Developers Berkeley, Persimmon and Barratt are handing out bumper payouts this year, but who gets what?

http://www.theguardian.com/business/2015/sep/06/nice-pile-executives-cashing-britains-housebuilding-berkeley-persimmon-barratt

Crealy Devon owners said:

“The sale of Cornwall’s Crealy will mean that we can concentrate our efforts and investments at our multi award winning Devon’s Crealy Great Adventure Park and its adjoining luxury caravan and camping park Crealy Meadows. We have had a good season so far this year in Devon and we are looking forward to progressing with some very exciting plans for the future.”

So nothing to do with financing for a big housing development on the A3052 (as presented to the Local Plan hearings) then?

http://www.exeterexpressandecho.co.uk/exiciting-plans-Exeter-s-Crealy-Cornish-sister/story-27723638-detail/story.html

Potential devolution deal members

Devon CC
East Devon DC
Exeter City Council
Mendip DC
Mid Devon DC
North Devon DC
Plymouth City Council
Sedgemoor DC
Somerset CC
South Hams DC
South Somerset DC
Taunton Deane BC
Teignbridge DC
Torbay Council
Torridge DC

West Devon BC

West Somerset DC

“… The UK government has always maintained that neonicotinoid pesticides do not threaten bees. It has laid the blame for high honeybee losses on the parasitic varroa mite which spreads viruses, and wet summers that prevent bees from foraging.

http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/aug/20/pesticides-neonicotinoids-linked-bee-decline-first-time-large-scale-field-study

August, silly season, politicians living it up on holiday, not much news unless you have a view on Jeremy Corbyn or Donald Trump, so here is some light reading about the owl:

“Owls use ‘stealth technology’ to help capture prey –
Study reveals that owls’ flight feathers absorb aerodynamic sound and suppress vibrations, allowing them to swoop on their quarry in perfect silence.”

http://www.theguardian.com/science/2015/aug/17/owls-use-stealth-technology-to-help-capture-prey

Couldn’t have put it better myself: Owl

“There were 94 staff managing the perception of Offices of Police and Crime Commissioners, including communications staff and lobbyists, with two OPCCs – Devon and Cornwall and the West Midlands – having as many as seven staff involved in public relations.”

http://www.taxpayersalliance.com/potential_police_and_crime_commissioner_savings_could_put_1200_bobbies_on_the_beat

Report on costs of al OPCCs here:

https://d3n8a8pro7vhmx.cloudfront.net/taxpayersalliance/pages/5606/attachments/original/1438848618/PCC_research_note.pdf?1438848618

Some “Yes, Minister” quotes:

From the episode currently on BBC 2

Sir Humphrey: If local authorities don’t send us statistics, Government figures will be a nonsense.
Hacker: Why?
Sir Humphrey: They’ll be incomplete.
Hacker: Government figures are a nonsense, anyway.
Bernard: I think Sir Humphrey wants to ensure they’re a complete nonsense.

Others you might find distressingly funny:

Hacker: Are you saying that winking at corruption is government policy?
Sir Humphrey: No, no, Minister! It could never be government policy. That is unthinkable! Only government practice.
Hacker: You’re a cynic, Humphrey!
Sir Humphrey: A cynic is what an idealist calls a realist.

Bernard: If it’s our job to carry out government policies, shouldn’t we believe in them?
Sir Humphrey: Oh, what an extraordinary idea! I have served 11 governments in the past 30 years. If I’d believed in all their policies, I’d have been passionately committed to keeping out of the Common Market, and passionately committed to joining it. I’d have been utterly convinced of the rightness of nationalising steel and of denationalising it and renationalising it. Capital punishment? I’d have been a fervent retentionist and an ardent abolitionist. I’d have been a Keynesian and a Friedmanite, a grammar school preserver and destroyer, a nationalisation freak and a privatisation maniac, but above all, I would have been a stark-staring raving schizophrenic!

[The Home Secretary has been forced to resign after a drink-driving incident]
Hacker: What will happen to him?
Sir Humphrey: Well, I gather he was as drunk as a lord. So, after a discreet interval, they’ll probably make him one.

Sir Humphrey: How are things at the Campaign for the Freedom of Information, by the way?
Sir Arnold: Sorry, I can’t talk about that.

Sir Humphrey: It’s so difficult for me, you see, as I’m wearing two hats.
Hacker: Yes, isn’t that rather awkward for you?
Sir Humphrey: Not if one is in two minds.
Bernard: Or has two faces.

Sir Arnold: If once they accepted the principle that senior Civil Servants could be removed for incompetence, that would be the thin end of the wedge. We could lose dozens of our chaps. Hundreds, perhaps.
Sir Humphrey: Thousands.

Sir Humphrey: Bernard, if the right people don’t have power, do you know what happens? The wrong people get it: politicians, councillors, ordinary voters!
Bernard: But aren’t they supposed to, in a democracy?
Sir Humphrey: This is a British democracy, Bernard!

https://en.m.wikiquote.org/wiki/Yes,_Minister

The Planning Court has ruled that the NPPF cannot be used to set a threshold below which Section 106 payments must be made. The Government decided that – if a development was for 10 homes or less no payments would have to be made – it was previously set for payments to be triggered for 5 homes or less. The new ruling is effective immediately.

The claim was allowed on a number of grounds and sub-grounds including:

Following the judgment, the Government has announced that the relevant paragraphs of the NPPG [1] will be removed and this is now reflected on the NPPG website. Accordingly, with immediate effect, developers will be unable to rely on those paragraphs in negotiations as to affordable housing and tariff style infrastructure contributions. The vacant building credit will also no longer be applicable.

Report: Jeremy Wigley, No 5 Chambers

http://localgovernmentlawyer.co.uk/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=23915:affordable-housing-and-small-scale-sites&catid=63&Itemid=31

http://www.westernmorningnews.co.uk/Review-Freedom-Information-Act-make-harder-public/story-26933685-detail/story.html

… “Tony Travers, director of the political research group LSE London, pointed out that the changes seemed to be “closer to nationalising some planning decisions than we’ve seen in the past, which is an interesting shift away from localism”.

http://www.theguardian.com/society/2015/jul/10/osbornes-proposals-relax-planning-system-retreat-localism

So, under the new relaxed planning laws, I put in a planning application on a brownfield site I own to provide 100 homes made out of plain, old second-hand shipping containers … nothing fancy, just rusty shipping containers with power and sewerage services and ultra-basic internal fittings.

Do I get automatic permission?

A council that operates with an Executive Cabinet, such as EDDC, must have an Overview and Scrutiny function. Until this election, this was one committee at EDDC. Now, in its wisdom, the committee has been split in two: an Overview Committee and a Scrutiny Committee.
The Scrutiny Committee is chaired (at least for now) by Independent Councillor Roger Giles. We say “at least for now” because Councillor Giles (who had the highest vote of any candidate in the last election) is a rigorous scrutineer of EDDC, which has not made him popular with ruling Tories. How long they can stand his careful scrutiny and extremely good chairmanship at this committee remains to be seen.

However, EDDC, in its wisdom, and no doubt to help Councillor Giles, EDDC officers have given the Committee a very firm idea of what it expects of it. This is found in pages 3-5 of the agenda (see link at the end of this post) for the current committee which met a few days ago.
The suggestions in red are ours!
“Questioning is key. As a Scrutiny Committee member – you want to be prepared, so below are some helpful prompts to help you form your questions. Your questioning technique is crucial in order to encourage open answers
–
avoid interrogation and treat those you are questioning with respect, but don’t be afraid to ask supplementary questions of you feel you haven’t been given a clear answer.”  So far so good.

•  IS IT REQUIRED? (do we have this, does it make sense to tackle it, do we really need it).  Who decides whether we have to do it, tackle it or need it? If it is majority party members or officers, is it truly scrutiny?
•  IS IT SYSTEMS THINKING? (is it evidence based and designed around the customer demands) Oh dear, systems thinking – in our view a very expensive pseudo-gobbledegook theory which has cost EDDC thousands of pounds in consultant time to implement and seems to us can be distilled into two questions: Does it improve things? Is it cheaper?
•  IS THE INTENTION CLEAR? (what are we actually trying to achieve) Is whose intention clear? If the intention is not clear, will it stop scrutiny? Surely if the intention is NOT clear it demands scrutiny!
•  ANY REAL OUTCOMES? (are we actually, and measurably, achieving things for our customers). Ah, customers – remember customers are often developers. And, again, how can one be sure what the outcomes might be unless they are scrutinised. And are the outcomes in the best interests of the electorate, if not, whose interests are being served and why?
•  WHAT IS THE COST? (both time and money) How can this be measured when officer time is never, ever costed on any project?
•  DOES IT COMPLY? (have we checked that it meets our obligations, the law, any formal guidance, and any Council policy or resolutions). Ah, that catch-all “formal guidance” – guidance is simply guidance and means that you can ignore it. There is no such thing as “formal guidance” unless they mean the law which is definitely NOT guidance!  What happens if a council resolution is unfair or unethical?

•  OTHERS DO WHAT? (how do other organisations tackle this, best practice) Yes, very useful, as long as you do not cherry-pick your “best practice” to suit your own ends.
•  EFFECTIVE AND EFFICIENT? (how do we know we’re doing things well, in a timely fashion, and at “best value”) Again, you cannot know best value if you do not cost officer time. And how do you measure “best value” for social costs?  Is effective disadvantaging anyone?  Is efficient also ethical?  Is it long-term pain for short-term gain?

•  WHAT IS THE RISK? (any areas of risk for the Council) Fine, as long as reputational risk is excluded. Scrutiny should be fearless and impartial.
•  ANYONE LOSE OUT? (are there sections of the community who might be disadvantaged by this approach, or be less able to take advantage, than others) How do you measure loss – EDDC does it purely in “economic” terms and seems not to understand any other measure.  Does one measure short-term, medium-term or long-term loss?

•  DOES IT LINK? (have we linked this to other, similar, pieces of work within or outside the Council) Does it matter if it links? Surely, ground-breaking issues often link with nothing, but other things may later link with it.

Summary: You are the Scrutiny Committee: you can scrutinise anything you think needs scrutinising as long as you are not simply troublemaking for the sake of it. You should not be bound by a narrow-minded check list!

http://eastdevon.gov.uk/media/1178172/260615-scrutiny-agenda-combined.pdf

A press release tells us that the Turks Head roundabout is being improved with DCC money because of the imminent arrival of the Premier Inn on the motel site and a 100 dwelling housing area further away.

Oh come on – motel, hotel just means traffic stays similar and industrial site traffic will be replaced by domestic traffic. But add the new EDDC headquarters on the Heathpark site and then traffic problems at the roundabout really kick off.

But this way, the whole county of Devon pays for the road improvement rather than the cost having to be incorporated into the relocation costs for EDDC.

Well, that’s good for the council tax payers of East Devon but it isn’t good news for other Devon taxpayers.

We wonder what Section 106 payments would have been expected for the Turks Head roundabout if a major supermarket HAD decided to use the site and if EDDC will offer similar inducements?

http://www.exeterexpressandecho.co.uk/news

Sidmouth

Tuesday 7 July 2015, 7:30 PM arranged by Sidmouth Vision Group

Kennaway House Sidmouth, Devon EX10 8NG

Seaton

Tuesday 7 July 2015 2.30 pm with District Councillor Marcus Hartnell

Town Hall

http://eastdevon.gov.uk/planning-libraries/consultation-proposed-changes2015/7167-pcarter.pdf

Baroness Hollis of Heigham Labour 3:30 pm, 22nd June 2015

Can the Minister say how devolution might work now in two-tier shire authorities such as Norwich, Cambridge, Exeter and many others? We have in place a city deal, delivered for example through the Greater Norwich area partnership, bringing together Norwich, its two adjacent districts which share in the gain from our economic growth, and the county council. Norwich already pools its community infrastructure levy receipts to help fund economic investment in the Greater Norwich area. Cambridge City, I understand, similarly partners South Cambs and Cambridge County Council. Exeter, I learnt today, is working with East Devon and Teignbridge district councils towards a combined authority or possibly an economic prosperity board.

Owl says – So there you have it from a member of the House of Lords – EDDC is working towards a combined authority with Exeter City Council and Teignbridge District Council.  Any comments anyone?

We are sad to report that John Gaffney died on Friday evening.  His contribution to Ottery St Mary and to East Devon were immense – he will be sadly missed. Our thoughts go to his family at this very sad time.

See the tributes here – https://www.facebook.com/groups/175988535857207/?fref=ts

Claire Wright’s tribute – John Gaffney

A proposal to build on AONB fields at the Uplyme/Lyme Regis border.(Planning App 15/0851/MOUT) has been submitted to EDDC.

This is an extremely unwanted development that is being opposed by a local action group – they have a new facebook page to explain things at http://www.facebook.com/StopSld 

Owl says – this is worth support.