applying for coastal improvement grants!

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/france/12047657/Devons-pirate-coastline-becomes-people-smugglers-new-target.html

It seems that tenants at Heathpark are going to be better informed about EDDC’s moving plans than the rest of us – including councillors, according to the front page of the View from Honiton today!

As Owl has already hooted, the Tory Government, for ideological reasons, is very keen to devolve some power over public spending to new regional bodies.

Local authorities in Devon and Somerset- including EDDC- have responded enthusiastically setting up a consortium, the Heart of the South-West (HotSW) to bid for more power to spend central government money.

But critics believe that the Government wants to boost local productivity by letting rip construction, housebuilding, and manufacturing, and by encouraging the selling off of public assets to be more economically exploited by the “free market”. Farming, tourism, and renewable energy seem low priorities. Climate change and the environment seem hardly to figure as concerns.

The negotiations at HotSW involve a business organisation, the Local Enterprise Panel, (LEP) but it’s difficult to know exactly who calls the tune, because the meetings so far have been closed to press and public and no minutes are published. A draft bid is almost ready and is intended to be sent to Whitehall before Christmas.

EDDC representative on HotSW is Council Leader Paul Diviani, and, true to form, a recommendation was about to be slipped through for Cabinet approval, to give Cllr Diviani delegated authority to agree to whatever bid HotSW comes up with!

But thanks to the insistence of Chair of the Scrutiny Committee , Independent Cllr Roger Giles, the context of the recommendation was openly discussed first, at a special meeting (Combined Overview & Scrutiny) called in the nick of time, just hours before the Cabinet meeting last Wednesday (2nd Dec).

The meeting began with a presentation by EDDC Chief Officer Mark Williams, which confirmed that the thrust of HotSW was to boost the local economy by expanding construction, industry and commerce – productivity was too low, he said, because there were a lot of old people in the area! The new digital economy would benefit from better training and apprenticeships, especially “Greater Exeter” (including part of East Devon).

Councillors were sceptical. Tory Mike Allen said HotSW negotiations should be more transparent, and Independent Cllr Rob Longhurst followed up his idea, putting forward the motion that a group of councillors with appropriate responsibilities should be kept informed of developments and consulted before decisions were made.

This was accepted, and it was also proposed that no delegated authority should be given to the Leader until the Full Council Meeting on 16th December, by which time all councillors would be sent a copy of the bid.

A triumph for transparency? Not quite— the bid will still not be put in the public domain before it goes to Westminster.

EDW note: Two previous posts on the subject here https://eastdevonwatch.org/2015/12/03/devolution-eddc-ceo-asks-us-to-trust-him-and-diviani/

and here https://eastdevonwatch.org/2015/12/05/that-devolution-meeting-part-2-the-dark-gets-darker/