Month: February 2016

‘Devolution’ threat to local democracy – sign the petition

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South Devon Watch: Petitioning devon county council 

          Stop the ‘unlawful’ devolution process

          in Devon and Somerset

  • The so called Devolution process taking place in Devon and Somerset right now, is an totally undemocratic and possibly unlawful transfer of power from local authorities to a quango of unelected and unaccountable business people called the Heart of the South West Local Enterprise Partnership.
  • Their meetings are held in secret and their minutes are not published.  They control £4 billion worth of grants from the government and the EU and have spent millions on Hinkley C power station.  These are the people, nearly all property developers and construction CEOs who are writing the devolution bid for Devon and Somerset.  Whilst local councils have their budgets slashed to a point they can barely function, the LEP enables enormous construction projects and is pushing for the building of 179,000 new homes, which are not affordable.
  • Local people are being shut out of decision making processes altogether while the responsibility for care homes, roads and house building is passed over to this opaque and remote quango, whose only goal is growth at the expense of everything else.

          Sign the petition here

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The community speaks

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Jack Rowland won yesterday’s Seaton Town Council by-election by a huge margin, winning 779 votes (74%) to the 273 (26%) for Eric Bowman, who had been promoted by Seaton’s Voice.

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What a South Hams district councillor thinks of devolution

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This says exactly what needs to be said about the Devon-Someset ‘devolution’ bid.

East Devon Watch

“The dreadful “Devolution” proposals from the Heart Of The South West Local Enterprise Partnership were endorsed by South Hams District Council today – but not before Opposition Group of councillors had put up a big fight. Here is what one of them said:

“The Government has taken away the funds that local authorities were once spending to meet the needs of local people – for affordable homes, care services, repairing local roads etc. It now offers to give back £195.5 million – but only if we endorse a package of megaprojects in which we have had no say.

This is coercion, not ‘devolution’. The decisions about how this council spent its money were once democratically decided; the proposals in this Devolution Prospectus were not. It is not the economic recovery plan that residents would have created themselves if they had been given the opportunity.

ROADS. The Government has taken away…

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