“Police bosses claim a rise in council tax would save hundreds of officer posts, as it faced budget cuts.
The proposal, being put to the public, would add about £26 a year to the bill of the average band D property in Devon and Cornwall.
The force’s Police and Crime Commissioner (PCC), Tony Hogg, said a 15% increase in the police’s share of council tax could save 350 officers.
If there is support for the rise, a referendum will be held on 5 May.”
“Four government departments have provisionally agreed to cut their spending by an average of 30% over the next four years, Chancellor George Osborne is to announce later.
The transport, local government and environment departments, plus the Treasury, have all agreed deals ahead of the spending review on 25 November.
The cuts will help the public finances back into surplus, he will say.
A Treasury source told BBC News the agreements were “really good progress”.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-34763261
But no doubt our council taxes will remain the same or increase as costs are offloaded from county and district and loaded on to town and parish council precepts.
And there no doubt will still be money to build a new council HQ in Honiton, subsidise the Thelma Hulbert Gallery, pay consultants exorbitant fees and continue to offer free parking to councillors and officers at Knowle.
Some assets won’t sweat quite as much as others.
Figures obtained by the Mail show that over the past three years, £3.43million of public money has been spent on private health insurance for council staff in England and Wales.
Last October:
Progress? None.
Yet, according to this web page (which we have saved in case it changes):
http://lymebayleisure.co.uk/luxury-properties/
“Discerning purchases (sic) can secure a plot of their choice now for an initial reservation fee of just £1,000, for further details of available plots, terms and conditions and time frames please email our dedicated sales team at info@lymebayleisure.co.uk”
Time for another update, perhaps?
House of Lords
Economics of the United Kingdom housing market inquiry
The Economic Affairs Committee of the House of Lords, chaired by Lord Hollick, is conducting an inquiry into The Economics of the United Kingdom Housing Market. This inquiry will consider:
the supply and affordability of housing for private buyers, for the private rental sector and for the social housing market across the UK;
the effectiveness of Government policies on the demand for and supply of reasonably priced housing across the UK.
The Committee invites interested individuals and organisations to submit evidence to this inquiry.
Written evidence is sought by 17 December 2015.
Scope of the inquiry:
The Committee is to investigate the economics of the UK housing market. Buying a house is becoming increasingly unaffordable for first time buyers. The cost of private rented accommodation is rising and there is a lack of affordable social housing. This Inquiry will consider the economic factors that influence the demand for and availability of reasonably priced housing to buy and to rent. This is a complex topic and the inquiry will particularly focus on the effectiveness of government economic measures designed to improve housing affordability.
Its scope, remit and how to submit evidence is here:
Planning Situation: Background
There is very strong evidence to show that across England the Planning system is badly broken and that communities are being left to pick up the mess. The NPPF has resulted in planning-through-appeal and, in areas where Local Plans can’t get through the inspection process, the developers are having a field day. The common practice is to pick off sites that haven’t been identified for strategic development and take local authority decisions through appeal. The sites that have been identified for strategic development can then be picked off at leisure later on. Developers are building up magnificent stockpiles of permissions and their profits have shot up since the inception of the NPPF.
Permissions can last for a minimum of three years and on bigger sites this can be extended. All the developer has to do to secure the permission is to put a spade in the ground. He or she doesn’t have to build-out. Build-out rates are appallingly slow. In the midst of massive claims about housing need, the market, other than in London and the south east, is sluggish. Here in Cheshire East we have permissions coming out of our ears, but the builders churn out approximately 30 houses per annum, even on big sites. This is big business and neither councils nor communities can afford the level of legal expertise that is required to negotiate their way through the minefield. The cards are stacked against them, anyway. The NPPF is deliberately written to ensure that housing gets built, and sustainability, which is supposed to prevent adverse development is neither properly defined nor properly applied.
Developers have their own standard housing designs and they have finely tuned their businesses so that they build to those stock patterns and only build sufficient quantities to keep demand and prices high. That is why affordable housing is not built in the quantities that are needed and why the big builders won’t build things like bungalows. Land-owners have got in on the act and now only want to sell their land for housing because this brings in a bigger return than infrastructure or commerce.
Local authorities are being kicked by both government and their communities. In fact, their hands are tied because getting a local plan through an inspection is difficult and because the law has been constructed in such a way that opposition is neutered. The so-called objectively-assessed housing need is always based on figures that assume enormous levels of growth for the whole of the twenty-year plan period. Add in the Liverpool and Sedgefield decisions, which are ways of providing an extra provision to supplement the five year housing supply, and areas are stuck with unrealistic housing expectations. Which the builders argue for, but then don’t bother to supply.
The NPPF was compiled by four people, three of whom had interests in the construction industry and one of whom was an officer in the RSPB. It is considered by most communities to be a developers’ charter. The lead figure in pushing for this was a woman from the Treasury called Kate Barker who is now a director of Taylor Wimpey. I once carried out an assessment of a group of members of the House of Lords who were in a debate on housing and who were all demanding further deregulation of the planning regime. They all had some kind of personal pecuniary interest in the industry.
All this might be forgivable if housing for those who need it was being supplied. It is not. Generally speaking, the housing that is being built is often in the luxury end of the market and such unnecessary provision as second homes. There are now more private landlords than in the public or housing association sector. Evidence shows that the latter are not going to be building much more property for several years because they are having to make up the shortfall, in some instances by making staff redundant, as a result of the current changes to the welfare regime. The right-to-buy is also seen by them as a threat and makes them reluctant to invest in more property.
There are some useful studies about all these things, in addition to the evidence presented by communities to the Review that was held by the Committee for Communities and Local Development last year. They made recommendations that might have been really helpful and the Government chose to ignore these. The Secretaries of State and the Planning Ministers seem to be in total denial about the failure of their policy. Across England there are action groups in communities that feel bruised and damaged by the fall-out from all this. Because the emphasis has been on a kind of scorched-earth, build-at-any-cost, programme the basic infrastructure provision that underpins all development is being eroded or omitted. The gladiatorial contests in major planning appeals now include spirited attempts to get away with not making any contributions to community infrastructure. The government is complicit in this. All political parties, and many charities make statements about the quantity of housing need but they rarely present the evidence that supports these claims.
At local level, we know that our local association has no method of working out housing need because they allow multiple registration (the same person can apply for as many different kinds of accommodation as they want. Every time they apply, this counts as housing need. It doesn’t matter whether they are already housed. A member of their household can also register in the same way).
(Jenny Unsworth, CoVoP and Protect Congleton)
“It is, essentially, nothing more than a compacted collection of mud, rocks and debris from down the ages.
But in a further sign of the madness of the febrile London property market, a prospective developer has just paid £150,000 – simply for the ground beneath an existing property.
And there is speculation that with the demand on both space and housing in the capital showing no signs of easing, buying the ground beneath other buildings in order to build down could just become a trend – lending an entirely new meaning to the expression ‘sitting on a gold mine’.
The 1,975 sq ft plot of ground beneath Queen Court, a 1930s apartment block in Queen Square, Bloomsbury, central London, was bought by an unnamed woman for £30,000 more than the reserve price.”
“Sneaky Tories have stopped publishing the names of big bucks donors to the party.
David Cameron pledged to reveal the names of his “Leaders Group” , who stump up more than £50,000 a year.
They get access to the PM and his Cabinet at dinners in Downing Street, Chequers or Tory HQ.
The first list was published in March 2012 and appeared quarterly on the official Tory website.
But there has been nothing since last summer’s list.
It revealed the Conservatives received £2.7million in the previous three months from people who attended dinners or meetings with the PM.
That represented 40% of the party’s total donations for the quarter.”
http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/tories-stop-naming-partys-big-6791018
… “I’ve never understood people who treat politics as if it were football. In football, you support the same team from birth to death, through thick and thin; no matter how hopeless they become, you never abandon them for a superior rival.
In a voter, though, that kind of blind devotion is bizarre. If the party you normally vote for starts propagating ideas you oppose, then you’re entirely free – indeed, you’re wise – to dump them and back a rival.
Voters owe no loyalty. Give me the turncoat over the ideologue any day. You can’t trust ideology: it does your thinking for you.
Our democracy would be healthier if everyone were a floating voter.”
Michael Deacon, Daily Telegraph
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/11980291/Forget-loyalty-to-your-party-everyone-should-be-a-floating-voter.html
… East Devon District Council (EDDC) had called on ministers to reconsider a one per cent rent reduction for council and social tenants.
The authority says the change will leave it £7.9million out of pocket after four years …
SOUNDS GOOD DOESN’T IT? BUT HOLD ON …
“… East Devon is planning to raise rents for new tenants from the end of November, according to a proposal going to the Housing Review Board on 5th November. Rents will be raised to the ‘target/formula rent’ in one go, the average difference being £2.21 per week although obviously in many cases it will be more.
Giving with one hand, taking with the other
The reason for this change is given as: ‘The Government announced in the summer budget that from April 2016, social housing rents will reduce by 1% each year for a period of four years. By moving rents at tenancy changes to formula/target levels for new tenants, some of the loss of rental income will be offset and lessen the severity of the 1%, 4 year rent reduction.’
In other words, what tenants gained on the one hand, EDDC (which is losing income through the reductions) will take back with the other. Tenants will pay to keep services funded. …”
http://seatonmatters.org/2015/11/02/rent-rises-for-new-east-devon-tenants/
… Many people all over the country feel not merely neglected but abandoned by central government. They pay their taxes, as they have always done, but the services which they expect in return — be it health, education or policing — are now in steep decline.
And, while the simplistic Left like to blame it all on ‘Tory cuts’, these citizens know it’s not all about budgets. Instead, it’s about the fashionable causes and warped priorities of a richly rewarded managerial elite versus the expectations of the people they serve.
For example, the public hear the Chief Constable of Surrey saying that her officers may no longer bother chasing car thieves or those who drive away from petrol stations without paying.
They hear the Police Commissioner for Devon and Cornwall say officers may no longer bother investigating some suicides or those who do a runner from a restaurant (in an area dependent on tourism).
They hear the Police Commissioner for Bedfordshire saying — as he did this week — that motorway speed cameras might be recalibrated to extract fines from the tiniest infractions (with no mention of ‘road safety’).
Yet they also know there are plenty of police available to swoop on pensioners who remonstrate with feral youths, or to take sneak photos of celebrities from helicopters, or to round up journalists who talk to whistleblowers and so on. And sympathy is in short supply.
If Frinton was very multi-cultural or very troublesome, there might be grants and pilot schemes and shiny new infrastructure. But it is not.
This is forgotten England: one of those unglamorous, unsexy back-waters where nothing much happens and things just slowly become more and more rubbish every day.
The local GP surgery, for instance, once a partnership of doctors who tended families from cradle to grave, reached crisis point last year after the last permanent GP departed. Patients had to queue round the block at dawn to see a ‘locum’ doctor.
‘It was dreadful,’ says Tony Comber, chairman of the surgery’s patient participation group. ‘If you did manage to get in, these locums would just keep repeating, “You’ve only got ten minutes”, even when my wife was having an epileptic fit right there.’
The surgery has been taken over, in the short-term, by a local employee-owned healthcare provider, with three doctors hired until March and locums filling any gaps. But elderly patients, often with complex problems, yearn for someone who knows their medical needs.
It will be a familiar story to millions, of course, but it simply compounds the sense of neglect in end-of-the-line places such as Frinton.
While other parts of the country look forward to expensive new railways or chunks of motorway, there’s nothing new heading in this direction. No one has mentioned an ‘Eastern powerhouse’.
The street lights go out between midnight and 5am to help the county council save money. The schools are overcrowded.
At the same time, central government is planning 10,000 new homes for the district, with no obvious employment for all the new arrivals, let alone extra health workers or schools.
I meet local councillors Jeff Bray and Richard Everett — both members of the Ukip opposition on the Tory-controlled district council — who say that Whitehall is clueless about the impact it will have.
Mr Bray represents a ward where an outlying village Many people all over the country feel not merely neglected but abandoned by central government. They pay their taxes, as they have always done, but the services which they expect in return — be it health, education or policing — are now in steep decline.
And, while the simplistic Left like to blame it all on ‘Tory cuts’, these citizens know it’s not all about budgets. Instead, it’s about the fashionable causes and warped priorities of a richly rewarded managerial elite versus the expectations of the people they serve.
For example, the public hear the Chief Constable of Surrey saying that her officers may no longer bother chasing car thieves or those who drive away from petrol stations without paying.
They hear the Police Commissioner for Devon and Cornwall say officers may no longer bother investigating some suicides or those who do a runner from a restaurant (in an area dependent on tourism).
They hear the Police Commissioner for Bedfordshire saying — as he did this week — that motorway speed cameras might be recalibrated to extract fines from the tiniest infractions (with no mention of ‘road safety’).
Yet they also know there are plenty of police available to swoop on pensioners who remonstrate with feral youths, or to take sneak photos of celebrities from helicopters, or to round up journalists who talk to whistleblowers and so on. And sympathy is in short supply.
If Frinton was very multi-cultural or very troublesome, there might be grants and pilot schemes and shiny new infrastructure. But it is not.
This is forgotten England: one of those unglamorous, unsexy back-waters where nothing much happens and things just slowly become more and more rubbish every day.
The local GP surgery, for instance, once a partnership of doctors who tended families from cradle to grave, reached crisis point last year after the last permanent GP departed. Patients had to queue round the block at dawn to see a ‘locum’ doctor.
‘It was dreadful,’ says Tony Comber, chairman of the surgery’s patient participation group. ‘If you did manage to get in, these locums would just keep repeating, “You’ve only got ten minutes”, even when my wife was having an epileptic fit right there.’
The surgery has been taken over, in the short-term, by a local employee-owned healthcare provider, with three doctors hired until March and locums filling any gaps. But elderly patients, often with complex problems, yearn for someone who knows their medical needs.
It will be a familiar story to millions, of course, but it simply compounds the sense of neglect in end-of-the-line places such as Frinton.
While other parts of the country look forward to expensive new railways or chunks of motorway, there’s nothing new heading in this direction. No one has mentioned an ‘Eastern powerhouse’. The street lights go out between midnight and 5am to help the county council save money. The schools are overcrowded. At the same time, central government is planning 10,000 new homes for the district, with no obvious employment for all the new arrivals, let alone extra health workers or schools.
I meet local councillors Jeff Bray and Richard Everett — both members of the Ukip opposition on the Tory-controlled district council — who say that Whitehall is clueless about the impact it will have. Mr Bray represents a ward where an outlying village of 750 homes is on course to absorb 1,000 new ones. ‘Where is the infrastructure and who will live in these houses if there isn’t the work here?’ he asks.
To cap it all, local policing is shortly to go through the wringer.
Faced with making £63 million of savings over the next five years, Essex Police is about to cut 15 of its 25 walk-in stations and shed 190 of its 250 police community support officers (PCSOs). The nearest police base to Frinton-on-Sea, in neighbouring Walton, is to be sold.
Morale is nose-diving. While the national average for sick days has fallen to four per year, the rate among Essex Police officers has risen to 13. Among PCSOs it’s 17.5. By the standards of any organisation, it’s a scandal.
‘This is the England that the politicians take for granted,’ says local MP Douglas Carswell, who defected to Ukip from the Tories and is his party’s only MP.
‘These are people who have paid into the system all their lives. Now they find themselves let down by the sheer incompetence of the state and by a political class cocooned in another world, spouting figures handed to them by civil servants. …”
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3307955/Forced-hire-police-town-old-white-politicians-care-about.htmlof 750 homes is on course to absorb 1,000 new ones. ‘Where is the infrastructure and who will live in these houses if there isn’t the work here?’ he asks.
To cap it all, local policing is shortly to go through the wringer.
Faced with making £63 million of savings over the next five years, Essex Police is about to cut 15 of its 25 walk-in stations and shed 190 of its 250 police community support officers (PCSOs). The nearest police base to Frinton-on-Sea, in neighbouring Walton, is to be sold.
Morale is nose-diving. While the national average for sick days has fallen to four per year, the rate among Essex Police officers has risen to 13. Among PCSOs it’s 17.5. By the standards of any organisation, it’s a scandal.
‘This is the England that the politicians take for granted,’ says local MP Douglas Carswell, who defected to Ukip from the Tories and is his party’s only MP.
‘These are people who have paid into the system all their lives. Now they find themselves let down by the sheer incompetence of the state and by a political class cocooned in another world, spouting figures handed to them by civil servants.’
Several newspapers report that the UK’s largest care home provider (Four Seasons) is in financial difficulty both from “financial engineering” and the inability of social services fees to keep up with costs. They will now sell off some homes and cut maintenance and refurbishment costs in others.
Luxury accommodation will, of course, always be available to those who can afford it. But what of the rest of us?
Is it morally defensible for a council to sell its assets so that luxury accommodation is available for the elderly, when others cannot afford it and when local youngsters are priced out of the housing market? Is it morally defensible to spend the money gained from such asset sales to build itself new offices. If our elderly have to put up with less well maintained accommodation, our youngsters being unable to own or rent homes because of high prices, why do our officers and councillors deserve it? “Making do and mending” is what the rest of us without extra resources are having to do.
Yet another example of “Local Authority plc” – running councils as businesses for profit rather than for those paying council tax. Only in this case ” shareholders” are officers and councillors, not us.
If our council tax is not paying for the services WE need – should we be paying it?
From today’s Sidmouth Herald Opinion page:
‘Regarding last week’s front page story about our MP Hugo Swire’s ‘big vision’ for Sidmouth sea front.
It should be noted that Sidmouth has successfully resisted all such overwrought ideas for 200 years. It is this above all else that gives the town such a unique character. It’s unmolested and historic frontage with the sea is not only its greatest attraction and income generator; it is why tourists, visitors, writers, artists, home-buyers come again and again.
It is hard to believe that Hugo (or anyone) truly believes that a multi-story car park and a marina must adorn the nation’s best preserved Regency sea front – and effectively ruin its character (see the East Devon Watch website for possible examples). Will our Westminster representative be remembered as the one to place the first carbuncle?
Is he immune to the messages of Sir John Betjeman, Jane Austen, Elizabeth Barrett Browning who all treasured the town’s character and spoke out against such cultural short-sitedness?
This is not a ‘brave’ vision Hugo, it is a tragic one.
Peter Nasmyth
(author of ‘Literature and Landscape in East Devon.’)’
… who boasts on “his” Twitter account that he got on to a “Leader Board” whilst doing a publicity stunt workout … only to have someone post below his photograph that, actually, as only 38 people took part in the challenge, EVERYONE got on to the “top 40” Leader Board!!!
From a Sidmouth correspondent:
“How ironical that a letter in last week’s Simouth Herald from Mrs Ann Liverton, former EDDC Tory councillor, should accuse independent councillors of East Devon Alliance (EDA) of not supporting local farming. (30 October, Opinion, “Must do better”).
She seems unaware that a key motive for the creation of EDA in 2012 was to try to protect what was left of the District’s prime farmland from being concreted over in the frenzy of destructive development that was assailing it.
In 2008 it was Mrs Liverton’s Conservative group on East Devon District Council that voted to relax planning rules to make it easier for agricultural land in rural areas to be converted into “business parks” often housing noisy and polluting industrial activities.
In 2009 she was a member of the planning (“Development Management”) committee that gave the green light for the massive –and continuing- expansion of Hill Barton and Greendale Barton business parks.
Many residents of Woodbury Salterton in Raleigh Ward were brought close to despair by the consequent loss of farmland and the destruction of their quiet rural environment.
And, final irony, the EDDC councillor representing this ward at the time was Ann Liverton!”
So, National Infrastructure commission lots of builders, road planners, railway experts etc – right? Wrong!
The commissioners are:
Lord Heseltine – politician
Sir John Armitt – an engineer (good)
Professor Tim Besley – former Bank of England adviser
Demis Hassabis – artificial intelligence researcher and neuroscientist
Sadie Morgan – a founding director of dR and Design Panel Chair of HS2
Bridget Rosewell – consultant and former Chief Economic Adviser to the Greater London Authority
Sir Paul Ruddock – chairman of the Victoria and Albert Museum and the University of Oxford Endowment
The commission will produce a report at the start of each five-year Parliament, offering recommendations for priority infrastructure projects.
Can you imagine the meetings!
From a Cranbrook Town Council Facebook page, we learn the following from the town council’s objection to the siting of Gypsy and Travellers sites near the town:
“Cranbrook currently has two schools to accommodate the influx of children that would naturally be part of any Gypsy or Traveller site.St Martin’s is already working at capacity. This is a school that already has a significantly high proportion of children with varying degrees of Special Education Needs.The new Cranbrook Education Campus has a current intake where over 50% of pupils require extra resources.”
15,000 houses given planning permission in Ebbsfleet – 350 so far built. Incredible – this is commuter belt for London and on the Eurostar route – so houses should sell like hot cakes. But developers don’t want to build the infrastructure!
“Although Ebbsfleet was earmarked for major development back in 2003, and permission has been granted for 15,000 housing units, only 350 have so far been built. This is credited to a reluctance on the part of private firms to fork out for infrastructure, rather than a lack of demand. And so, accordingly, £200m of public money is being used to jumpstart the process.”
There have been a number of concerns regarding an intermittent, extremely foul odour in the area. This appears to be as a result of activity from the nearby digester (AKA the ‘pink bubble’ off Oil Mill Lane). Concerns were raised at a recent Parish Council meeting where residents were informed that for any action to be taken, a significant number of people (more than five) need to each individually report the odour within the same time frame.
To do this, you need to inform:
East Devon District Council:
01395 517457
environmentalhealth@eastdevon.gov.uk
Environmental Health: 0800 807060 (Report ‘Pollution to land’)
