“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 

Calls have been made for the suspension of a licence that allows dredged waste from Exmouth Marina to be dumped at sea.  

Daniel Clark eastdevonnews.co.uk 

Teignmouth residents were outraged in 2018 when its beaches suddenly turned black because the spoil was being disposed of nearby Sprey Point, writes Local Democracy Reporter Daniel Clark.

And following angry protests, the Marine Maritime Organisation (MMO) suspended a licence that MarineSpace Ltd, on behalf of Exmouth Marina Ltd, had been granted for maintenance dredging and disposal of 10,000 tonnes of materials.

But in September the MMO lifted the suspension and consented Exmouth Marina Ltd to restart dredging operations.

It was agreed the waste would be dumped at a disused off-shore disposal site approximately 7.7km off Teignmouth, which should ensure its beaches do not turn black.

The black sludge on Teignmouth beach in 2018.

However, Teignbridge District Council’s executive committee this week raised questions around the sampling methodology that had been used.

Members agreed to ask the MMO to suspend the licence while a review takes place.

Councillor Jackie Hook, executive member for climate change, coastal protection, and flooding, said all recalled the ‘environmental catastrophe’ when black sludge washed up on Teignmouth beach as a result of disposal of waste at Sprey Point.

She added: “Our principle objections relates to sampling, as surely it is obvious that without knowing what is dredged, it is impossible to determine permission to dredge.”

She said that the council could choose to do nothing, support a judicial review, or lobby the MMO for additional clarification.

Cllr Hook added: “More information needs to be sampled and there is a need for us to lobby them to apply the sampling, as we need to stop the disposals of marina sludge in our seas.”

Cllr Martin Wrigley added that it appeared ‘the process has led to a wrong decision from the MMO’, adding: “As part of the lobbying, we should request that they suspend the licence pending the new sampling process we are requesting. There is no expectation they will, but we should ask them to.”

Cllr Nina Jeffries added that all councillors heard from the local communities and businesses and fishermen who were effected.

Cllr Alan Connett, leader of the council, slammed the ‘air of arrogance’ from the Government organisation that led to the authority having to consider a judicial review just to net some engagement.

The executive agreed to maintain its existing objection to the licence and to lobby for additional clarification of sampling methodology to be carried out.

Members also recommended that the MMO properly supports that representative sediment testing methodologies be incorporated within licence criteria.

The latest official daily data shows there have been 22 new daily cases of coronavirus in Exeter and 24 across East Devon.

Paul Greaves www.devonlive.com

Figures released on Thursday, November 5 which have details over the seven days up to October 31 reveal there has now been 2,057 people in the city that have tested positive for Covid-19, with 22 of these being new cases.

In the South West, there have been 1,215 new cases, bringing the region’s cumulative total to 48,329 positive cases.

Former Covid hotspots in Exeter continue to see a decline in infection rates, with the overall picture for the city showing a slight downward trend.

The seven–day rolling rate of new cases up to October 31 gives a picture of which neighbourhoods in Exeter and East Devon have the most infections.

Exeter and East Devon Covid map up to October 31

While Pennsylvania & University in Exeter still has the city’s highest number of confirmed cases – 29 – this has significantly decreased from the 72 reported on October 16.

The area with the second highest number of confirmed cases of coronavirus in Devon is St James Park & Hoopern with 26 while Middlemoor & Sowton has 16.

Areas to see a slight increase include Starcross & Exminster and St Thomas West.

East Devon has reported 24 new cases up to November 5 with infections currently rising slightly overall with 152 currently active.

A closer look at the cluster map reveals Cranbrook, Broadclyst and Stoke Canon to have the highest rolling number of cases with 21. This, however, is down by 3 on the last count.

Exmouth Withycombe and Raleigh have seen an increase of seven.

See the map here.

“Johnson is after all the most accomplished liar in public life – perhaps the best liar ever to serve as prime minister. Some of this may have been a natural talent – but a lifetime of practice and study has allowed him to uncover new possibilities which go well beyond all the classifications of dishonesty attempted by classical theorists like St Augustine. He has mastered the use of error, omission, exaggeration, diminution, equivocation and flat denial. He has perfected casuistry, circumlocution, false equivalence and false analogy. He is equally adept at the ironic jest, the fib and the grand lie; the weasel word and the half-truth; the hyperbolic lie, the obvious lie, and the bullshit lie – which may inadvertently be true.”

In an acerbic review of Tom Bower’s controversial biography of the prime minister, The Gambler, Stewart – who was kicked out of the Conservative party by Johnson last year – pointed to his “lack of moral conviction” and mocks his affection for mythological figures like Pericles. www.thelondoneconomic.com 

Rory Stewart upstages the the book he reviews in the Times Literary Supplement: “Boris Johnson: The gambler, by Tom Bower” – Owl

rory stewart www.the-tls.co.uk 

Lord of misrule

Boris Johnson: an amoral figure for a bleak, coarse culture

On Boris Johnson’s desk in Number 10 stands a bust of the Athenian leader Pericles – his “hero” and “inspiration” for forty years. Tom Bower, who has made his name trying to destroy the reputation of famous figures (from Richard Branson to Prince Charles), chooses in this new biography of Boris Johnson to provoke through rehabilitation – to invite comparisons with figures such as Pericles by praising Johnson’s personality, talents, political successes and character.

Bower tells us that Johnson can be warm-hearted, kind and genuinely polite, that he is not gossipy or malicious, and that he is generous, believes the best of people and lacks pettiness or envy. He reminds us of “Johnson’s magic combination of intelligence, wit, cunning and exhibitionism” which – allied to a formidable memory, and a facility with words – has made him one of the most highly paid writers and speakers of his generation. He minimizes Johnson’s misdemeanours – not by omitting them, but rather by listing so many that they lose their power to shock. Thus, the first time he describes Johnson cheating on his wife, and lying, it is disturbing; but when Bower describes the fourth affair and Johnson’s claim that “It is complete balderdash. It is an inverted pyramid of piffle. It is all completely untrue and ludicrous conjecture …”, it is bathetic.

Things that would seem humiliating lapses in others (such as Johnson’s prevarications to avoid leaving his official residence when he resigned as foreign secretary) are made to seem predictable and “authentic”. The countless times when he lets people down subliminally readjust our expectations, so that on the rare occasions when Johnson does what is required for the job (gets up early to read his briefings as mayor of London, for example) it appears a sign of heroic diligence. And when Johnson behaves particularly badly, Bower is able to excuse it as a product of an unhappy childhood, with a mother who had a breakdown and a stingy father who (according to Johnson’s mother) kept them in cold houses, cheated on her, and hit her in front of their young son.

There are other compliments that could be paid to Johnson. Bower is not strong on his sense of humour, or flashes of learning. He passes quickly, for example, over the impressive lecture Johnson gave on the Latin poet Horace in 2004. There are some characteristic Johnson touches in that speech (he emphasizes Horace’s hypocrisies, cowardice and compromises over the more dignified and stoical elements in the Odes; and reduces the poetry to the question of whether journalists are more important than politicians). But it is impossible to deny the ease and enjoyment with which Johnson cites Latin verse. And few other public figures would have observed that “there is a final sense in which Horace is not just a ward and protégé of Mercury but also carries out the ultimate function of that divinity”.

It is above all, however, as a successful politician that Bower invites us to admire Johnson. He bet on the side of Leave in the Brexit referendum when the polls were against it. He persevered after his first failed leadership campaign. He resigned as foreign secretary, although resignation is generally fatal to a political career. And on the basis of all this became prime minister, just as he twice before became a Conservative mayor in a Labour city. Then – having defied parliament and the Supreme Court, brought in an unpopular and provocative Chief Adviser, fired some of the most senior and well-known members of his own party (and also others including me), and called an election when the polls were unpromising – he won an astonishing majority. He appears able to sense and grab the tail of the galloping horse of history, when everyone else is still wondering where it might be stabled.

Even this underestimates his achievement. Johnson is not simply an opportunist, exploiting impersonal historical forces; he has often created these events – whistling the horse of history to himself, and whipping it on its way. In 2019, he faced the same Labour leader and the same Brexit conundrum that led Theresa May to lose her majority two years earlier, and with a highly personal and idiosyncratic campaign won an eighty-seat majority. And his disproportionate impact on that election, which was not apparent in the early polls, also suggests that he did not simply benefit from the vote for Brexit, but made it happen. Bower concludes, therefore, that those of us who criticize him – as I am about to do – are narrow-minded, prudish, inadequate or envious.

Perhaps it is envy. Johnson is after all the most accomplished liar in public life – perhaps the best liar ever to serve as prime minister. Some of this may have been a natural talent – but a lifetime of practice and study has allowed him to uncover new possibilities which go well beyond all the classifications of dishonesty attempted by classical theorists like St Augustine. He has mastered the use of error, omission, exaggeration, diminution, equivocation and flat denial. He has perfected casuistry, circumlocution, false equivalence and false analogy. He is equally adept at the ironic jest, the fib and the grand lie; the weasel word and the half-truth; the hyperbolic lie, the obvious lie, and the bullshit lie – which may inadvertently be true. And because he has been so famous for this skill for so long, he can use his reputation to ascend to new levels of playful paradox. Thus he could say to me “Rory, don’t believe anything I am about to say, but I would like you to be in my cabinet” – and still have me laugh in admiration.

But what makes him unusual in a politician is that his dishonesty has no clear political intent. Lyndon Johnson’s corrupt and dishonest methods were ultimately directed towards Civil Rights Reform; Alberto Fujimori’s lies enabled a complete restructuring of the Peruvian economy. Machiavelli argues on the basis of such examples that dissimulation may be necessary for effective political action. But Johnson proves that it is not sufficient.

I saw almost daily, when he was foreign secretary and I was one of his Ministers of State, how reluctant he was to push through even those policies that he professed to endorse. He demanded, for example, to know why we were not doing more for “charismatic megafauna”, but when I came back with a £9 million programme to work with the German development agency on elephant protection in Zambia, he simply laughed and said “Germans? Nein. Nein …”. He said, “Rory: Libya. Libya is a bite-sized British problem. Let’s sort out Libya”, but when I proposed a budget, and some ideas on how we might work with the UN and the Italians in the West of Libya, he switched off immediately. “Cultural heritage”, he told me, “is literally the only thing I care about in the world”, but again I could not get him to support a fund on cultural heritage. Even when he did rouse himself to action, as mayor, the results often seemed not what he intended – having campaigned against skyscrapers, for example, and in favour of emulating the architecture of Periclean Athens, he left a legacy of some of the most ill-considered, inhuman towers in London (Nine Elms in Vauxhall being a dramatic example).

Why? Was it that implementing his policies would have involved challenging another point of view and he did not want to make anyone unhappy? Did he lose interest because I had reduced “charismatic megafauna” to actual elephants, or “the bite-sized British problem” to a slow multilateral effort? Was it allergy to detail, which meant that, two-and-a-half years after the Brexit vote, he still struggled to understand the Customs Union, was blind to the issue of Irish borders, and kept saying that we could have a transition period without an agreement? Why did he fail to grasp the implications of Coronavirus in February?

Johnson’s explanation for all these things is that he suffers from the classical vice of akrasia. He knows what the right thing to do is but acts against his better judgement through lack of self-control. He is, in Aristotle’s words, like “a city that votes for all the right decrees and has good laws but does not apply them”. But Johnson’s lack of so many of the other virtues listed by Aristotle – temperance, generosity (he is notoriously reluctant to reach for his wallet), realistic ambition, truthfulness or modesty – is startling. It is hard to accept that in every case he agrees on what is good, and intends it, but somehow frustrates himself from achieving it – rather than in fact having quite different beliefs, priorities and intentions.

This lack of moral conviction is not a secret. Rather than fooling everyone, he has in a sense never fooled anyone. Siblings, parents, teachers, bosses, subordinates, colleagues and friends have always seen through him. His housemaster at Eton wrote about the teenage Johnson’s “gross failure of responsibility” and his sense that he was “an exception, one who should be free of the network of obligation which binds everyone else”. His first Editor at The Times fired him thirty years ago for lying. His next editor at the Daily Telegraph called him “a morally bankrupt cavorting charlatan, rooted in a contempt for the truth”.

And the public are fully aware of this. Nevertheless, millions voted for him to be prime minister – some with great enthusiasm. Is this because many assume that no politician could actually be diligent, competent or sincerely dedicated to public service? And that if someone – a Theresa May or Keir Starmer, for example – claims to be one of these things, they must be deceiving us? Johnson believes so, and this frames his political approach. “Self-deprecation is a very cunning device”, he explains, “all about understanding that basically people regard politicians as a bunch of shysters.”

His speeches, therefore, are written not to dampen but to titillate the public’s sense of scandal, and embarrassment. Take his most familiar speech, which begins with an attack on regulations, and Health and Safety, but continues:

“Which is why my political hero is the mayor from JAWS.”

Laughter.

“Yes. Because he KEPT THE BEACHES OPEN.”

“Now, I accept,” he goes on in an uncertain tone, “that as a result some small children were eaten by a shark …”

The audience follows Johnson down the path of their shared hatred of Health and Safety, only to discover with delight that he has, apparently inadvertently, endorsed the eating of children. Johnson never poses as our better – rather he goes out of his way to exaggerate his incompetence. Take again his central speech during the election campaign, when he stood in front of a row of police and asked:

You know the police caution? (Long pause while he apparently tries to remember) “You do not have to say anything …” Is that right? “But anything you say …” (pause) No … “but if you fail to mention something which you later rely on” … hang on let’s get this right … (pause) anyway you get the gist.

Instead of the politician who tries to impress us with knowledge, Johnson flatters us by allowing us to feel we always know more than him.

Why is this so particularly appealing? Is it that voters want him to confirm their distrust of all elites and high-minded stories? Or to validate some conviction that there can be no true moral or political purpose, no sincere vision of self or country? Or does his disregard for red lights, the edges of racism and homophobia in his humour, the flamboyant ricketiness of his life and finances, his refusal (until very recently) to eat well, drink sensibly, watch his weight, and still less act professionally, tuck in his shirt or brush his hair – while still becoming prime minister – make us feel better about ourselves? Is he a carnival lord of misrule allowing us to rebel against the oppressive expectations of our age, or a hand-grenade to be thrown at the establishment?

Whichever it is, Bower is wrong to suggest that Johnson is seeking to emulate the heroes of ancient Greece. Johnson states grandly that “every skill and every pursuit and every practical effort or undertaking seems to aim at some good, says old Aristotle, my all-time hero. And that goal is happiness”. But Johnson’s notion of happiness seems a much thinner thing than Aristotle’s life of honour and virtue. It is more akin to pleasure, and insufficient to provide a rich, flexible or satisfying purpose to his political life. Again, Johnson often compares himself to Pericles on the grounds that they both enjoy good speeches, democratic engagement, big infrastructure and fame. But Pericles built the Parthenon, not the Emirates Cable Car. And if, like Johnson, he had made and lost a £1,000 bet, he would have wanted to pay it, and be known to have paid it (rather than sending Max Hastings an envelope with a note saying “cheque enclosed” with no cheque).

These differences are not trivial. It is not simply that Pericles had more self-control, allowing him to act more prudently. It is that Pericles’ understanding of which drama and architecture to sponsor, when not to attend a private party, when to speak and when to be silent, and why fame was worthwhile, was rooted in a notion of personal honour, and the honour of the state. Gladstone and Churchill, also – in their very different context – had a sense of personal and national honour (and it can be traced from Churchill’s grand historiographical writing to his micromanagement of the detailed designs of a bomb shelter). Johnson does not. And if Johnson is not a virtuous Greek, still less is he a stoical Roman. Johnson’s delight in bluff, and in what the Romans would have called levitas and impudentia, is the antithesis of the Roman ideal – and a direct rejection of the Roman statesman’s dignitas and gravitas.

Instead, Johnson’s way with words, his irrepressibility, his recklessness (and caution with money), his lofty references and brutal politics, and his tricks echo the less familiar moral universe of Norse literature. Like Egil’s saga, his life shocks and impresses us with the resilience, shamelessness and cunning (disguised as simplicity) that allows him to continually embarrass and defeat every conceivable authority and constraint – teacher and colleague, boss and husband – seizing power through trickery.

Johnson may have a bust of Pericles on his desk. But he is not, as he pretends, a man suffering from akrasia – someone who struggles, with shame, to live up to the ideals of a complex classical civilization. Rather, he is an amoral figure operating in a much bleaker and coarser culture. And it is in his interest – and that of other similar politicians around the world – to make that culture ever coarser. But unless we begin to repair our political institutions and nurture a society that places more emphasis on personal and political virtue, we will have more to fear than Boris Johnson.

Rory Stewart is a Senior Fellow at the Jackson Institute at Yale University

A “significant” number of staff who work on a ward at the Royal Devon and Exeter Hospital (RD&E) have tested positive for coronavirus, prompting safety concerns to be raised.

Anita Merritt www.devonlive.com 

DevonLive understands that more than half of the workforce on the ward at the hospital have tested positive at the site.

The hospital trust has confirmed a “number of staff” have been diagnosed with the virus, but has refused to disclose to DevonLive how many of its staff on the ward have COVID-19, how many are self-isolating, whether the ward remains open and how many of its other hospital staff have tested positive.

The RD&E has said that rigorous contact tracing has been carried out.

It added the personal protective equipment (PPE) staff wear is effective in containing the spread of the virus.

However, a source connected to the hospital – who asked to remain anonymous – claimed that at least half the members of staff on the ward have now tested positive.

They said: “There have now been a significant number of positive cases and large numbers of staff on the ward are self-isolating. Frontline staff are not being screened routinely, and when they are tested they are not being provided with the results urgently.

“More broadly we are hearing from staff who are dissatisfied that they are working when they should be isolating. That’s my greatest concern.

“For those working at the RD&E there needs to be a duty of care with routine testing in place.

“If staff are unknowingly carrying it and being made to work then this is already out of control. The public confidence in the hospital is essential, but equally inpatients and staff are now being very much compromised.

“Once staff are under pressure and are desperately short staffed they end up cutting corners, and then it gets even worse. The UK has lost more than 500 NHS care workers during the first wave. The price is too high.”

An RD&E spokesperson said: “We take infection prevention and control extremely seriously at the RD&E and have very strong processes in place.

“We have had a number of staff who have tested positive for COVID-19 and have carried out rigorous contact tracing. Any staff or patients who have had contact where there might be a risk of transmission have been asked immediately to self-isolate.

“In line with national guidance, staff in clinical areas are required to wear appropriate and effective PPE at all times, and we have evidence that this is effective in preventing the spread of infection.

“Additionally, as part of the COVID-Genomics UK consortium, we are pioneering using ground-breaking genetic sequencing to help understand and control outbreaks in the region.”

Government forced to reissue key charts used to justify second lockdown after admitting projected fatalities were overstated.

“The use of data has not consistently been supported by transparent information being provided in a timely manner. As a result, there is potential to confuse the public and undermine confidence in the statistics.” – The Office for Statistics Regulation

By Laura Donnelly, Health Editor and Harry Yorke, Political Correspondent www.telegraph.co.uk

Official projections which pushed the country into a second lockdown have been quietly revised to no longer suggest deaths could soon overtake those at the peak of the first wave, The Telegraph has learned.

Graphs presented at a televised Downing Street press conference on Saturday suggested that the UK would see up to 1,500 Covid deaths a day by early December, far beyond the numbers seen in the first wave.

But documents released by Government show that the figures were far too high and have been “amended after an error was found”. The forecast has been revised, reducing the upper end of the scale to around 1,000 deaths a day by December 8 – on a par with the peak of the pandemic in April.

Presenting the graphs on Saturday, Sir Patrick Vallance, Boris Johnson’s chief scientific adviser, said the statistics, which covered a six-week period, presented “a very grim picture” with “greater certainty” than long-term modelling could provide.

But the Government Office for Science has now corrected two of the slides, reducing both the upper end of the range for deaths and that for hospital admissions by one third. While the presentation suggested daily hospital admissions could reach up to 9,000 in early December, the upper end of the range has now been cut to 6,000 in the updated slides.

It comes days after it emerged that separate modelling showing a worst-case scenario of 4,000 deaths a day by the end of December was based on out of date data which has also since been updated.

The revelation prompted former Prime Minister Theresa May to question the Government’s use of statistics and ask whether “figures are chosen to support the policy rather than the policy being based on the figures”.

On Thursday night, leading scientist Professor Carl Heneghan, of Oxford University, said the graphs presented at the weekend had been found to be “riddled with errors”, raising concern that a desire for lockdown had seen forecasts “systematically” exaggerated.

Greg Clark, the chairman of the Commons science and technology committee, said the belated admission of errors was “of great concern”, adding that the changes to the upper range in the forecast on hospital admissions was particularly concerning as this was “the key projection” in the case for lockdown.

Steve Baker, a backbench Tory MP given advance sight of the projections ahead of the Downing Street briefing, said: “Government must accept that public confidence rests on not over-egging the pudding.”

On Thursday, the UK statistics watchdog criticised the Government for a lack of transparency about the data driving its lockdown policies, warning that the failings could create confusion and undermine public confidence.

In other developments, Rishi Sunak, the Chancellor, extended the furlough scheme, under which the Treasury covers 80 per cent of the wages of employees unable to work, until March. 

Dominic Raab, the Foreign Secretary, announced that he was self-isolating after coming into contact with someone who has coronavirus.

Matt Hancock, the Health Secretary, said people were allowed to leave their homes to travel abroad for assisted dying during the lockdown.

Last Saturday, when Boris Johnson announced the lockdown, Sir Patrick presented a series of slides on the outlook for the pandemic including the now-disputed 4,000 deaths graph.

On Tuesday, Sir Patrick and Professor Chris Whitty, the chief medical officer, were questioned by the Commons science and technology committee about the use of the modelling scenarios which MPs said had frightened the public.

Sir Patrick said he “regretted” it if he had not made it clear that these scenarios were models rather than projections and were “not as reliable” as the six-week forecasts he had also presented. He told MPs: “The right graphs to focus on are the six-week medium-term forward projections,” describing the slides on hospital admissions and deaths as the ones “that are important”.

Amid bad-tempered discussions about the long-term scenarios, Prof Whitty said he had “never used anything beyond six weeks in anything I have ever said to any minister on this issue”.

But an addendum to the published slides has revealed that these forecasts contained significant mistakes. A note added to the presentation said: “Plots on slides 4 and 5 have been amended after an error was found in the interquartile ranges for SPI-M [Sage’s Scientific Pandemic Influenza Group on Modelling] medium term projections.

“This does not affect the insights that can be taken from this analysis.”

Although the central forecasts remain unchanged, forecasting 750 deaths a day and 4,290 hospital admissions by December 8, the upper end of the range has been revised down. Instead of 1,500 deaths, it suggests an upper figure of 1,010, while the top range for daily hospital admissions falls from around 9,000 to 6,190.

The changes significantly alter the appearance of the graphs, meaning the shading no longer suggests that deaths in the weeks up to December 8 could dwarf those of the first wave.

Prof Heneghan, the director of the Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine at Oxford University, raised concerns that incorrect data was “systematically” being used to drive the country into lockdown, saying: “It really worries me that, on matters that are this important, we are finding that the data is absolutely riddled with errors.

“I don’t know if the data is being rushed through or if what we are seeing is bias being introduced, but what we are seeing looks systematic. All the mistakes are consistently in one direction, so you have to ask whether it is being done on purpose to suit the policies, like lockdown, they want to impose.”

He urged ministers to be more transparent, saying revisions to data should not be “snuck out” and adding: “We’re in an era where public compliance is essential to public health, and in due course we will need people to take the vaccine. That requires people to trust the Government.”

The SPI-M projections, dated October 28, were a central part of the weekend presentation, with Sir Patrick and and Prof Whitty since emphasising that they were more reliable than long-term scenarios.

SPI-M includes Professor Jonathan Van Tam, the deputy chief medical officer, Professor Neil Ferguson, of Imperial College London and Professor John Edmunds, of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, all of whom have advocated national action (watch Boris Johnson giving an update after the start of the national lockdown in the video below).

At a Downing Street briefing on Thursday, Sir Simon Stevens, the head of the NHS, said services were now dealing with the equivalent of 22 hospitals of Covid patients.

Amid growing rows over the figures presented in the case for lockdown, he contrasted the NHS data with other charts, saying: “Those are facts. Those are not projections, forecasts, speculation. Those are the patients in the hospital today. 

“And as we think about the next few weeks, in a sense we already know what is likely to happen, because today’s infection is the intensive care order book for a fortnight’s time.”

Earlier, Professor Yvonne Doyle, the director of health protection at Public Health England (PHE), defended the models used to justify the second national lockdown, saying they were “presented to aid planning”.

The Office for Statistics Regulation criticised the Government for a lack of transparency over publication of data about the pandemic amid concern that it failed to publish the data sources, models or assumptions on the case for lockdown for several days after the televised presentation, only doing so the night before MPs voted on the restrictions.

In a damning statement, it said: “The use of data has not consistently been supported by transparent information being provided in a timely manner. As a result, there is potential to confuse the public and undermine confidence in the statistics.”

A Government spokesman said: “The main consensus projection remains unaltered. The data still clearly shows, and the consensus remains, that without intervention we are likely to breach the first wave of hospital admissions and deaths in a matter of weeks.”

Scientists have found the strongest evidence yet that people who recover from Covid may mount a much faster and more effective defence against the infection if they encounter the virus again.

Ian Sample www.theguardian.com 

Researchers at Rockefeller University in New York found that the immune system not only remembered the virus but improved the quality of protective antibodies after an infection had passed, equipping the body to unleash a swift and potent attack if the virus invaded a second time.

“It’s very good news,” said Michel Nussenzweig, the head of molecular immunology at Rockerfeller and a senior author of the study. “The expectation is that people should be able to produce a rapid antibody response and resist infection in a large number of cases.”

It is unclear how long the immune system’s memory might last, but Nussenzweig said it could potentially provide some protection for years. The discovery may explain why verified re-infections from the virus are so far quite rare.

When people are infected with coronavirus, the immune system launches a multi-pronged attack. One form of protection comes from T cells, which seek and destroy infected cells, and so prevent the virus from spreading. A second front involves B cells, which release antibodies into the blood. Antibodies latch on to the virus and stop it from invading cells in the first place.

Once the infection has passed, the immune system stands down, but it remembers the virus by storing so-called memory T cells and memory B cells. Should the virus return, these are immediately called to action.

Many studies have shown that the first wave of antibodies to coronavirus wane after a few months, raising concerns that people may lose immunity quickly. In their study of 87 coronavirus patients, the US researchers confirmed that antibodies wane, falling to about a fifth of their peak level over six months, but this may not matter too much, they believe.

When the researchers examined the immune system’s memory, they noticed that six months after infection the antibodies made by memory B cells had evolved to become more potent. These highly honed antibodies could be unleashed within days of re-infection, rather than taking a couple of weeks to build up, as seen in primary infections.

The scientists went on to show that tiny amounts of coronavirus, or protein fragments from inactive virus particles, lurked in patients’ intestines and apparently helped to maintain the immune system’s memory. The remnants of the virus are not thought to be harmful.

“The take-home lessons are that people who have been infected, six months later have persistent B cell memory responses with antibodies that can neutralise the virus and can do it very well,” Nussenzweig said. That could mean wiping out the virus before it takes hold, he added. “We don’t know how long any protection will last, but it might be a really long time. It could be years.”

The study is preliminary and has not been peer-reviewed or published in a journal.

Charles Bangham, a professor of immunology at Imperial College London, who was not involved in the study, said the work suggested there was “a very good chance that if you’re re-exposed, you’ll make a brisker immune response” to the virus. “It remains to be proved that it’s protective, but you would be reasonably confident it would have some beneficial effect,” he said.

Arne Akbar, a professor of immunology at University College London, said: “This is good news for everybody who has been sick with coronavirus.” He said the immune system was like an army that stands down once the threat is over, but remains prepared for a future invasion. “You want the army to be generated again very quickly, and this is what these researchers have found.”

A rapid coronavirus test at the heart of Boris Johnson’s mass-testing strategy missed more than 50% of positive cases in an Operation Moonshot pilot in Greater Manchester, the Guardian can reveal.

Sarah Boseley www.theguardian.com .

The 20-minute tests, on which the government has spent £323m for use with hospital and care home staff with no symptoms, identified only 46.7% of infections during a crucial trial in Manchester and Salford last month.

This means that many of those carrying Covid-19 were wrongly told they were free of the virus, potentially allowing them to infect others.

The tests were due to be used in the UK’s first city-wide mass-testing initiative, which starts in Liverpool on Friday. There was confusion on Thursday night when the council suggested they would no longer be deployed as part of the trial, but the government later insisted that small numbers of NHS staff would be using them in hospitals.

Scientists with Greater Manchester’s mass testing expert group (MTEG) raised significant concerns about the accuracy of the OptiGene Direct RT-Lamp tests this week, and said the technology should not be widely used as intended in hospitals or care homes.

The findings pose significant questions about one of the main tests in the government’s mass-screening strategy, which Johnson heralded this week as the UK’s main route back to normality. The prime minister told MPs on Monday that the government was “rolling out testing of all NHS staff as fast as we possibly can” and that it wanted to introduce rapid, regular testing for hospitals, care homes, schools and universities.

The Salford trial was billed as the first step in the Operation Moonshot mass-testing scheme but was drastically scaled back after just six weeks, in part due to concerns about the accuracy of the OptiGene test, the Guardian understands.

Local leaders had asked the government for the clinical validity data behind the technology, but it is understood this data has not been provided.

The Department of Health and Social Care said the test had been validated in three other trials which differed from Manchester’s findings, however it has not made this data public.

The MTEG, which reports to the region’s health chiefs and the Greater Manchester (GM) mayor, Andy Burnham, revealed their concerns about the Operation Moonshot findings to Martyn Pritchard, the chair of the region’s testing strategy group on Monday.

In a letter seen by the Guardian, they wrote: “The current available data from the Manchester pilot shows low sensitivity (46.7%) of the Direct RT-Lamp platform,” which is favoured for use in hospitals because of its ability to produce results in around 20 minutes.

They wrote that “a high proportion of samples collected from infected individuals in a ‘real world’ setting would not be detected” using the technology, and added: “MTEG have significant concerns and do not feel the data supported the investment in the large scale rollout of Direct RT-Lamp saliva testing in any of the proposed clinical settings considered (hospital staff, care staff, community settings) at this time.”

The Greater Manchester experts said “technical limitations of the system were also a cause for concern”, including the lack of internal controls, and that if not addressed “these may pose a significant risk of errors”. They added: “It should be noted that solutions to these issues are not available at this time and are likely to take considerable resource and time to address.

“It is also of concern that the scale of investment needed [at a ‘new department’ level] to deploy this test at a scale that would be useful and sustainable is unlikely to be cost-effective.

“We remain fully committed to wider asymptomatic testing in the health and care sectors as well as in community settings, however we are not convinced that this is the right platform for widespread deployment across GM.” The experts said they would assess the tests again if there were fixes that “materially improve sensitivity”.

The hospital test is made by OptiGene, a small biomedical firm in Horsham, West Sussex. The government has paid £323m for 600 of its newly developed Genie HT machines and 90m testing kits and chemicals. Each machine can reportedly deliver up to 200 tests an hour.

The DHSC confirmed that the Genie HT machines would be the primary technology deployed to test NHS staff and patients who do not present with coronavirus symptoms.

They do so using two methods: the rapid Direct RT-Lamp, where a saliva sample is added straight to the machine after being made safe by heating, and the RNA Lamp, which takes longer to process because the nucleic acid has to be extracted from the sample.

Prof Mark Wilcox, the co-chair of the DHSC’s technical validation group, said: “The Direct Lamp tests used in Manchester have been validated in other laboratories and in real-world testing for use in different settings.

“It is incorrect to claim the tests have a low sensitivity, with a recent pilot showing overall technical sensitivity of nearly 80%, rising to over 96% in individuals with a higher viral load, making it important for detecting individuals in the infectious stage. The challenge now is to understand the reasons for the difference in claimed sensitivity in one evaluation versus those in multiple others.”

The health secretary, Matt Hancock, announced a six-week trial of OptiGene’s tests at the end of May, which he said “could change the way that we control Covid-19 across the country”. The results of the trial, however, have never been made public. A separate study published last month found that it identified only 67% of infections, meaning it missed one in three cases, and advised anyone who tests negative to take a separate follow-up test to verify the result.

OptiGene referred the Guardian to the DHSC.

Questions have also been raised about a separate rapid saliva test which will be offered to everyone in the community in Liverpool. The public data available on the Innova test is for nose and mouth swabs only, not saliva tests.

The instructions for use say “negative results do not rule out Sars-CoV-2 infection” and should not be used for treatment decisions or “infection control decisions”. The government’s Porton Down laboratory evaluated the test and approved it in August, but only for swab samples and no detailed results have been published.

Johnson earlier told the Commons that the rapid test to be used in Liverpool would be one “that you can use yourself to tell whether or not you are infectious and get the result within 10 to 15 minutes”. The Innova test, however, is for people who already have symptoms and is not approved to be self-read. Any positive case should be confirmed with the gold-standard lab-based PCR swab test.

Experts, including those in Liverpool, are understood to be anxious about the performance of the tests chosen for use in the pilot scheme and to have asked for reassurance from the government. There is concern that doubts over the results will undermine public confidence and affect people’s willingness to come forward for testing.

Bill Esterson, the Labour MP for Sefton in Merseyside, asked the government on Thursday to urgently publish the test’s clinical validity data and said: “It’s very worrying if unreliable tests are being used. It’s crucial that the Liverpool mass-testing pilot succeeds.”

The Danish government has ordered the slaughter of all farmed mink in the country after the reported discovery of a mutant form of coronavirus in the animals. It has already spread to humans.

[A disturbing story on many fronts. Travellers from Denmark now required to quarantine – Owl]

Graham Lawton www.newscientist.com 

What do we know about the situation in Denmark?

According to a report in the Danish newspaper Berlingske, 207 mink farms have seen infections of coronavirus. The authorities have failed to contain the virus, and all 17 million farmed mink in Denmark will now be culled, said Denmark’s prime minister Mette Frederiksen at a press briefing on 5 November. Denmark has the world’s largest mink industry.

The Danish prime minister described the mutated virus as “a serious risk to public health and to the development of a vaccine.” However, health minister Magnus Heunicke told the press briefing that there is no sign yet that the mutant virus causes more serious symptoms of covid-19.

Some areas of northern Jutland – the region of Denmark that connects to the European mainland – will be isolated to stop the spread of the virus in humans. Frederiksen said a “mutant” virus has been identified in five farms and 12 people have become infected with it.

What sort of mutant?

We don’t know for sure. There is no scientific publication about it. According to the newspaper report, the Danish State Serum Institute says the virus is sufficiently different from other circulating strains to mean that a vaccine may not work against it, though there is no information on the Institute’s website and it has not yet responded to New Scientist’s requests for comment. Up to now all circulating strains are thought to be similar enough that a single vaccine will immunise against all of them.

The newspaper also said that the 12 infected people “have been found to have an impaired reaction to antibodies.” It is not clear what this means. It could be a mistranslation of “antibody response”, which could mean that the 12 individuals are producing previously unseen antibodies. That would strengthen the claim that the mutant virus may evade a vaccine.

Can mink really catch the coronavirus?

Yes. There are already scientific reports of farmed mink in the Netherlands catching it from humans. And in June more than 90,000 mink were culled in Aragon, Spain after the virus was detected in fur farms.

Can mink pass it to humans?

Yes. One of those reports from the Netherlands says that at least one worker on a mink farm caught the virus from the animals. The worker showed only mild respiratory disease.

What do scientists say?

Francois Balloux, a professor of genetics at University College London (UCL), took to Twitter to describe the report as “highly problematic”. He said his colleague Lucy van Dorp at UCL has already documented numerous coronavirus mutants arising repeatedly in mink, none of which are concerning for humans. The claim that this strain may be resistant to a vaccine is “idiotic”, he said. Such mutations might emerge in humans once we have a vaccine but won’t appear in mink, he said.

Other scientists echoed his views. James Wood at the University of Cambridge in the UK, said he understands that the mutation is on the spike protein, which the virus uses to enter cells and which induces an antibody response. However, “the true implication of the changes in the spike protein have not yet been evaluated by the international scientific community and are thus unclear. It is too early to say that the change will cause either vaccines or immunity to fail,” he said in a statement.

Virologist Ian Jones at the University of Reading in the UK, said that it was not surprising that the virus had mutated, as it would need to adapt to mink. Denmark’s precautionary action would make it less likely that the new virus would spread widely in humans, he said in a statement.

Is the virus likely to spread to other animals?

Yes, very. More than 60 mammal species are known to be definitely or probably susceptible, ranging from gorillas and chimps to foxes, yaks, giant pandas and koalas. Even some whales, dolphins and seals may be able to catch it.

Why did nobody see this coming?

We did. Even before this happened, virologists were concerned about “reverse spillover”, which is when humans pass the virus on to domestic or wild animals. That could be a problem for the animals as some species fall ill and die. It could also spell trouble for us, as animals could become a new reservoir of virus and make the pandemic even harder to control. Animals could also be a crucible for the virus to mutate into another novel coronavirus.

Abbeyfield had put the former Shandford Care Home in Budleigh Sslterton on sale through Savills at auction on Tuesday, Lot 68.

The Savills’ website indicates that it failed to sell, presumably because it failed to reach its reserve price.

“A well located 26 bedroom former care home, of approximately 11,480 sq ft, with further potential subject to the usual consents. Vacant possession.”

The newly created Shandford Trust will have to wait a bit longer for the expected windfall.

A sign of the economic times?

See previous post.

The Ladram Bay retrospective planning application to retain a section of the viewing deck erected without planning permission was withdrawn on Monday.

It was due to have been considered by the Planning Committee on Wednesday. Planning Officers had recommended refusal.

An enforcement notice was issued by EDDC on the 26th June 2019 seeking the removal of the raised platform, in its entirety. The notice took effect on the 01/08/2019 and a subsequent appeal was lodged. 

This appeal was dismissed on 17 August 2020 and the enforcement notice was upheld for the removal of the platform in its entirety due to its unacceptable visual impact, lack of planning policy support given the location of the site in a designated World Heritage Coast, AONB and Coastal Preservation Area.

The structure needs to be removed by the 17th March 2021.

Given the Carter history at Ladram Bay – What next?

Earlier in the Week the Chief Medical Officer, Professor Chris Whitty, justified the South West having to lockdown because the NHS would be overwhelmed.

Last night on BBC Spotlight Sir Simon Stevens, Head of the NHS, was introduced as having an explanation for why the South West might be on the verge of running out of beds. (about 2mins 30 sec here but link expires 1900).

He said that it was a matter of Geography. Torbay now has more cases than in April and the geography of the South West means that there are quite long distances between, say, Truro and Plymouth and to Bristol. Whereas in a place like Liverpool, if Liverpool hospitals become very, very busy then their cancer patients can be looked after in a cancer specialist hospital just across the  road. That’s just not possible across big parts of the South West.

No Sir Simon, the real explanation is that the South West has the lowest number of critical care beds per head of population. There are simply not enough beds anywhere compared to the rest of the country, either just across the road or up in far flung Bristol

Work on an alternative plan for how development across the Greater Exeter Area is set to continue, despite the end of the GESP.

RIP GESP – Owl

Daniel Clark, Local Democracy Reporter www.southwestfarmer.co.uk

The Greater Exeter Strategic Plan was due to be the formal planning framework for development across Exeter, East Devon, Mid Devon and Teignbridge, but following East Devon and then Mid Devon pulling out over the summer, work has ceased.

Teignbridge District Council’s executive on Tuesday (November 3) recommended to full council that they formally withdraw the process as well, but that in principle, support is still given for a joint non-statutory plan, to include joint strategy and infrastructure matters between the four authorities.

Speaking at Tuesday’s meeting, Cllr Gary Taylor, executive member for planning, said that while this ends the ‘lockstep partnership’ between the councils, there were still vital issues that affect the whole area and therefore can be effectively considered in a strategic, cross-boundary manner.

He said that these issues included that the collective authorities comprise a functional economic area and form an extensive housing and travel to work area, and that the wider area also faces common issues such as the need to deliver greater numbers of homes, constraints on infrastructure, the need to respond to the climate emergency, achieve net zero carbon development and increase habitat creation; and the need to improve accessibility for urban and rural areas by widening digital connectivity.

The proposals would provide a co-ordinated response to the area’s strategic economic, climate, housing, environmental and infrastructure issues and help to secure central government investment, but as a non-statutory plan, it would not be subject to statutory consultation or examination and therefore would be faster to prepare and more able to respond to changing circumstances.

Cllr Taylor added that this would still be better than purely acting independently, and that much of the effort and expenditure for the GESP process would still be relevant for the review of Teignbridge’s Local Plan that has begun.

Agreement of details of the scope of the plan, a timetable for its production, the resources required, and governance arrangements, will be agreed at a later date.

Nicholas Matheson does not have the qualifications of Dido Harding. He has never run a large private sector organisation, or sat in the House of Lords. He is merely an expert in virology and immunology.

Tom Whipple Science Editor www.thetimes.co.uk 

But as health chiefs attempt to roll out testing in Liverpool, they might learn from his experiences because he has mass tested the 10,000 students and staff of Cambridge University for a month.

In the summer Dr Matheson, the Baroness Harding of Cambridge, came to the same realisation that has informed the pilot test strategy in Liverpool. He argued that regularly testing all students would be the way to get through the winter.

The university agreed. Since the start of term, Cambridge has in effect operated its own parallel test and trace scheme. Like a scienceocracy it has also used the opportunity to experiment with long-mooted solutions.

Unlike the national programme, students are not analysed individually. They have been sending in swabs every fortnight, pooled with members of their bubble. If a bubble tests positive then it is locked down until they can get retested to identify who is infected.

This cuts down on tests but by checking twice it also catches most false positives.

So far, it seems to have worked: unlike other universities, none of which test at this scale, there have been no uncontrolled outbreaks.

The key to this approach, Dr Matheson said, and the reason Liverpool will be an important test case, is that more than half of cases are asymptomatic — people who would not volunteer for a test as they did not realise they had Covid-19.

Unless you can pick them up, preventing spread is extremely difficult. “We had a modest outbreak in one of the colleges,” he said. “The first few cases were picked up via the asymptomatic screening programme.

Joe Anderson, the mayor of Liverpool, on mass testing

“We like to think that by recognising the outbreak promptly we could limit the spread.”

While some universities have amplified infections and gone on to seed outbreaks into the community, the reverse seems to have been the case in Cambridge.

Since the second week, when positivity in asymptomatic tests peaked at 0.9 per cent of students, there has been a steady decline in cases. In the latest week, total positivity, including those presenting for tests because they had symptoms, had almost halved.

Dr Matheson acknowledges that making such a system work in a city will bring its own problems. A key lesson from the Cambridge scheme is that it needs support. Eighty per cent of students volunteered to take part, and because they are in college all can easily be followed up.

“We are generally supportive of the Liverpool approach,” he said. “We think asymptomatic screening is a good idea. But the devil is in the details.”

Boris Johnson’s drive to use mass so-called moonshot testing to control the spread of Covid-19 will fail unless stringent quarantine rules are relaxed, senior government advisers have warned.

Oliver Wright, Chris Smyth www.thetimes.co.uk 

Ministers have been told that plans to use millions of 15-minute tests to screen large parts of the population for asymptomatic Covid-19 risks being undermined by the existing test and trace system.

In particular they have been told that the “ridiculous” policy requiring the contacts of people known to have infections to self-isolate for two weeks or face a £10,000 fine risks undermining public acceptance of the mass testing initiative.

Instead ministers should use the new capacity to relax the quarantine rules and allow those who have come into contact with a known Covid-19 case to carry on with their daily life while being tested every two days.

“It’s a massive problem,” one senior figure advising the government, said. “The threat of self-isolation has killed the test and trace programme. People just say screw you — I’m not doing it. Compliance is really low.”

They added: “With the new tests they need to say we’ll still do contact tracing but we will ask people to pop in every two days and get another test, and provided they remain negative, then they can go about their business rather than being confined. You test them on day two, day four, day six and then they’re in the clear.

“I really don’t understand why they aren’t changing course.”

Robert West, professor of health psychology at University College London and a member of the government’s SPI-B behavioural advisory group, said that using rapid tests to free contacts from the need to isolate would be “very useful”.

He said: “It is potentially a massive step forward if people could get a test quickly and be confident of getting the result the same day. It would just give everyone so much more confidence that you’re not going to put someone in a really difficult position by naming them as a contact.”

He said that poor compliance on self-isolation was “primarily a matter of financial and practical support”.

“If you look at the demography of people who haven’t isolated they are struggling financially, in insecure jobs and have caring responsibilities. That is really pretty crucial.”

He said fixing test and trace was crucial to avoiding restrictions. “We have to find a way to identify and quarantine people who are infectious and support them to isolate. If we can do that we don’t need mass lockdowns.”

Sir John Bell, regius professor of medicine at Oxford University, said the new mass testing initiative that will begin trials in Liverpool this week must reduce the number of people needing to self-isolate.

“These need to be seen as tests that promote enablement rather than restrictions,” Sir John told the Today programme on Radio 4. “Although people with a positive test will still need to confine themselves for a period of time.

“What we hope ultimately you’ll be able to do is to avoid the quarantine of contacts that has caused so much trouble.

“People get pretty irritated when they get told they passed someone in the shops and they now need to quarantine for ten or 14 days. With these tests it should be possible to test these people every two days and they can go about their business provided they remain negative.”

Flavio Toxvaerd, a lecturer in the economics of infectious diseases at the University of Cambridge, said: “The incentives to get tested are complicated and may vary from person to person. A civic-minded individual who is asymptomatic but tests positive for Covid-19 may choose to self-isolate. This would be a desirable outcome. But others may take a positive test result as a cue to be less cautious, as they are no longer at risk of infection. They thereby put others at risk and in such cases, testing may backfire.

“For some, not knowing their infection status may be preferable to testing positive as a positive test may bring forced self-isolation and loss of income. Unless the government puts in place the right incentives, plausible deniability may look attractive to some who suspect they are infected but who stand to lose a lot from self-isolation. So a sensible testing policy must go hand in hand with proper support and incentives for those who test positive.”

Ministers have been burnt by over-hyped pledges on testing in the past. But this time there is a belief — among politicians and their scientific advisers — that the UK is on the verge of a game-changing increase in capacity that could allow the country to live with Covid-19 without the need for lockdowns (Oliver Wright and Chris Smyth write).

Sir Patrick Vallance, the chief scientific adviser, said that increased testing may come ahead of a vaccine in advances that could help normal life to resume.

The cause for optimism is the validation of four types of new tests that do not require lab processing and can be done at home with results returned in as little as 15 minutes.

While Liverpool will be used in the first instance to test how best to run such a mass screening programme, it is likely to be rolled out nationally at the end of the upcoming lockdown period.

One senior figure involved in the programme said there should be enough of the new devices to potentially test the whole of the UK before Christmas and that this was something ministers were “definitely” thinking about.

But even with the new tests, deploying them at such a scale will be a tall order with a population of about 66 million.

One negative test does not mean you will not become infected, so it is not necessarily a passport for a normal Christmas. People also have to agree to be tested in the first place, and many may be reluctant to risk the prospect of a positive test.

In Liverpool the plan is to offer a test every week. There will also be targeted interventions such as in schools, colleges and healthcare settings. There could also be door-to-door testing in areas with high rates. The idea is to see what is effective, what uptake looks like, and the effect in reducing transmission.

Testing everyone in a one-off programme is not a strategy. But it could be a reset moment on the path towards a more targeted programme of regular testing and allow the end of social distancing.

Ministers are determined that it does not become another eye-catching target that they miss while distracting from the need to find a coherent screening plan.

Jeremy Hunt, the chairman of the health select committee, warned that hospitals could experience similar levels of transmission as during the first coronavirus wave without a rigorous testing regime for health workers.

Calling for more routine testing of NHS staff, he told the Today programme: “My biggest worry, frankly, is that we still have not introduced weekly testing of NHS staff.

“We know that up to 11 per cent of coronavirus patients in hospital died last time, having caught the virus in a hospital, and I think it would be quite unforgivable if we made the same mistake twice and didn’t take that terrible weight off the minds of NHS staff of worrying that they might be giving the infection to their own patients.”

Four types of test

Standard PCR

The original test that is used in NHS laboratories and Test and Trace “lighthouse labs”. It involves amplifying a small sample of the coronavirus’s genetic material through repeated heating and cooling to stimulate key reactions.

The test is extremely reliable but takes several hours to process in a specialist lab. This means that it is hard to turn around tests in under 24 hours. There have been concerns that because it is so sensitive it picks up cases where people have fractions of the virus’s genetic material, or RNA, in them but are not actually infectious.

RT-Lamp

This technique allows test machines to pick up genetic material without the need for the series of temperature changes. This means results come back much quicker — sometimes in 20 minutes.

The equipment needed is much smaller than for PCR tests — about the size of a laptop computer — which means they can be used for localised community checks rather than having to send samples away. The government intends to use these tests for screening in places such as hospitals to ensure that asymptomatic patients and staff do not spread the disease.

Saliva Lamp

These tests use the same RT-Lamp technology but with a sample of saliva rather than a full throat and nasal swab. The advantage of this is that it is much easier to administer and makes it potentially more reliable. Most of the problems with PCR tests have been connected to samples rather than a failure of the testing itself. These tests are also likely to be used in community settings.

Lateral flow

This is pregnancy test-style technology that requires only a sample to be run along the surface of an absorbent pad. Such tests are cheap and can be mass-produced.

They are quicker than other tests — giving results in 15 minutes — and do not require specialist equipment or technicians to administer. This means they can be scaled up very rapidly. They are less accurate than other tests; however, because they detect coronavirus protein rather than RNA, they are better at identifying those most likely to be infectious.