And now Ottery St Mary:

Sidmouth.nub.news

In the last few days listening to all the news of the development of the Corona virus around the world I have been brought back to my days at university when I was studying for my degree in Biology and Chemistry.

Among the many things that crossed my mind there was something I remember being said to us by one of our lecturers. How true it was, I don’t know, but at the moment it looks like his words were filled with great wisdom and knowledge. He said to us: “Nature has its own ways of controlling the population and that is the reason we see famine and epidemics, war and natural disasters occurring at times.

“At the same time when that happens human beings show their worst and their best and that is the reason we hear of horror crimes committed in the name of religious or nationalism, but also we hear about great acts of courage and kindness.”

A week ago an Ottery resident Sarah Crow put a message on Ottery Matters that showed her concern should the spread of the virus would reach the town and how the lonely and vulnerable would be able to cope if they would be forced into isolation.

Within hours there was a meeting of representatives of organisations such as the Help Scheme and the Coledrige Medical Centre and a group under the name of Ottery Community Volunteers was formed.

This group got into action and through the facilities of their own and the local social media pages they asked for volunteers to come forward so they could have enough resources to deliver medicines, basic essentials, food, etc. to those confined to their homes during the crisis. In other words to provide those residents with the necessary reassurance that they had not been forgotten.

The latest figures show that over 200 people have indicated their willingness to help. The group still is looking for people who could help, in particular volunteers that may already have DBS checks in place and can drive.

If you think you could be one of the members of this great group of volunteers, please get in touch with Sarah through this link.

I would like to congratulate Sarah on the success of her initiative which I hope will set up an example for other communities.

It would be wonderful not having to use the services of this group and Ottery spares the damage the virus can bring upon the town but, who knows, this could be the beginning of an initiative that will give those isolated and vulnerable people in the parish the reassurance that there will always be lots of people in town on standby ready to help at any time and under any circumstances.

I am sure we all in Ottery join our voices to thank Sarah and all those volunteers for showing us that in this community there will always be people who care and will come forward to help.

Owl hopes there will be many more community self-help initiatives like this

Daniel Wilkins Exmouth Journal

Otterton residents who are self isolating, either because they have Covid 19 symptoms or because they are elderly or at high risk from the disease are being reassured that help is available for them.

The parish council is setting up a network of volunteers in the village to drop provisions or provide other help to those in need.

Parish council chairman John Hiles said: “We want the people of Otterton to know that support is available to them and urge them to get into contact if they are self isolating. 

“A number of people are ready and willing to help.” 

Anyone needing assistance is asked to email cv19otterton@gmail.com, call 07468429264 or visit the facebook page CV19 Otterton.

“Guided by the science” In a previous post Owl revealed aspects of a discussion about Coronavirus held with trusted friends knowledgeable in health matters. Here is an extension of the discussion:

With a novel virus there is so much we don’t know that health scientists have to resort to modelling using what little is known and filling in the gaps with assumptions. As soon as real data becomes available from an infected population, there needs to be priority given to collect them and use them to refine the modelling. That is a true scientific approach.

In a document reported here:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/mar/15/uk-coronavirus-crisis-to-last-until-spring-2021-and-could-see-79m-hospitalised

The government’s position is spelled out:

• The health service cannot cope with the sheer number of people with symptoms who need to be tested because laboratories are “under significant demand pressures”.
• From now on only the very seriously ill who are already in hospital and people in care homes and prisons where the coronavirus has been detected will get tested.
• Testing services are under such strain that even NHS staff will not be swabbed, despite their key role and the risk of them passing the virus on to patients.

We don’t seem to be collecting data on the number of people “self-isolating” either. So from now on we appear to have no real idea of what is happening accept in terms of hospital admissions yet the government keeps telling us the majority will have only mild symptoms. So how will we know when its all over? (Owl’s experts thought that there might be clever statistical sampling that could be employed but there is no evidence of that).

Here is better informed debate on the subject: from today’s Guardian:

Anthony Costello, a UK paediatrician and former director of the World Health Organization (WHO), said he had written to Whitty asking for testing to continue in the community.

“The key principles from the WHO are intensive surveillance,” he told the Guardian. “You test the population like crazy, find out where the cases are, immediately quarantine them and do contact tracing and get them out of the community. This deals with family clusters. That’s the key bedrock of getting this under control.”

This was how South Korea, China, Japan, Hong Kong and Taiwan had brought their case numbers down.

“You can really take people out of the population and make sure they are quarantined. That is vital – before you get to social distancing.”

However, the UK government is stopping tests outside of hospital. “For me and the WHO people I have spoken to, this is absolutely the wrong policy. It would mean it just lets rip,” he said.

Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, WHO’s director general, expressed his concern on Friday at the end of testing and contact tracing in Britain and some other European countries. “You can’t fight a virus if you don’t know where it is,” he said. “Find, isolate, test and treat every case to break the chains of Covid transmission. Every case we find and treat limits the expansion of the disease.”

As a result Owl does not intent to publish any infection rate data for Devon as is published, for example, on DevonLive. Unfortunately these data are simply unreliable.

More than a million people in Great Britain now live at least a mile from a bus stop with a regular service, BBC research suggests.

The Campaign for Better Transport (CBT) said cuts to services had left some people “trapped in their homes”.

Bus pass use by older and disabled people in England has fallen by almost a fifth in a decade.

The South West is the worst off, with 96,000 poorly served homes

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-51815726

The government has promised £5bn over five years for buses and cycling.

However, Department for Transport (DfT) figures show local and central government support for buses has fallen by £800m a year over 10 years.

Analysis of bus route data for the BBC’s Panorama showed 550,000 properties, equivalent to about 1.3 million people, are at least 2km (1.2 miles) from a bus stop with a service calling on average four times a day.

‘Your heart sinks when you need to get to the doctor’s’

Marion Crawford, from Lower Denby, West Yorkshire, said her local bus stopped about seven years ago, leaving her reliant on charity-run services.
“I’m not benefitting from my bus pass at all,” she said.

“I don’t know what I’d do without the community bus. I’d have no way to go grocery shopping or to the doctors, I’d be reliant on friends.”

The 92-year-old said: “When you go to the doctor and they say they want to see you again, your heart sinks, you think ‘how am I going to get here?'”

Paul Jones, chief officer of the Denby Dale Centre, which provides a charity-funded bus service, said: “Our members tell us some bus routes do not actually reach their villages any more and they feel left alone.”

The charity has received grant funding from the government and the National Lottery for its services.

Judith Lawrence, 75, said she had not left her village of Helperby, North Yorkshire, at all this year because of a lack of bus services.

No private operators run routes through the village, so the local council provides a minibus to take residents to a nearby town twice a week.

“I’ve got a bus pass but no bus,” Ms Lawrence said.

“It’s almost like a discrimination against the people in rural areas with low incomes who can’t afford to take a taxi somewhere.”

The lack of buses is also affecting people trying to get to work.

Construction worker Marti Blagborough said buses between his home in Farnley and Leeds city centre are often delayed or do not turn up.

He said: “If there’s no buses there’s no work, because we can’t get there.

“You have to trust them, I guess you’ve got no other choice.

“If I lived locally I’d have the option of maybe bicycle to work and stuff like that but working further away it’s the only option.”

Bus use has declined over the past decade along with a fall of about 10% in the number of miles covered each year, but it varies across Great Britain

.
According to annual DfT figures, the areas with the most steady declines in estimated miles travelled by bus include Blackburn with Darwen, which has seen a 42% reduction since 2014; Stoke on Trent (41% reduction); and North Yorkshire (41%).

Martin Kelly, Blackburn with Darwen Council’s director of growth and development, said the authority had invested in public transport but “several travel companies in the area have stopped trading or have reduced the services due to falling passenger numbers”.

He said other factors included austerity cuts to council funding, changing employment patterns and “lower demand for traditional shopping patterns”.

“Our figures do seem to have stabilised, however, and we have recently been granted funding from the DfT which should allow us to increase certain services,” he added.

Stoke-on-Trent City Council said commercial operators’ fares increase when usage falls, creating “a vicious circle”. The council is bidding for funding from the government to improve bus reliability and provide more services.

‘Reliant on goodwill’

The government funds free bus passes for pensioners and disabled people in England but the number of journeys made with them has fallen by 18% since 2010.

The DfT said part of this decline was due to the fall in pass holders because the age at which people can receive them has risen in line with changes to the state pension age.

Darren Shirley from the CBT said: “We’re seeing people who are trapped in their home, essentially.”

He said many people left without a bus service would be “reliant on the goodwill of neighbours” to get around.

On average, pensioners and disabled people in England took 26 fewer bus journeys a year on their passes than they did in 2014-15, DfT data showed.

In Somerset the number of concessionary journeys taken was down by 45%.

A spokesman for Somerset County Council said it had reduced spending on concessionary fares for “a variety of reasons, including reductions in both subsidised and commercial bus services” and the collapse of a bus operator in 2016.

He added that the council continued to “meet and exceed” its statutory duties.

A spokeswoman for the DfT said: “Buses are crucial to communities, providing key links to work, school, shops and family and friends.

“We’ve pledged £5 billion to overhaul bus and cycling links, which is on top of the significant £220 million investment we’ve already made to make buses more reliable and convenient.
“We’re also publishing a national bus strategy which will help transform local transport services in every region across the country.”

If you are in the UK, you can watch Panorama: Britain’s bus crisis on Monday 16 March at 20:30 on BBC One or catch up afterwards on iPlayer.
Reporting team: Will Dahlgreen, Rob England, Daniel Wainwright

Public health experts and hundreds of doctors and scientists at home and abroad are urging the UK government to change its strategy against coronavirus, amid fears it will mean the epidemic “lets rip” through the population.

They say the UK is turning its back on strategies that have successfully brought down the numbers of infections and deaths in other countries.

Sarah Boseley  www.theguardian.com

Public health experts and hundreds of doctors and scientists at home and abroad are urging the UK government to change its strategy against coronavirus, amid fears it will mean the epidemic “lets rip” through the population.

They say the UK is turning its back on strategies that have successfully brought down the numbers of infections and deaths in other countries.

On Thursday, Boris Johnson and his medical and scientific advisers announced that only those seriously ill in hospital would be tested. Anyone who had any symptoms should self-isolate at home for seven days, without notifying the NHS.

Banning mass gatherings would not help reduce the spread of infections, the prime minister and his advisers said – although it now seems likely, largely in response to sporting and entertainment bodies cancelling events of their own accord.

Anthony Costello, a UK paediatrician and former director of the World Health Organization (WHO), said he had personally written to the chief medical officer, Professor Chris Whitty, asking for testing to continue in the community.

“The key principles from WHO are intensive surveillance,” he told the Guardian. “You test the population like crazy, find out where the cases are, immediately quarantine them and do contact tracing and get them out of the community. This deals with family clusters. That’s the key bedrock of getting this under control.”

This was how South Korea, China, Japan, Hong Kong and Taiwan had brought their case numbers down. “You can really take people out of the population and make sure they are quarantined. That is vital – before you get to social distancing.”

Yet the UK government was stopping tests outside of hospital. “For me and the WHO people I have spoken to, this is absolutely the wrong policy. It would mean it just lets rip,” he said.

Costello thinks we will be in the same position as Italy within two weeks. “The basic public health approach is playing second fiddle to mathematical modelling,” he said.

Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, WHO’s director general, expressed his deep concern on Friday at the end of testing and contact tracing in the UK and some other European countries.

“You can’t fight a virus if you don’t know where it is,” he said. “Find, isolate, test and treat every case to break the chains of Covid transmission. Every case we find and treat limits the expansion of the disease.”

Devi Sridhar, professor of global public health at The University of Edinburgh, listed on Twitter the reasons for continuing to test. “1 People can alter behaviour based on whether they have Covid. 2 Break chains of transmission. 3 Local hospitals can plan for how many patients will need care. 4 To know where cases are emerging (hotspots). 5 How do we know how large problem is?”

A government minister in Singapore has also expressed dismay. “One concern we have with cases such as UK and Switzerland isn’t just about the numbers. It is that these countries have abandoned any measure to contain or restrain the virus,” minister for national development, Lawrence Wong, said at a press briefing on Sunday. “If there’s no attempt to contain, we estimate the number of cases in these countries to rise significantly in the coming days and weeks.”

An open letter from a group including some of the UK’s most senior doctors asked the government to publish the modelling and any other evidence for the policies it is pursuing. “Our country’s public health response to Covid-19 is demonstrably different to most other countries’ responses globally and in Europe … There is also no clear indication that the UK’s response is being informed by experiences of other countries in containing the spread of Covid-19,” it said, pointing out the risks to the NHS of a rapid and huge surge in cases of people needing hospital treatment. The UK has 2.5 beds per 1,000 people in the population, they said, which is fewer than France (6), Italy (3.2) and the United States (2.8).

Immunologists, in a separate open letter, said they had “significant questions” about the government’s apparent strategy to rely on building up “herd immunity” by exposure to the virus in the UK. Sir Patrick Vallance, the chief scientific adviser, has suggested this might be a good outcome from many people becoming infected.

Herd immunity is usually brought about by vaccination – not exposing people to the risks of a disease. “The ultimate aim of herd immunity is to stop disease spread and protect the most vulnerable in society. However, this strategy only works to reduce serious disease if, when building that immunity, vulnerable individuals are protected from becoming ill, for example through social distancing. If not, the consequences could be severe,” says the letter from the British Society for Immunology.

Behavioural scientists joined the concern, saying they believed the government should immediately bring in social distancing measures and not delay for fear of the public getting “behavioural fatigue”.

“If ‘behavioural fatigue’ truly represents a key factor in the government’s decision to delay high-visibility interventions, we urge the government to share an adequate evidence base in support of that decision. If one is lacking, we urge the government to reconsider these decisions,” wrote Prof Ulrike Hahn from Birkbeck, University of London, and others.

DevonLive has just published yet another article on the Exmouth seafront development. This repeats the story about the delay caused by the findings from the scrutiny committee. It also gives an update on Phase 2 and a history of the ill fated project to date.

It has prompted a correspondent to observe: “Sadly, seeing as it seems likely many hotels and restaurants may soon go to the wall, so fragile is the business model for tourism at the moment, Scrutiny may well have done the best thing for Ingham!

Once the tourism sector shows its winners and losers, the local seaside towns may have to radically reinvent themselves yet again.”

Daniel Clark  www.devonlive.com

It is now eight years since as part of the Exmouth Masterplan, East Devon District Council released its plans for an ambitious, and what proved to be controversial, redevelopment scheme for the seafront.

The plans have faced delay after delay, the latest last Thursday when the council’s scrutiny committee agreed that panel agreeing the selection criteria for the marketing exercise to identify a developer for the Queen’s Drive site was not properly balanced…..

……..But phase 2 of the seafront project, the new watersports centre, in complete contrast, is on budget and on time, and is set to open this summer, as planned.

Aiden Johnson-Hugill, Director, Grenadier said that they are still aiming for practical completion in June or July, as construction has been slightly affected by the weather. He said: “We are targeting being open for the summer holidays. It’s a bit like Christmas, you can’t miss it.

“The big thing is we are on site. In part, as a result of the highways works which means the magic of the site is that it has direct beach access. Developments are often precluded with a road or an esplanade but here you can walk straight across.

“Our contractors are doing a good job and we chose them as they have a proven track record of delivering marine developments and ultimately will be handed back to the community, so we didn’t want to build something shoddy. We are on budget and within the parameters of tolerance for the construction timescale.”

(Article then summarises the full development history)

House building based on need, priority given to brownfield sites, good design – too good to be true? Especially if EDDC’s Blackdown House , often described to Owl as “Colditz”, sets the gold standard for design?

Robert Jenrick plans for the future to get Britain building www.gov.uk 

• Developers encouraged to build upwards and above stations
• New map of brownfield sites to make the most of unused land
• Proposals being considered to turn disused buildings into homes more quickly

Housing Secretary Robert Jenrick MP has today (12 March 2020) set out proposals to bring Britain’s planning system into the 21st century as part of plans to get the country building.

Councils will be encouraged to take a more innovative approach to home building – by ensuring redevelopment of high streets is housing-led, building upwards and above and around stations.

Next month the government will launch a register of brownfield sites which will map out unused land as part of plans to encourage councils to make the most of this land first – backed by £400 million to bring this mostly unused land back to use. 

Developers will be able to demolish vacant commercial, industrial and residential buildings and replace them with well-designed homes without getting delayed in a lengthy planning process, under new plans being consulted on by the government, meaning that more homes will be able to be delivered more quickly.

The government will also review how places assess how many homes are needed in their area and incentivise those that deliver on those numbers.

All local authorities will also be required to have up-to-date Local Plans in place by December 2023, or see government intervention, so enough homes are built for their communities.  

The changes come ahead of plans for an ambitious planning white paper – set to radically reform the planning system by speeding up the decision-making process so homes can be built quicker where they are needed the most.

Good design and place-making will be at the heart of the new system, championing tree-lined streets, a “fast track for beauty” and a commitment to lower carbon emissions in all new homes – for a green revolution in housebuilding.  

Housing Secretary Rt Hon Robert Jenrick MP said:

I want everyone, no matter where they live, to have access to affordable, safe, quality housing and live in communities with a real sense of place – as part of our mission to level up, unite and unleash the potential of this country.

We must think boldly and creatively about the planning system to make it fit for the future, and this is just the first step, so we can deliver the homes communities need and help more young people onto the ladder.

This follows a package of measures announced in yesterday’s Budget to help more people onto the housing ladder by building more affordable homes and speeding up the planning process to deliver the 300,000 homes a year the country needs.

There will be more help for those that want to build their own home and for parish councils and neighbourhood forums wanting to build a small number of homes that will allow their community to grow.

A further £1 billion will be made available to help unlock almost 70,000 new homes and create a new £10 billion Single Housing Infrastructure Fund to give confidence to communities, local authorities and developers that the infrastructure they want will be delivered before the building starts. 

This follows the announcement of £12 billion of investment to build more affordable homes – the biggest cash investment in affordable housing for a decade. With the ability to also bring in around £38 billion of further private and public investment. 

This new Affordable Homes Programme will deliver more affordable housing, helping more people to own their own home through the government’s home ownership programmes such as Right to Shared Ownership.

It will also help to build more social rent homes – supporting those most at risk of homelessness.

To secure a fairer deal for those who are renting the government will abolish “no fault” evictions through the Renters Reform Bill and bring forward the social housing white paper to ensure residents in social homes are treated with dignity and respect.

In order to help ensure the homes that people are living in are safe, £1 billion of grant funding to tackle unsafe cladding systems on high-rise residential buildings over 18 million in both the private and social sectors has also been announced. 

The grant funding is in addition to the £600 million already available, as the government introduces a new Building Safety Bill to bring about the biggest changes to building safety in a generation.

An extra £145 million, on top of the £236 million allocated at the end of February, will be used to offer ‘move on’ accommodation for up to 6,000 rough sleepers and those at immediate risk of rough sleeping.

In addition, a further £262 million will be used to expand drug and alcohol treatment services for vulnerable people sleeping rough – ensuring every area in the country receives additional funding for these vital services.

It need not be this way but one of the most disastrous weeks in the history of global medicine and global economics has ended with country after country retreating into their national silos. They are fighting their own individual battles against coronavirus and in their own way.

Gordon Brown  www.theguardian.com

Each country has, of course, its own distinctive health systems that it relies on, rightly values its own medical experts and the disease is at a different stage in each. But why is there, as yet, no internationally coordinated medical project – equivalent to the wartime Manhattan Project – mobilising all available global resources to discover a coronavirus vaccine and to fast-track a cure?

Why, as the disease engulfs more than 100 countries, has there been no consistent, coordinated global approach not just to tracking, testing and travel but to openly learning from each other about the relative merits of quarantine and social distancing? And why, when a world recession now threatens, is there not yet an attempt at a combined effort on the part of governments and central banks to deliver a global economic response?

Instead, ours is a divided, leaderless world and we are all suffering from the tendency to go it alone: an initial cover-up in Wuhan; China’s delayed reporting to the international community; the World Health Organization (WHO) meekly agreeing that the crisis was “moderate”; and even when on 30 January it apologised and declared an international emergency, still the world continued to receive confused travel advice.

It used to be said of the Bourbons that they would never learn by their mistakes. Centuries on, national leaders still seem unable to apply or even absorb the hard-earned lesson that crises teach us, from the Sars epidemic and Ebola epidemic to the financial meltdown: that global problems need global, not just local and national, responses.

In my first days as prime minister in 2007, the Labour government had to grapple, in quick succession, with an international terrorist incident, floods, a foot and mouth outbreak, avian flu and the first banking crash of the global financial crisis. “There are decades when nothing happens,” Lenin wrote, “And there are weeks when decades happen.” This succession of challenges taught me that governments will rapidly lose control of events unless they immediately pull out all the stops to get to the root of the problem, and then move with decisive and overwhelming force and resolve.

In October 2008, within days of the Lehman Brothers collapse, bankrupt banks, which had been running capitalism without capital, were nationalised and recapitalised. The lesson for today is as stark: you can cut interest rates and payroll taxes and focus your energies on dealing with the after-effects. But you will not succeed unless you can also build confidence that you have a clear-cut medical response to what is a global health emergency .

But the global financial crisis also taught me that while you need the analysis and advice of expert organisations such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and now the WHO, you also need political leaders in every continent with the courage not just to lead but to work together. And the best way to do so is in a global forum – in 2008, this was the G20 leaders’ group – within which decisions can be agreed. These decisions will then carry authority and legitimacy.

But what depth of dialogue has there been today between the main global players – Presidents Xi, Trump, Moon of South Korea, and Prime Minister Conte of Italy – to benefit from each other’s insights on travel restrictions, lockdowns and social distancing? Take testing: while the UK is way ahead of Trump’s America, Britain had, up to 10 March, tested at less than half the rate of Italy and a just over a 10th the rate of South Korea. Slow to test patients who had not been in China, Italy or South Korea, perhaps we had something to learn from China’s decision to test even the most marginal cases? And the delays in testing sum up why fears are still growing for our safety: despite the brilliance of Britain’s medics, the government still seems behind the coronavirus curve.

Of course, the very idea of global collaboration – and the convening of what would be a “virtual” G20 – sits uneasily with the “America first”, “China first”, “India first” and “Russia first” populist nationalism that has been subdividing our world. Since the high point of cooperation in 2009, nationalists have been in the ascendant – building walls, closing borders, clamping down on immigrants and imposing tariffs. And what was first a protectionist nationalism has morphed into an aggressive us-versus-them unilateralism.

Our willingness to cooperate is becoming inversely related to our need to do so, and this insularity means we are fighting today’s pandemic with under-resourced international institutions, not least a WHO to which ever more responsibilities have been added without the financial means to discharge them. In fact, despite a number of laudable post-Ebola initiatives – including the new vaccine fund (Cepi) – we are $9bn short of the funding needed for medical R&D and contingency planning. Sadly leaders either panic, as now – or, until disaster hits, follow the course of least resistance: inattention and neglect.

What’s more, this us-versus-them nationalism has spawned a blame culture, with under-pressure governments holding everyone but themselves responsible for anything that goes wrong. And yet an ideology of “everyone for himself” will not work when the health of each of us depends so unavoidably on the health of all of us.

In the financial crisis, governments did come together – with globally coordinated interest rate cuts, fiscal stimuli, currency swaps and anti-protectionist deals. A decade on, rising nationalism will likely block central bank cooperation and an early easing of trade restrictions. Today, also, interest rates are currently so low that there is far less scope for monetary activism. The world’s central banks – for the last 10 years just about the only game in town – are increasingly exposed as emperors with few clothes.

I believe a concerted global, governmental response is still possible. Each country should commit to removing blockages in supply chains; be ready to ease tariffs (and certainly not add to them, as rushing at the Brexit deadline might do); extend credit, as the UK has rightly announced to businesses, including a moratorium on tax payments; and guarantee upfront financial support for workers sent home or on short time. And where countries cannot afford to do so, the IMF and World Bank should be asked, as in 2009, to step up.

But the economic shock we face today – a ruptured international supply chain and, soon, millions able to work only from home – demands innovative thinking that is more in tune with our digital age. An industrial policy, backed up by fiscal firepower, could accelerate the workplace revolution that is already under way: from making business decisions via teleconferencing to the provision of online education, health and other services. Thus allowing millions to continue to work, study, organise their lives and make a living from home.

Yet no individual initiative will substitute for a collective declaration that, working together, the world’s governments will do whatever it takes. Coronavirus will not be the last, nor the worst, pandemic. But if the Manhattan Project could bring people together in the 1940s to create the most lethal weapon in human history, surely we can come together, in the 21st century, to save both lives and the livelihood of millions. We may not be able to repeat Roosevelt’s New Deal-era promise that there is nothing to fear but fear itself, but confidence in the future can be regained only by bold international actions that build confidence today.

“Guided by the science”  (Owl has been discussing this with trusted friends knowledgeable in health matters). Here is a digest of that discussion.

Owl understands that computer models are being used to test and guide the most appropriate strategy to counter Coronavirus. Since this is a novel virus there is much we don’t know. These models, therefore, have to be built on a raft of assumptions. The truly scientific approach would be to make these assumptions openly available and to use the models to test the sensitivity of strategy formulation against the likely range of assumption uncertainty. This should highlight the critical assumptions, allowing debate to be focussed on the issues that really matter. Hopefully, robust strategies can be found that are sound against a range of uncertainties. Where this is not possible, decisions becomes a matter for political decision and judgement. Where the scientist has to be careful is when he/she has an underlying “agenda”. 

Yesterday (Saturday 14 March) both the Times and Guardian carried a number of letters from eminent scientists, clinicians  and epidemiologists calling for publication of these assumptions. There are official admissions (repeated on every BBC news bulletin) that the number of cases might be as high as 10,000. To have that many undetected i.e. mild or asymptomatic cases can surely only come from a radically different set of assumptions? On what evidence is this based and why is it being said?

The UK appears to be following a very different strategy to other nations. This short article discusses the central Herd immunity strategy.

Sarah Boseley  www.theguardian.com

Herd immunity is a phrase normally used when large numbers of children have been vaccinated against a disease like measles, reducing the chances that others will get it. As a tactic in fighting a pandemic for which there is no vaccine, it is novel – and some say alarming.

It relies on people getting the disease – in this case Covid-19 – and becoming immune as a result. Generally it is thought that those who recover will be immune, at least for now, so they won’t get it twice.

But allowing the population to build up immunity in this way – rather than through widespread testing, tracking down the contacts of every case and isolating them, as many other countries in Asia and Europe have chosen to do – could increase the risk to the most vulnerable: older people with underlying health problems.

To reach herd immunity, about 60% of the population would need to get ill and become immune, according to Sir Patrick Vallance, the government’s chief scientific adviser. Though it could need as much as 70% or more. Even scientists who understand the strategy are anxious. “I do worry that making plans that assume such a large proportion of the population will become infected (and hopefully recovered and immune) may not be the very best that we can do,” said Martin Hibberd, professor of emerging infectious disease at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine.

“Another strategy might be to try to contain [it] longer and perhaps long enough for a therapy to emerge that might allow some kind of treatment. This seems to be the strategy of countries such as Singapore. While this containment approach is clearly difficult (and may be impossible for many countries), it does seem a worthy goal; and those countries that can should aim to do.”

The government’s “nudge unit” seems to favour this strategy. Dr David Halpern, a psychologist who heads the Behavioural Insights Team, said on BBC News: “There’s going to be a point, assuming the epidemic flows and grows, as we think it probably will do, where you’ll want to cocoon, you’ll want to protect those at-risk groups so that they basically don’t catch the disease and by the time they come out of their cocooning, herd immunity’s been achieved in the rest of the population.”

But Anthony Costello, a paediatrician and former World Health Organization director, said that the UK government was out of kilter with other countries in looking to herd immunity as the answer. It could conflict with WHO policy, he said in a series of Twitter posts, which is to contain the virus by tracking and tracing all cases. He quoted Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the WHO director general, who said: “The idea that countries should shift from containment to mitigation is wrong and dangerous.”

Herd immunity might not even last, Costello said. “Does coronavirus cause strong herd immunity or is it like flu where new strains emerge each year needing repeat vaccines? We have much to learn about Co-V immune responses.” Vaccines, he said, were a much safer way of bringing it about.

It need not be this way

Gordon Brown, based on his experience of the banking crisis, writes: (full text on seperate post)

It need not be this way but one of the most disastrous weeks in the history of global medicine and global economics has ended with country after country retreating into their national silos. They are fighting their own individual battles against coronavirus and in their own way.

Each country has, of course, its own distinctive health systems that it relies on, rightly values its own medical experts and the disease is at a different stage in each. But why is there, as yet, no internationally coordinated medical project – equivalent to the wartime Manhattan Project – mobilising all available global resources to discover a coronavirus vaccine and to fast-track a cure?

Why, as the disease engulfs more than 100 countries, has there been no consistent, coordinated global approach not just to tracking, testing and travel but to openly learning from each other about the relative merits of quarantine and social distancing? And why, when a world recession now threatens, is there not yet an attempt at a combined effort on the part of governments and central banks to deliver a global economic response?

Instead, ours is a divided, leaderless world and we are all suffering from the tendency to go it alone: an initial cover-up in Wuhan; China’s delayed reporting to the international community; the World Health Organization (WHO) meekly agreeing that the crisis was “moderate”; and even when on 30 January it apologised and declared an international emergency, still the world continued to receive confused travel advice.

Postponement of English local elections for a year was announced in various media including: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-51876269

Potential consequences, especially on smaller political parties are discussed here.

By Stephen Bush  www.newstatesman.com

The 2020 local and mayoral elections will be postponed until May of next year following advice from the Electoral Commission. The political consequences are unknowable because the economic and social consequences of the coronavirus outbreak are unknowable. The one thing we can say with certainty, from a political perspective, is that “things will be very different this time next year”. British politics and culture may well be forever changed, or at least changed for the foreseeable future by the events of the year to come.

But the important logistical change is that the 2021 local elections will be a contest of near-unprecedented scale for an off-year. Thanks to the combination of the Scottish and Welsh parliamentary elections, the metro-mayoral elections, the combined authority semi-rural mayoral elections, the police and crime commissioner elections,  essentially everyone in the United Kingdom will have a ballot of some kind – which to my knowledge has never happened before.

That will be a big logistical challenge for the new leaders of Labour and the Liberal Democrats, whoever emerges from those party’s contests. On the Labour side in particular, Keir Starmer’s inner circle believes that its number one priority, should he win, is not political but organisational – both to address and respond to the Equality and Human Right Commission’s report into anti-Semitism but also to get the party “match fit” again. Starmer’s allies are concerned that Labour has lost huge amounts of institutional memory, both over the past five years and in recent months, and think that unless the party is able to become vastly more professional and well-organised, nothing else they try to do will come off.

Next year was always going to be the first real test of the post-Corbyn party’s political appeal. The level of logistical challenge means that it is now going to be a real test of competence too.

“I cannot imagine any other country, democracy or dictatorship, where the centre would so obsessively micromanage its public sector. Britain is off the graph for centralisation. Its local government now has a mere 1.6% of GDP for its spending, against 6% in Germany, 12% in France and 15% in Sweden. In the eye of Whitehall, anything beyond London is now “regional”, never local.”

He’s right – but when the alternative is government by unelected quangos we are caught between the devil and the deep blue sea – Owl

Simon Jenkins  www.theguardian.com

Populism has arrived, blue in tooth and claw. Rishi Sunak’s budget, clearly dictated from 10 Downing Street, proposes a staggering £600bn of extra public spending over the current parliament, showing an enthusiasm for public spending not seen seen since postwar reconstruction in the 1950s. Apart from cash set aside for coronavirus, it is going not into people’s pockets but largely into state infrastructure. As it rises, it will carry one signature: Boris Johnson’s.

No one can complain that a chancellor should prepare to meet a pandemic trauma. Seeking relief for those unable to work makes sense. So does short-term aid to businesses suffering a collapse in demand. But the deeper interest in any budget lies in what it reveals of a government’s mind. Sunak’s budget had one message: that the British economy is in the ownership of central government, as not seen since denationalisation in the 1980s.

Sunak made almost no mention of the private sector, except for short-term fiscal relief. His economy was a public construct of hospitals, schools, colleges, roads, railways, research institutes – all supplied by the grace of London. I calculated that his speech gave away an extra £1.7m of taxpayers’ money every second: generosity on a Neronian scale. Small wonder Labour’s Jeremy Corbyn was left stumbling over how to object. He should just have smiled and said thank you.

Absent from the speech was any idea that the public sector belonged to anyone but Sunak. As for local government, there was to be no let-up in austerity. While “our” NHS is to roll in cash, local government’s share of the welfare state, social care and social services got nothing extra. There was no mention of old people or family support or youth clubs: chief victims of the 30% cut in local council spending since 2010. Downward pressure will continue on libraries, day centres, sports fields, drug rehabilitation and facilities for young people.

Central government can borrow and spend at will. Local government is allowed no such liberality for its services. There was no whisper from Sunak of a let-up in rate capping, no new sources of local revenue, no hope of council tax revaluation. If cuts continue, they are not central government’s responsibility. Blame your hapless, wasteful local council.

In contrast, Downing Street is splurge central. Anything the NHS asks for, says Sunak, be it “millions or billions”, it can have. He pledges to pay for 50m more surgery appointments. What other government on Earth would boast such implausible specificity? No such offer is made for local care visits, on which the NHS relies for backup. This is built-in unfairness and inefficiency.

At times Sunak sounded as if Johnson wanted to be everyone’s mayor. He wants to run everything. He is to allow a redevelopment at Darlington station, a village bypass in north Wales, hotel bedrooms for 6,000 rough sleepers. He announced £8m for new football fields, grants for new maths teachers and £25,000 for an art teacher in every school. This sounds like window dressing, a sort of blame-shedding for Tory austerity.

Sunak’s Father Christmas act continued. There is to be an astronomical billion pounds for tower block cladding. “Over a hundred” road junctions are to be improved. Fifty million potholes have been identified as needing repair. Has Sunak counted them? As a cultural uplift for poor Teessiders, rumour has it that Sunak is to send 750 of his brightest and best officials to live among them. This is like a Victorian missionary expedition.

I cannot imagine any other country, democracy or dictatorship, where the centre would so obsessively micromanage its public sector. Britain is off the graph for centralisation. Its local government now has a mere 1.6% of GDP for its spending, against 6% in Germany, 12% in France and 15% in Sweden. In the eye of Whitehall, anything beyond London is now “regional”, never local.

The new elected metro-mayors were carefully assigned “regions” not cities, lest they over-identify and go native. They depend not on accountable local taxes but on Treasury handouts. As Professor Tony Travers of LSE puts it: “Devolution means mayors are allowed an opportunity to talk to the Treasury about how to spend money.” They are Whitehall agents.

Central cash for locally run services – police, schools, transportation – increasingly relies on hypothecated hand-outs, on Whitehall decisions as to how they are to be spent. Capping and ring-fencing money for police numbers, or subject teachers or new roads, is not communal choice. It is not what most countries would regard as local democracy. It is subservience to central command and control to a single leader.

This is the new egocentric populism. It has virtues. It is non-ideological. Its macroeconomics has Keynesian features, buying new public projects in advance of tough times, albeit at the risk of “crowding out” the private sector. It is not partisan, witness on Wednesday as former Thatcherite Tories bayed support for a budget they would have damned had it come from a Labour chancellor. A fleeting piquant moment came with a still, small voice speaking up for old Tory caution. It was Theresa May, speaking truth to power.

Johnson’s populism is extreme. Not even Donald Trump tries to run the US this way. It is government more in the style of Orbán’s Hungary or Erdoğan’s Turkey, relying on seeking current votes by borrowing from future taxpayers. In doing so, Johnson is suppressing what should be the fountainhead of political freedom: local democracy. Who cares whether or not this is Toryism. It is wrong.

Two days after the budget, the Office for National Statistics announces that it intends to publish a series of articles on how to understand the data around the UK’s biggest economic issue.. These will use available evidence to discount or support the main arguments around the productivity puzzle or where gaps in the data exist.

Essential reading for the Great South West, Heart of the South West and anyone else planning to double our local economy in 20 years – Owl

Productivity measurement – how to understand the data around the UK’s biggest economic issue

https://www.ons.gov.uk/employmentandlabourmarket/peopleinwork/labourproductivity/articles/productivitymeasurementhowtounderstandthedataaroundtheuksbiggesteconomicissue/2020-03-13

Introduction

In December 2019, the Royal Statistical Society announced that the UK Statistics of the Decade award had been awarded to the Office for National Statistics’s (ONS’s) labour productivity series. This series reveals that average annual growth in the decade after the 2008 economic downturn was only 0.3% a year, a period of weakness deeper and more prolonged than any seen in the UK since the 1890s. This weakness has implications for profits, wages, living standards, tax revenue and public services.

In response to the interest this has generated, the ONS is keen to contextualise its data and has commissioned a series of short “explainer” articles from expert academics, each providing a view on the measurement of productivity in the UK. These articles will explore where the data and methods are strong, where improvements are possible, and where the data support or do not support some of the main proposed explanations of the UK productivity puzzle.

Each article should provide a brief summary or assessment of a particular aspect relating to the measurement of productivity, drawing out where the available data provide evidence to discount or support the main arguments around the productivity puzzle or where data gaps exist. These articles, which will be published over the coming months, will provide an entry point for those looking to understand the main issues concerning the productivity puzzle.

We have planned a series of articles, including this one, on the following topics:

• Productivity measurement – how to understand the data around the UK’s biggest economic issue
• Measurement of productivity statistics, by Nick Oulton
• Measurement of output data used in productivity statistics, by Martin Weale
• Measurement of capital data used in productivity statistics, by Jonathan Haskel
• Measurement of labour market data used in productivity statistics, by Richard Heys and Stuart Newman
• How the production boundary influences productivity measurement, by Diane Coyle
• How management and uncertainty issues influence productivity measurement, by Paul Mizen

These articles take the enhanced set of productivity statistics now being published by the ONS to evaluate some of the different theories around the UK’s productivity puzzle, to provide clarity on the lessons emerging from these data.

The productivity puzzle

The productivity puzzle is now a firmly established part of the UK macroeconomic landscape. For five decades before the 2008 economic downturn, the average output each UK worker produced in an hour of work increased steadily by around 2% a year. In contrast, the productivity record since the economic downturn has been historically weak, enduring its slowest recovery from an economic downturn since the Second World War. While other countries have seen similar slowdowns, the UK’s productivity puzzle is deeper and more persistent than elsewhere.

The fall in productivity growth is even more perplexing because it comes at a time of apparently rampant technological innovation and the strongest labour market performance since the 1970s, with high levels of employment and low unemployment. At the Office for National Statistics (ONS), our role is to provide the best possible estimates of productivity growth to understand what is going on and perhaps assist policymakers in finding solutions. As productivity has become a bigger issue, we have invested more time and effort into detailed productivity statistics than ever before. We have established a new research centre, the Economic Statistics Centre of Excellence (ESCoE) in collaboration with the National Institute for Economic and Social Research (NIESR) and a network of universities to improve our methods and data, alongside investigating further the detailed, firm-level data that we collect in our surveys and from administrative sources.

These are the main headings under which the causal theories of the productivity puzzle can be grouped and will be examined:

Structural arguments eg Changes in financial regulation

Labour and managerial arguments eg Weak UK management practices

Measurement arguments eg is productivity growth already captured in GDP measures

Capital arguments eg Banks’ inability to lend against intangible assets

Innovation arguments eg A slowdown in the flow of ideas or new technologies

Uncertainty arguments eg Uncertainty caused by rapid technology change causing firms to delay capital investment

This statement is issued on behalf of County Councillors and sent to all Devon MP’s

Hilary Ackland (Exeter, Pinhoe and Mincinglake)

Marina Asvachin (Exeter, Wonford and St. Loyes)

Martin Shaw (Seaton and Colyton)

Claire Wright (Otter Valley) 

We are all  members of the Health and Adult Care Scrutiny Committee, but this statement is issued in our personal capacities. 

We are gravely concerned that the people of Devon are being excessively exposed to the threat of death through the coronavirus, because the Government is failing to introduce the social distancing measures needed to contain the epidemic.

The UK has fewer hospital beds, fewer Intensive Care Unit beds and fewer specialist respiratory beds than other European countries. In Devon we have more than our fair share of the elderly population who will be especially vulnerable to the epidemic.

A Government adviser, Dr David Halpern, has suggested that we can ‘cocoon’ the vulnerable while the epidemic runs through the rest of the population. This is false, because if there is a high level of contagion, the elderly will inevitably catch the virus too, and it is NOT true that the young and fit people are safe. In Italy, people of 20, 30 and 40 are also suffering life-threatening pneumonias, and hospitals are are leaving people over 60 to die because there is not enough specialist equipment (such as ventilators) to save all the victims.

It is estimated that we have four weeks before we are in the extreme situation currently faced in Italy. As Jeremy Hunt, chair of the Health Select Committee and former Health Secretary, has suggested, we should be using this time to introduce radical social distancing measures to protect our population. These have been shown to slow down and contain the epidemic in China and South Korea and they should be used here while we have the chance. 

If we can slow down the epidemic even for a few months, we have a better chance of restricting the severe cases to the numbers which the NHS can treat. Meanwhile, 

medical researchers may identify drugs which can help treat the worst cases, and a vaccine to protect against the virus.

Boris Johnson has said that many more families will lose loved ones. But his policy is unnecessarily condemning many people to die when the NHS becomes unable to cope. We cannot stand by and allow this to happen. Until we can vaccinate against this virus, we need to accept radical restrictions to our lives, in order to save lives. We call on our Devon MPs and Councils to press the Government to immediately change direction.

Martin Shaw

Independent East Devon Alliance County Councillor for Seaton & Colyton

Website: www.seatonmatters.org 

(Or at least what was written in his script). Owl was struck at the time by the reference to a truly national ambition to improve strategic highways in the South West – particularly the A417. 

Owl has found out that the A417 runs between Gloucester, Cirencester and Swindon and is used by many motorists travelling between London and the West Midlands as a shortcut between the M4 and the M5.

Technically, the Chancellor is correct.  Gloucester and Wiltshire are in the region of the South West but Owl thinks their “regional inequality” doesn’t compare to ours. The worry is he, and all his Whitehall chums, no doubt thinks they really have got inequality “done”. 

A mis-perception the Great South West could usefully work on?  

https://www.gov.uk/government/speeches/budget-speech-2020

And there’s more money for our roads too.

Today, I’m announcing the biggest ever investment in strategic roads and motorway – over £27bn of tarmac.

That will pay for work on over 20 connections to ports and airports, over 100 junctions, 4,000 miles of road.

I’m announcing new investment in local roads, alongside a new £2.5bn pothole fund – that’s £500m every single year; enough to fill, by the end of the Parliament, 50 million potholes.

The details of all the road schemes I’m funding will be published later today – and I thank my RHF the Transport Secretary for his efforts.

Our ambition is truly national.

The A417 in the South West.

The A428 in the East.

The A46 in the Midlands.

Unclogging Manchester’s arteries.

Freeing the traffic north of Newcastle.

And, something my North and Mid Wales colleagues will be particularly pleased to hear…

…we’re protecting beautiful villages in the Welsh Borders, as we finally build the Pant-Llanymynech bypass.

We promised to get Britain moving – and we’re getting it done.

And there’s one more road I want to mention.

It’s one of our most important regional arteries.

It is one of those totemic projects symbolising delay and obstruction.

Governments have been trying to fix it since the 1980s.

Every year, millions of cars crawl along it in traffic.

Ruining the backdrop to one of our most important historic landmarks.

To the many H & RHMs who have campaigned for this moment – I say this:

The A303 – this government’s going to get it done.

Owl wonders if there are any lessons here for EDDC.

Climate change, food production, energy and the built environment are among the issues that will be explored in a project looking at ways to make the Sid Vale more sustainable over the next 10 years.

Philippa Davies  www.sidmouthherald.co.uk

The Vision Group for Sidmouth is launching a project called Sidmouth 2020, focusing on positive actions that will benefit the local community in the coming years.

It will look at whether people need to reduce travel and imports, and become more resilient and self-sufficient.

Various public events are planned later in the year, including an evening in June focusing on biodiversity in gardens, parks and the countryside.

There will be an event in August, linked to the food festival at Kennaway House, celebrating local produce.

Later in the year there will be a session looking at the built environment, covering self-build, retrofitting and getting a good deal on renewable energy for the home.

Anyone interested in the project can find out more by visiting the Vision Group for Sidmouth website.

The housing secretary has announced a raft of new planning reforms to boost housebuilding. Lucie Heath explains the key policies

https://www.insidehousing.co.uk/insight/insight/jenricks-planning-reforms-the-key-changes-at-a-glance-65419

Planning reforms

• Introduce new permitted development rights for building upwards on existing buildings by summer 2020
• Consult on potential permitted development rights to allow vacant buildings to be demolished and replaced with new homes
• New support for community and self-build housing schemes, including support finding plots of land
• Support the Oxford-Cambridge arc by setting up a new spatial framework for the area, setting out where housing will be delivered up to 2050, and create four development corporations across the region

Housing Delivery Test

• Review the formula for calculating local housing need to encourage more building in urban areas
• Require all local authorities to have an up-to-date local plan by 2023 or government will intervene
• Continue with plans to raise the Housing Delivery Test threshold to 75% in November 2020
• Reform the New Homes Bonus to ensure local authorities that build more homes have access to greater funding

Planning departments

• Implement new planning fee structure to better resource planning authorities and link funding to improved performance
• Provide automatic rebates of fees when planning applications are successful at appeal
• Expand the use of zoning tools to support development that is aimed at simplifying the process of granting planning permission for residential and commercial property
• Make it clearer who owns land by requiring greater transparency on land options
• Support local authorities to use compulsory purchase orders by introducing statutory timescales for decisions and ending the automatic right to public inquiry

Homeownership

• Continue with the proposed First Homes scheme, which offers eligible first-time buyers new homes at prices discounted by a third
• Form partnerships with developers and local authorities to be the frontrunners for delivering the first wave of new homes

Design

• Revise National Planning Policy Framework (NPPF) to encourage good design and placemaking throughout the planning process
• Respond to the Building Better, Building Beautiful Commission and take forward recommendations calling for urban tree-planting and giving communities more influence over design
• Implement a new National Design Code to allow residents of communities to have more influence over design. Allow local areas to produce their own design codes for new development.

Climate and sustainability

• Review policy for building in areas at flood risk by assessing whether current NPPF protections are enough and whether further reform is needed
• Introduce Future Homes Standard in 2025, which will require up to 80% lower carbon emissions for new homes
• Create a new net zero carbon housing development in Toton in the East Midlands through a development corporation

DevelopmentGovt agency/department/organisationPlanningPolicy

Rishi Sunak’s first budget is not as generous as it seems and many Whitehall departments will still be worse off than they were before the spending squeeze began in 2010, according to Britain’s foremost economics thinktank. 

Owl also thinks that the measures relating to our region – A303 at Stonehenge and Plymouth centre make-over – may be re-announcements or confirmation of expectations.

Phillip Inman  www.theguardian.com

The Institute for Fiscal Studies said the chancellor made the budget sound more substantial than it was, while relying on previously announced spending plans.

Paul Johnson, director of the IFS, said Sunak delivered a timely and well-targeted government response to the coronavirus but warned voter “expectations may be disappointed” from the promised increase in public spending.

In an assessment published a day after the coordinated response to the coronavirus outbreak from the Treasury and the Bank of England, the IFS said much of the longer-term spending rise designed to level up Britain was from previously announced measures for the NHS, schools, defence and overseas aid. “There is relatively little here for other departments,” Johnson added.

In an indication that a decade of austerity has had lasting effects, the IFS said spending per person for most public services will remain well below 2010 levels, despite Sunak’s expansionary budget.

Outside of the Department of Health and Social Care, which has had a protected budget, spending per head will still be about 14% lower than it was before the past decade of cuts began.

The thinktank said the loss of EU funds spent in Britain would mean spending per person of about 19% lower. With health and social care included, spending per head returns to 2010 levels in 2025.

Johnson said austerity was over in some respects, but that a decade of cuts to Whitehall departments had taken its toll. “If austerity is a process and a direction, then it’s over. If it’s spending above where we were in 2010, it’s with us for a very long time. But my sense is austerity is a direction rather than a level,” he added.

Although broadly praising the chancellor’s response to Covid-19, the head of the IFS said many self-employed workers would not get the support they might need and groups who may not be entitled to benefits could quickly face hardship.

“Sunak will certainly want to monitor the effectiveness of the package and be ready to come back with more if necessary,” he added.

The IFS said the government’s plans for a spending spree on transport projects and other public works was “genuinely very big”, although cautioned that the scale of the increase meant it would be a significant challenge to ensure the money was well spent.

The thinktank said Britain was more vulnerable to changes in interest rates, inflation and growth as the government pumps up borrowing levels and adds to the national debt. Sunak said at the budget he would balance day-to-day public spending with tax receipts by 2023, under rules set by his predecessor, Sajid Javid, with £12bn of headroom to spare.

However, the forecasts were drawn up by the Office for Budget Responsibility, the government’s independent tax and spending watchdog, before it could take full account of the coronavirus outbreak. The IFS warned that a downgrade in UK growth of just 0.3% a year over three years would eliminate all of Sunak’s headroom.

Johnson said: “This doesn’t look consistent with George Osborne’s mantra that the government should fix the roof while the sun is shining.”

Analysis of the budget by the Resolution Foundation thinktank said the economic hit from weaker growth over the next five years, despite extra spending by the government, will be about £300 per household this year, rising to £575 per year by the middle of the parliament.

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“The budget does almost nothing to offset the considerable welfare cuts put in place by George Osborne in 2015,” said the thinktank.

Households with incomes just above the bottom 10th “will eventually be £2,900 a year worse off, on average, thanks to benefit and tax changes announced since 2015. With £900 of that yet to come as a result of welfare policies still being rolled out.”

It added: “These cuts mean the incomes of the poorest families have actually fallen over the past two years, and there is a risk that child poverty will reach record highs by the time of the 2024 election.”

Flights from Exeter to Manchester – feared lost after the collapse of Flybe – have been revived by airline Blue Islands.

eastdevonnews.co.uk 

The Channel Islands-based carrier says it has stepped in to provide multiple daily services for the popular route ‘to maintain essential regional connectivity’.

CEO Rob Veron said: “With 120,000 passengers flying between Exeter and Manchester in 2019, we have reacted quickly to maintain these vital connections which are essential for the economic and social wellbeing of the South West, following the sad closure of Flybe.

“We are pleased to complement Saturday’s announcement of the continuation of flights between Exeter and Jersey with our Exeter – Manchester services.

“We look forward to providing key UK regional infrastructure in this first phase of activity from Exeter Airport as we continue to sustainably develop our route network in key markets.”

Matt Roach, managing director at Exeter Airport, added: “With routes already secured to Jersey and now with the addition of multiple daily services from Exeter to Manchester, we are delighted that Blue Islands has been able to provide this key infrastructure to the South West, and so quickly after the disruptions which followed Flybe’s collapse last week.”

Blue Islands says it will establish a base – including engineering support – in Exeter for its ATR aircraft and crew to serve the route, which will operate multiple flights throughout the day from mid-April.

Blue Islands announced last week it will also maintain the connection between Exeter and Jersey with up to seven flights per week.

The former Flybe franchise partner has continued uninterrupted services as normal, including operating free flights to Birmingham and Exeter last week.

Simon Jupp, MP for East Devon, said: “Keeping Devon’s quickest connection with Manchester is great news for the South West.

“I’d like to thank Blue Islands for stepping in and providing this popular route to protect jobs and connectivity.”

Planning for the future www.parliament.uk

On 12 March 2020, the Budget was presented in the House of Commons.

• Read the Commons Library summary on the Budget 2020

The Government announced new housing measures in the budget, including  a new affordable homes programme, a building safety fund to remove unsafe cladding from buildings, funding to help rough sleepers and more.

Robert Jenrick (Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government) announced in the statement that the Government will release a ‘Planning’ White Paper in the Spring.

Robert Jenrick: “home ownership seems like a dream that is out of reach”

Mr Jenrick says “home is so much more than 4 walls and a roof” its about “security, a stake in society and about investing for our future.”

He said:

“This Government believes in supporting people who are working hard to own their own home and ensuring that young people and future generations have the same opportunities as those became before them.”

He went on to say that the Government has built over 1.5 million new homes over the last decade and that the proportion of young homeowners has increased.

However he said “a great deal more is required to be done” because people are “trapped” paying high rents and many are “struggling to save for a deposit” which makes home ownership seem like a “dream”.

He says that a Building Safety Bill and a Renters Reform Bill will be presented to Parliament.

In relation to recent flooding, Robert Jenrick concluded by saying:

“I am announcing today that I will be reviewing our policy to prevent the building in areas of high flood risk.

Given the recent devastation suffered by many of our communities, we’re putting in an extra £5.2 billion into flood defences.”

John Healey: “Treasury’s flawed thinking runs throughout”

John Healey (Shadow Secretary of State for Housing ) said that “this indeed is a follow-up to the budget and the Treasury’s flawed thinking runs throughout.”

He scrutinised the Government’s plans by saying:

“After nearly 10 years, still no plan to fix the country’s housing crisis.

“While the promise of the White Paper is a threat to give big developers a freer hand to do what they want, ignoring quality, affordability and sustainability.”

He agrees that planning needs reforming however “planning is not the major constraint on the new homes the country needs when 365,000 and only 213,000 were built.” As well as “6,200 new social homes were built last year when more than million people are on housing waiting lists.”

Mr Healey asked the Government:

• whether local areas will set targets for social housing targets and not just total housing targets?
• will new standards be set for greener zero carbon homes?
• how much extra funding will Government provide to “beef up” the capacity of council planning services?

He says the White Paper is a “red warning” as it can “strip local communities of the powers they have to say ‘no’ to big developers.”

In response to the Minister’s proposal to invest in building safety, Mr Healey asked “how many fire risk buildings will this new fund have to cover” and whether he’d guarantee that “no leaseholder would now have to pay the costs to make their buildings safe.”

The Department for Housing, Communities and Local Government released new building safety figures in the morning, which the Minister “hadn’t mentioned” in his statement.

In response to this Mr Healey said “nearly 3 years on from Grenfell 266 high rise blocks still have the same Grenfell style ACM cladding on the side”.

He also says the Department has not published the test results or numbers of those blocks with unsafe cladding.