Not content with one honorary title …?
Owl,
Hon Animal, Hogwarts
but I don’t boast about it
Developer? Planning permission? No worries!
From Community Voice on Planning:
“We have just been notified that Persimmon have been advertising a site in Kingswood without submitting a planning application, while this might not be illegal it is definitely immoral see the link below:
We believe that this may not be an isolated incident and would advise you to check all developer websites for advertising about your area. If you find anything please let us know but also contact the advertising standards and complain.”
Julie
Community Voice on Planning
Hugo says tax credits have been much too generous
“Tax credits need to be reformed for numerous reasons not only because they are complicated and prone to error but because they encourage employers to keep wages low because they know the state will top up their wages bill; in effect they are being given a licence to pay less. More importantly tax credits discourage recipients from working harder and longer hours for more pay so productivity and aspiration suffer. An example of this is a single parent with three children who works 16 hours a week on the minimum wage – earning them roughly £5,400 per year. Adding together child tax credit, working tax credit and support for childcare, he/she could receive an additional £23, 885 a year. They would effectively receive around 80 per cent of their income via benefits. However there is little incentive to switch to a job working more than 16 hours a week. The tax credits drop sharply; net income increases more slowly and recipients can face a high marginal tax rate.”
Three kids AND working 16 hours a week at a minimum wage job, probably on zero hours – how does she do it!
For comparison:
[Bankers] “Total bonuses over the past year rose by 4.9 per cent to £40.5billion, of which £14.4billion was paid in the finance and insurance industry, a 2.9 per cent increase, the ONS said”
Tax credits cost about £30 billion a year.
https://fullfact.org/economy/welfare_budget_public_spending-29886
Mid Devon senior officers appear to write policy without involving portfolio holder
“SENIOR managers rewrote a report that controversially called for a 50 percent cut in funding to the Grand Western Canal, without his input, the portfolio holder responsible for grants to community organisations has said.
Mid Devon District Council’s community well-being policy group met this afternoon to discuss plans to reduce the council’s support for the attraction from £45,000 to £22,500 next year and withdrawing financial support completely in the following year.
Supporters of the canal spoke at the meeting to express their concerns at the impact such a dramatic cut in funding would have.
Adam Pilgrim, who was a member of the Canal Awareness Group which ceased to exist earlier this year, told assembled councillors: “You would be doing the community a great disservice if you implement the recommendation.”
Cllr Slade said: “Last year I was involved in the decision-making process and I suggested concern about a few elements and some of the suggested changes were made, but I wasn’t involved this year and by the time I raised concerns, the document was in the public domain. …
… He claimed the document was rewritten by the council’s senior management and he could not make a recommendation to cabinet to support the current proposals. “I have serious reservations about the cuts, including to the Grand Western Canal,” he said.
Cllr Bob Deed, who formerly held the same cabinet post, and said he had some experience of the challenge of making reductions to the funding of worthy causes, said: “I am absolutely disgusted with the fact the cabinet member has not had any opportunity to be involved in the discussion of this paper. It’s autocratic.”
Moving and Improving questionnaire needs – improving!
The preamble to this survey includes:
“We sent out paper copies of our Moving and Improving questionnaire to 3,000 randomly selected households in the post. To make sure this stays as a random sample, everyone else has to complete this copy of the questionnaire. They both have the same questions.”
The implication of this statement is that the replies from the 3000 households will be analysed separately from the self-motivated respondents to the online survey.
Is this true? If so, will the results of both versions be published?
A correspondent also writes:
“I commented in my response to Q3 – for what reason might I visit the Honiton or Exmouth offices? – to the effect that I noted that “To attend a Council meeting” was not included in the list of boxes to tick.
I surmised that they hoped no-one would bother,”
Exmouth: EDDC changes its mind about rugby club supermarket site
“East Devon District Council (EDDC) has viewed a store on the site in Royal Avenue as a priority since publishing its Exmouth Masterplan in 2011.
However, the latest draft of EDDC’s Local Plan deletes references to the store, and says a new or refreshed Masterplan will be drawn up.
Exmouth’s mayor has welcomed the rethink, but the chairman of the town’s chamber of commerce says a new large food store is still required, even if a proposed Marks and Spencer store, also in Royal Avenue, is built, as this would not be enough to meet the town’s needs.
When asked about the council’s policy shift, an EDDC spokesman said: “As a council, we need to be adaptable in our approach to our Masterplan and refresh our proposals when we need to.
“For example, we all agree that a large supermarket development on the estuary side is a challenge, so we need to take a look at the location and other town centre sites.”
Stuart Hughes’s “Pothole Army” fails to march
“An “army” of people to fill potholes on Devon roads promised last year has been thwarted by legal paperwork and insurance delays.
Last October Devon County Council asked volunteers to help repair the roads to help save money.
Fifty five people applied to become Community Road Wardens but no work has been yet been undertaken.
The council said the scheme was “innovative” and it was taking time to get everything in place.”
Bye bye countryside, bye bye localism, hello urban sprawl
“Tens of thousands of new homes in greenfield areas in England will be given automatic planning permission amid fears that communities will have inappropriate developments forced on them.
Ministers have quietly given developers the right to be granted “planning in principle” in areas that are earmarked for new housing schemes.
Rural campaigners said the new powers will restrict the rights of council planning officers to ensure that the design, density, size and location of homes is in keeping with local areas.
Shaun Spiers, chief executive of the Campaign to protect Rural England, said: ““The country needs more house building, but the way to achieve this is through well-planned developments that win public consent. Imposing development without local democratic oversight is a recipe for discord. …”
Police Commissioners threaten judicial review over cuts
Seven Police commissioners, including ours at Devon and Cornwall, join forces to urge Policing Minister Mike Penning to halt ‘deeply flawed’ changes and threaten to sue:
“Tony Hogg, the police and crime commissioner for Devon and Cornwall, said: “It is with considerable regret that I cannot rule out mounting a legal challenge against the Government’s plans. I feel I must do everything I can to stop these proposals coming into effect.”
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/police-cuts-forces-threaten-to-sue-government-over-unjustified-budget-reforms-a6718676.html
300 seaside town residents pay £100 a year for private security
Security company AGS drives around Frinton-on-Sea in Essex every night between 7pm and 7am and also has an emergency phoneline.
Totnes MP raises concern over “rural right to buy”
“No 10 ridiculed after adding poppy to David Cameron Facebook picture”
First it’s Hugo Swire and Councillor Elson whose photos are changed by EDDC, now it’s David Cameron’s who has had his doctored to add a large poppy.
It seems that when Tory politicians don’t like their pictures – they just airbrush them!
Though no-one appears to have doctored the picture in this article, which accompanies a story about Mr Cameron accepting free membership of an expensive private members club:
where it also says:
“… But what kind of club has Cameron joined? It’s one where the dress code requires that men refrain from wearing such excrescences as collarless shirts and deck shoes, while women will be shown the door for sporting denim or exposing their undergarments. It’s one where the menu doesn’t have prices (according to Zagat: “Members sniff, ‘If you ask how much it costs, you can’t afford to eat here’”), but will reportedly offer Dover sole meunière at £40 and wine from £60 a bottle. It’s one where Vivienne Westwood launched her memoirs in 2014, and where Boris Johnson held his Christmas party. It’s one with which Dave and Sam Cam are familiar, since they had a lovely election victory dinner there in May.
Earlier this year, though, the owners of Mark’s decided that their club wasn’t quite exclusive enough. So they chose to cull about a third of its members. “Members will be asked if they want to join the club again,” Charles Price, the American entrepreneur who oversees the club, told Vanity Fair. “If they do, they can submit their applications.”
The idea was to make Mark’s the most exclusive club in London. “It’s going to be a global A-list, from a variety of backgrounds, old world and new world,” Price said. “You can’t just have a name or money to get in; the main qualification is you have to be interesting.” So, while Mark’s closed its doors in July and Paris-based designer Tino Zervudachi gave the club a multimillion-pound makeover, there was a kind of night of the posh knives in which membership was reduced from 2,500 to 1,500.” …
Nearly a third of East Devon workers do not receive Living Wage
And they will be the ones most affected by Tax Credit reductions and whose wages most affect their struggle to pay increased rents and house prices.
There are already warnings that many care homes (a backbone of the East Devon economy) may soon close because they cannot afford to raise wages when council payments to them are not rising to take account of higher wages.
“Within Devon, the figure ranges from 18 per cent in Exeter to 28 per cent in East Devon, 31 per cent in Mid Devon and Teignbridge, and 41 per cent in Torridge.”
http://www.exeterexpressandecho.co.uk/Devon-workers-earns-Living-Wage-new-figures/story-28085285-detail/story.html
Clyst St Mary developers fail to win hearts and minds
Housing: a political omnishambles of epic proportions
When the Commons debates the government’s new housing and planning bill tomorrow, people will start to see that the Tories’ housing plans are driven by the politics of the Conservative party, not by the housing needs of the country.
Ministers talk about building more houses and helping people become homeowners. But this hides the truth that their housing record is five years of failure on every front.
Home ownership has fallen every year since 2010 and is now at the lowest rate in a generation. The Conservatives have overseen the lowest number of homes built under any government since the 1920s and the lowest number of genuinely affordable homes for two decades. Homelessness is rising; private rents have soared.
So in a political panic about falling so far short on their new-build numbers, the bill gives ministers wide-ranging powers to impose new house building and override both local community concerns and local plans. With a total of 32 new housing and planning powers for the centre, this legislation signals the end of localism.
Ministers’ rhetoric also hides the realities at the heart of this new housing bill. At prices up to £450,000, new “starter homes” don’t do nearly enough to help those struggling to buy and will be totally out of reach for most young people and families on ordinary incomes. Most damaging of all, the bill sounds the death knell for our ability to build the affordable homes to rent and buy that are so badly needed.
The forced sell-off of council homes to fund right-to-buy discounts for housing associations will mean affordable homes currently set aside for local people will be sold on to speculators and buy-to-let landlords, with no prospect or plan for replacement like for like in the areas they’re lost.
While housing associations may build more homes as they sell under right to buy, many will increasingly build for open market sale and rent. Indeed, a third of them now say they’ll no longer build any affordable homes.
And as ministers use new powers through the planning system to impose starter-home obligations on developers, the system that has provided nearly 250,000 genuinely affordable homes to rent and buy in the last decade will be choked off. All told, Shelter predicts the bill will lead to the loss of 180,000 affordable homes over the next five years.
Like the cut to tax credits, this bill is the chancellor’s work, with his political fingerprints all over it. And like tax credits, it faces a looming row in the Lords. Above all, it fails the same low- and middle-income working families that the Tories claim they represent.
The more people see of this bill, the less they’ll like it. It is set to become a slow-burn problem all the way through to 2020. Some moderate Tory council leaders and MPs already recognise it as bad policy but know the chancellor believes it to be good politics.
I’m determined to expose this bill as both bad policy and bad politics.
John Healey is shadow cabinet minister for housing and planning
How to make a bad housing situation worse
According to today’s Sunday Times Homes supplement, East Devon is in the top five areas to have recovered after the last credit crunch, after South Norfolk, Tonbridge and Malling, Stroud and East Hampshire.
This is put down to East Devon being “an affluent rural location where buyers are a little older and have built up plenty of equity. They are probably not mortgage dependent so are not constrained by tighter lending rules – which means that they can move more easily”.
And what does EDDC do: it flogs the Knowle site to a luxury retirement home builder to make a bad situation worse and thinks it can solve this crisis by building five “affordable” homes on a town centre car park.
Edinburgh in danger of losing World Heritage status due to inappropriate development
Today Edinburgh, tomorrow the Jurassic Coast?
Devon/Somerset devolution: a democratic deficit black hole
How many people realise that Devon-Somerset devolution initiative is being led, not by its councils, but by its Local Enterprise Partnership – a sort- of mega East Devon Business Forum? And that it is pressing ahead with its plans without any public consultation?
Click to access Devolution%20Statement%20of%20Intent%20(low%20res).pdf
Members of its board are listed here:
http://www.heartofswlep.co.uk/chief-executive-and-non-executive-directors
How many people realise that power over development and housing for the whole of Devon and Somerset is to be potentially given to Karim Hassan (former Regeneration supremo at EDDC and now Chief Executive of Exeter) and EDDC Leader Paul Diviani – both masterminds of Cranbrook?
Click to access Issue1HeartoftheSouthWestPadbrookPark__436306.pdf
This is what the Electoral Reform Society has to say about devolution deals in the north of England:
“The public shouldn’t just be given a yes/no option on a pre-agreed deal – we can’t have a fait accompli approach to devolution. There should be proper and meaningful consultation on the deal itself – what powers the public want the Combined Authority to have, and what they want their councils to do and look like in the 21st century.
“A piecemeal approach to engaging the public in the devolution debate isn’t sustainable. If citizens in County Durham are to be given a vote, it’s only right that citizens across the region should too.
How many people realise that the potential devolution of powers to Devon and Somerset are being led by its Local Enterprise Partnership (a collection of business people?
How many people realise that this partnership is suggesting that development and housing matters in the hands of Karim Hassan ( formerly head of Regeneration in East Devon and now Chief Executive of Exeter City Council) and EDDC council leader and Cranbrook apologist Paul Diviani?
“The Combined Authority said the public across the North East would be consulted – and we’ve yet to see what this will look like. It can’t be a tick-box exercise – instead it must be a real process of deliberative democracy, with the ability for the public to change aspects of the deal which they want to be improved. Local ‘Citizens’ Assemblies,’ like the ones we are running in Sheffield and Southampton, could be a great start.
“Let’s have a real debate about devolution and decentralisation. The ERS and leading academics are currently holding Citizens Assemblies in North and South that offer a promising model to follow in terms of engaging local people in the devolution agenda. Politicians in the region and the UK government would do well to watch them and build on them as a way to open up these discussions about where power should lie in our regions.”
Multi-storey car park with apartments
As suggested by Hugo Swire in today’s Sidmouth Herald, here’s one to think about:
Source: http://www.dezeen.com/2008/02/17/mountain-dwellings-by-big/
or maybe this one:
http://www.al.com/business/index.ssf/2014/05/publix_to_build_grocery_store.html
“Beware Greeks bearing gifts” in Eastern Sidmouth
This phrase from Greek mythology can be paraphrased as “Do not trust enemies who bring you presents — they could very well be playing a trick.”
This might apply in Sidmouth where EDDC seems to be keen on (part?)-financing a “scoping study” with Sidmouth Town Council for “eastern Sidmouth”.
Why the caution? A scoping study would be EDDC-led and would mean they choose the terms of reference and the consultant(s).
A Neighbourhood Plan for Sidmouth would be citizen-led with EDDC involvement.
Get the difference?
As Councillor Cathy Gardner puts it so clearly:
The study, run by East Devon District Council (EDDC) and the town council, would look at what a potential project for the eastern town could involve – and how such a scheme should be planned and implemented.
But Councillor Cathy Gardner, an EDDC member for the Sidmouth Town ward, has voiced concern that any such consultation would be ‘premature’ – and suggested waiting until the fate of a Neighbourhood Plan is determined.
The town council will decide in December whether to draw up a Neighbourhood Plan for the whole Sid Valley. If it goes ahead, the community-led document will involve consultation on things like where new homes and shops should be built.
It would also ask for views on what should happen in the eastern town.
“Cllr Gardner said: “My fear is that [the scoping exercise] has the potential to shortcut or even derail the prospect of doing a Neighbourhood Plan. The big benefit of asking [about the eastern town] as part of a Neighbourhood Plan is the solid methodology – it is the best way to get feedback from members of the public.
“Why would you rush [doing the scoping exercise] when you can do a really good quality consultation as part of a Neighbourhood Plan?
“It seems a bit premature.”
Cllr Gardner also warned that by asking residents the same questions in two separate consultations, there was a danger of ‘consultation fatigue’ and receiving less responses.
But EDDC says it thinks Sidmouth residents will welcome having their views represented in any plans for the town.
A council spokeswoman said: “We appreciate that Sidmouth Town Council is also considering a Neighbourhood Plan and it seems to us that the town council’s desire to move forward with one should not preclude the other – otherwise there is a danger that good ideas are delayed or blighted by an overly controlled approach.
“A Neighbourhood Plan is a possible future opportunity that should not inhibit what seems to be a clear appetite from the town council to regenerate the eastern end of town.
“Cllr Gardner has raised the question of consultation fatigue, which is an issue worth recognising and one that we and the town council will of course seek to avoid.
“As a Neighbourhood Plan takes at least two years to be put in place, it would be a shame to use that as a reason not to do anything else in the meantime.”
http://www.devon24.co.uk/news/sidmouth_could_launch_seafront_regeneration_scoping_exercise_1_4291585
