Month: February 2017
Seaton Heights auction details
Go to https://eastdevonwatch.org/2017/02/27/seaton-heights-up-for-auction-at-2-5-3-million-next-month/
How Seaton fares in the papers for CCG meeting
The papers for the CCG meeting on Thursday are available online. On a quick reading of the 92 pages of the report on the consultation, it is impossible to say clearly what outcomes they point to. All the report says about how the meeting will approach the decision is: ‘The scheduled date for the Governing Body to make a decision is the 2 March 2017, although a key feature in that meeting will be assessing readiness for such a key decision. The CCG has already confirmed the papers will be published and the decision will be made in public, and communicated to stakeholders afterwards. If it is decided that further work is needed prior to decision, it will be for the Governing Body to confirm the rationale and when the decision will be made.‘
However the summaries of the consultation highlight some things which are hopeful for Seaton, and maybe for the wider aim of keeping more beds in more hospitals than the CCG envisaged:
- The public meeting in Seaton organised by Seaton Town Council, the League of Friends and the GP surgeries was easily the largest event (estimated at 250 people – I thought 300) of the whole consultation.
- The EX12 postcode (Seaton) produced about 400 responses, almost twice the number in any other postcode (and there were about 100 from EX24, Colyton, on top).
- The Seaton option (A) was the most supported of the CCG’s four options.
- However ‘other (write-in) options’, many of which included retaining more beds than CCG envisaged, were even more supported than Option A overall. Almost half of all respondents did not support any of the CCG’s options.
At the very least, we can say that the Seaton community did a good job in creating awareness and promoting responses, with keeping beds in Seaton hospital strongly favoured – and much support for keeping many more beds than the CCG options offered.
Thursday is D-Day for Seaton beds
- Email d-ccg.corporateservices@nhs.net
- Phone 01392 267 670 or 01392 267 638
Greater Exeter: bonanza for landowner-councillors?
Did you even know that East Devon is proposing to be part of a Greater Exeter Strategic Plan (GESP)? This could supersede the Local Plan which the district has so painfully drawn up over recent years, and which is supposed to last to 2031.
Ed Freeman, who is the Service Lead – Planning Strategy and Development Management, writes to EDDC councillors on the consultation for GESP:
“… The consultation paper is attached for you to get an advanced preview and we would welcome your comments by 10th April. Alongside this will be a call for sites to land owners and developers for housing and employment land across the area which can then be considered for allocation to meet the needs of the area for homes and jobs in the future.
So if you are secretly sat on a few acres of land and would like to put it forward for development now is the time to tell us! …”
As East Devon Watch, which broke the story, says, ‘yes, you read that right. Let us know about any secret land holdings you are sitting on. NOT so we can report you to the Monitoring Officer for not listing them on your declarations of interest – but so that we can do our best to help you to get them developed.’
This from the Council which gave us Graham Brown, who had to resign in 2013 because he boasted to the Daily Telegraph that he could get planning agreed for £25,000.
5% on your Council tax, but drastic cuts
Independent County Councillor Claire Wright explains how the Government is forcing Devon people to pay 5% more while services are slashed. This follows a 4% rise last year -and 5% a year is likely to be the pattern until 2020. This is as unfair as the Poll Tax: we should not be putting up with this. Claire’s questions to Hugo Swire are for Neil Parish, too.
Devon’s council tax will rise by 4.99 per cent from April, following yesterday’s budget meeting. More services and backroom functions are being cut, including road maintenance, community composting payments, as well as funding for vulnerable children and adults services.
Government ministers, who have forced councils, and as a consequence, citizens (mainly vulnerable ones and those on low incomes) across the country into austerity have this year allowed councils to increase tax to higher levels, to offset in a very small way the massive cuts they have made to council budgets.
This year the government has slashed £23m from Devon County Council’s budgets – a 15 per cent cut in the seventh year of austerity.
According to the scrutiny budget papers of 30 January, fewer people will be eligible for social care, due to budgetary pressures. Page 88 states: “This (budget) requires an overall reduction in the number of clients to achieve budget levels.”
It goes on to state on page 89: “The scale of change is likely to severely test the capacity of managers at different levels, especially where pressures of essential work cannot be reprioritised without risk to those who receive services.”
Over half of Devon County Council’s budget has now been cut since 2010. More than £267 million over the last seven years.
The council tax rise will cost the average Band D council taxpayer £1.16 a week extra. Devon County Council leader, John Hart said in a press release: “I believe we are justified in asking for that to help protect and support some of the most vulnerable people in society.”
Of course, he really has no choice with the crisis in social care that is present. This year’s budget was around £5m overspent due to increasing costs of care and massive government budget cuts.
While £1.16 a week extra might be shrugged off by people who are comfortably off. Others on a tight budget, those who are struggling to pay debts and bills, will regard it as yet another burden..
The government says it can’t afford to look after its sick, its vulnerable and its elderly, so it encourages councils to increase council tax instead. Pushing a huge burden onto residents. Charging the taxpayer significant sums of money for poorer and fewer services.
And of course, this isn’t the only council tax rise that people will have to swallow. The likelhood is that district councils will hike their tax, Devon and Cornwall Police has already announced it is increasing its council tax and the fire authority will also surely, like it did last year to increase its council tax.
That’s a massive year on year increase in council tax, for fewer and poorer services. Each year as the cost to taxpayers rise, the services get sparser and poorer.
According to a report out this week almost a third of the population of Britain is living on an ‘inadequate’ income. More people than ever are using foodbanks and homelessness has rocketed.
How do ministers sleep at night knowing that it is their policies, their ideology, their own selfish version of how they believe a society should operate, that are causing this awful hardship… in the fifth or sixth largest economy in the world.
Hugo Swire MP has expressed concern about social care funding and the closure of hospital beds.
But if Hugo Swire was REALLY concerned and REALLY serious about these issues, he would vote AGAINST the council budget cuts in the House of Commons next Wednesday afternoon (23 February).
But so far he, along with his conservative colleagues have quietly voted in favour, hoping no one will notice.
Once again this year, I will notice. And I will sure everyone notices how he and his colleagues vote.
Because this vote surely goes to the absolute heart of whether Mr Swire really cares about his constituents or is little more than a party yes man.
Here’s the webcast of yesterday’s budget meeting – https://devoncc.public-i.tv/core/portal/webcast_interactive/244712
Consultancy firm creams off more NHS cash
View From reported in December that Carnall Farrer, a consultancy firm run by Dame Ruth Carnall, who is head of our CCG’s ‘Sustainability and Transformation Plan‘ – which is behind the proposed cuts to hospital beds – was being paid £40,000 a month by the CCG, i.e. nearly half a million a year. Now East Devon Watch reports that the same firm is taking even more in Camden.
It is completely unacceptable that top NHS officials like Carnall set up private businesses which cream off scarce cash from the service.
Ottery getting NHS’s attention – I wonder why?
As the NHS and social care crises deepen, two key consultation meetings are both taking place in Ottery St Mary next month, the only venue for each in the whole of East Devon.
- The NHS is holding meetings across Devon to get people’s views on services at major hospitals such as the RD&E. It is all part of the SUSTAINABILITY AND TRANSFORMATION PLAN, which will involve major cuts and centralisation of NHS services across Devon. This meeting is on Monday 13th March 6pm-8pm – The Kings School
- Devon County Council is holding meetings about PROMOTING INDEPENDENCE, which is its name for getting ‘families, friends and informal social networks’ to support people who need social care that DCC can’t afford to provide (to attend this, email socialcarecommissioningsupport-mailbox@devon.gov.uk by Tuesday 28th February). Wednesday 15 March, Tumbling Weir Hotel, Ottery St Mary. Facilitated event: 3pm-4.30pm, Drop-in discussion opportunity: 5-6pm, Facilitated event: 6.30-8.30pm.
Is it just coincidence that both these events are in Ottery? Or is it because Ottery has an Independent County Councillor, Claire Wright, who has been pushing hard on these twin crises, and bringing them to the attention of the public, while other councillors haven’t bothered?
Cutting West Seaton out of Seaton
The Boundary Commission for England has made proposals which would take part of Seaton ‘around Beer Road’ – which the map shows means the area to the west of Castle Hill/Marlpit Lane and to the south of Bunts Lane – out of the Seaton district council ward and puts it into Beer and Branscombe ward.
Because the area would then be in a different district ward from the rest of Seaton, it would be also be a separate ward for town council election purposes, with one councillor (the rest of Seaton would be another ward, with 11).
The Commission justifies this on grounds of ‘electoral equality‘, i.e. ensuring that each ward has roughly the same number of voters per councillor. However while this change would leave Seaton ward with just 1% over the recommended number of voters, it would leave the expanded Beer and Branscombe ward 5% over.
It seems that Beer and Branscombe parish councils are behind the drive to expand their ward. Alternatives to ‘include either Salcombe Regis from Sidmouth parish or the parish of Southleigh’ were rejected because they ‘would not meet our statutory criteria of community identity.’ Bizarrely, it doesn’t seem to have occurred to the Commission that West Seaton citizens might have feelings about having their Seaton identity taken away!
This is now out for consultation until 3rd April and will be considered by Seaton Town Council. By coincidence, the AGM of the West Seaton & Seaton Hole Association takes place on Thursday 16th February (at the Marshlands Centre, Harbour Road, starting at 7 pm). We will add this to the agenda.
Here is what the Commission says in full:
‘Beer & Branscombe, Coly Valley and Seaton 35 We received a number of different suggestions for this area. One of the two district-wide warding patterns we received proposed that the parish of Southleigh be added to the existing Beer & Branscombe ward to improve electoral equality. The other district submission suggested that a part of Seaton parish be included in Beer & Branscombe ward but did not specify a proposed boundary.
36 We received submissions from both Beer Parish Council and Branscombe Parish Council that accepted that the current ward of Beer & Branscombe needed to be extended to provide for better electoral equality. It was suggested that either an area around Seaton Hole or Salcombe Regis be added to the current ward. We visited the area and considered all proposals. We concluded that to include either Salcombe Regis from Sidmouth parish or the parish of Southleigh would not meet our statutory criteria of community identity. A ward coterminous with Seaton parish would not provide for acceptable electoral equality. Therefore, we have included an area of Seaton parish around Beer Road in our Beer & Branscombe ward. This provides for good electoral equality for both our proposed Beer & Branscombe and Seaton wards. Coly Valley ward remains unchanged, which was supported by a submission from one of the parish councils in this ward.’
Funding the NHS, by Jack Rowland
I was born in 1950 so have been fortunate in my lifetime that the NHS has existed throughout that time. During my formative years I remember listening to the family discussions that took place concerning health provision that was available before the NHS was created. By and large my parents and grandparents feared having to seek health related help – they were all working class living in, what was then, a poor area of London.
My formative years, hearing stories at first hand, forged the views I still have today regarding the type of society I want to live in and the one I want to see for my children. They are both in their 30’s with good University degrees, good careers and living in London and Bournemouth, but cannot afford to buy a property yet and do not have the salary linked pension provision that I enjoyed during my career.
Where I live now in Seaton we are experiencing the same problem with the local Clinical Commissioning Group (CCG) that other areas of the U.K. are experiencing, namely giving options across a number of local hospitals with the aim of reducing bed spaces. The CCG has gone through the sham of holding public consultation events to be able to put a tick in a box when no doubt the decision had already been made when looking at options to save money.
To say that alternative services will be put in place to avoid people having to occupy bed spaces is just a future promise at the moment and, in my opinion, will not adequately tackle the problems that people will face in the future with people living longer, but, as we know now, having more multiple difficult health issues allied with possibly living at home alone or with another aged husband / wife or partner.
So who is the real culprit?
I lay the blame squarely at the door of Central Government and the current Conservative stance. The U.K. is the 5th or 6th richest country (depending on which statistic you believe). The Government decide how the expense cake will be divided and the priorities whilst servicing Government debt and hopefully growing the size of the cake. I want to see the NHS and Social Services receive a larger slice of the cake as we can afford to do that if the will is there to match the current and future needs.
I want to see everyone benefit fairly from a growing economy and in a society where health and social care is not subject to a post code lottery and a fair national tax system for individuals and businesses that encourages individuals and businesses to grow and develop without resorting to tax avoidance schemes or exploiting loopholes.
I know that the cost of the NHS and Social Services will grow due to an ageing population and I’m not advocating throwing more money at them without strong controls over how the money is spent, but I do want to see the same improved provision in the future regardless of where you live or your financial situation. As a country we can afford to do this without decisions being devolved to a local level that has resulted in the current situation and Central Government pointing the finger and blaming health professionals.
Although I am a Councillor on Seaton Town Council the views I have expressed above are my personal views. JR
RD&E back on red alert
Local NHS crisis deepens: RD&E back on red alert, according to Express & Echo
Seaton & Colyton MATTERS 