Seaton’s tourism signage scheme gets go ahead at last
Devon County Council Highways has finally signed off the scheme for over 30 new tourism and traffic signs which the Town Council has been negotiating for over a year. The scheme will mean that new attractions like the Wetlands and Seaton Jurassic are finally properly signposted. The scheme has been carefully integrated to make everything easy to find for visitors coming into the town, and should be implemented this spring before the main tourist season.
People often complain about the Town Council but this scheme is a tribute to the persistence of councillors, who have brought partner organisations together and overcome difficulties in raising the full cost of the scheme. Devon County Council has contributed the majority of the £20,000 funding, and I have contributed £1000 from my County Councillor’s locality budget to help fill the funding gap.
SW bottom of the league for infrastructure spending – what do we get for having most of our MPs from the ruling party?
(from the Sunday Times) Britain does infrastructure well –
New Axe Valley service replaces X52 from Seaton and Beer to RD&E and Exeter from 22 January
The timetable for the new service is here: 52 Seaton-Exeter 220118. I am disappointed that the service does not include Colyford and, at my instigation, DCC are talking again to Axe Valley about this.
This is still a minimal service. If you want a better service, use these buses and encourage the company to believe more journeys would be viable!
Coming to a site near us before long? Hospitals knocked down to build houses which nurses can’t afford
from The Guardian 9 January 2018
Four out of five homes built on former NHS sites that have been sold off to private developers will cost more than nurses can afford, according to new research.
Fifty-nine NHS sites, including many former hospitals, have already been sold to housebuilders as part of the government’s public land sale programme to boost housing supply. But the large majority will be unaffordable to nurses, according to the New Economics Foundation (NEF) thinktank. It found that in London none of the homes will be in reach.
Neither are the new developments adding much to the supply of affordable or social housing, the NEF found. Across the UK, only one in 10 of the homes built on the sold-off NHS sites analysed will be available at social rent. The average sale price is expected to be £315,000 – 10 times a nurse’s average annual salary.
The Royal College of Nursing has previously warned that high housing costs could force 40% of nurses out of the capital by 2021. For newly qualified nurses the price of a typical first-time-buyer home is 16 times their salary in inner London, seven times in the West Midlands and six times in the north-west of England, the RCN said.
In Colchester, Essex, the former psychiatric hospital Severalls is being transformed into more than 700 homes, none of which will be affordable to nurses and only 87 of which are classed as “affordable”, the NEF research showed. In St John’s Wood, north London, an NHS site has been sold to developers building three five-bedroom homes expected to cost around £3.75m – 121 times a nurse’s annual salary. There will be no affordable housing.
Persimmon, whose chief executive, Jeff Fairburn, is in line for a bonus worth over £100m, is developing the site of Pontefract general infirmary in West Yorkshire with 117 homes, only seven of which will be social or affordable housing. However, the prices are mostly below £200,000.
The report, No Homes for Nurses, estimated it would take a midwife over a century to afford the deposit for a market-rate home in Enfield where Chase Farm hospital is being redeveloped into 138 residential dwellings. Only 19% of them will be affordable, despite the borough having a target of 40%.
“These NHS sites are community assets – they should be used to deliver community benefits,” said Joe Beswick, housing lead at NEF. “Public land, which is owned by all of us, is being flogged off to developers so they can make massive profits, while producing a tiny amount of affordable housing.”
“This is a government with the wrong priorities on housing,” said John Healey, Labour’s shadow secretary of state for housing. “Ministers should be maximising the number of new genuinely affordable homes on public land, not treating low-cost housing as an afterthought.”
The government has identified surplus Department of Health sites with capacity for 26,000 homes. Between 2015 and 2017 it was expecting to sell sites for 4,000 homes.
In November, the government announced nurses would have first refusal on affordable housing generated through the sale of surplus NHS land. But the NEF argued that in London even affordable rent, which can be as high as 80% of market rent, is not affordable for nurses.
A government spokesperson said: “Since April 2010 there have been more than 357,000 affordable homes provided in England, but we’re aware that more needs to be done, which is why we’re investing over £9bn in affordable housing.
“For NHS staff in particular, we announced plans in October last year to give first refusal on affordable housing schemes built on NHS land sold for development.”
Donald Campbell made MBE in New Year’s Honours
Well-known local naturalist, Donald Campbell, who lives in Colyton, has deservedly been honoured in the New Year’s Honours List, ‘For services to Nature Conservation.’ The citation notes that he was formerly chairman of the East Devon Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty. I am sure everyone in the area will join me in congratulating him on this well-deserved recognition.
I am afraid I cannot summon up the same enthusiasm for the DBE (Damehood) awarded to Angela Pedder, who retired very recently as chief executive of the Devon NHS Success Regime and Sustainability and Transformation Plan. The citation says ‘For services to Healthcare’, but Pedder is one of those primarily responsible for the policy of hospital bed closures in Seaton, Honiton and other hospitals.
‘Absolutely no change to physiotherapy services at Seaton’, I am assured, despite removal of some equipment
Residents have contacted me because some equipment has been moved from the gym, part of the radiotherapy area at Seaton Hospital. I have spoken to Theresa Denning, the Locality Manager based at Axminster who is responsible for physiotherapy, and she assures me that ‘there is absolutely no change to physiotherapy services at Seaton’. She tells me that some under-used equipment has been moved to make room for other equipment to be used by the community rehabilitation team to treat patients who are being brought in from home. Seaton Hospital reception also confirmed that they are continuing to book physiotherapy appointments as and when needed.
CCG, RD&E speakers at Honiton community event to begin ‘co-designing and co-producing’ local health services/activities – we need a similar meeting in Seaton too
Conservatives block my call for the County Council to ‘speak up for Devon’ in the debate over the European Single Market and Customs Union – but it will produce an impact assessment
As the Brexit negotiations finally entered the phase of talking about the UK’s future economic relationship with the EU, I asked the County Council this week to speak up for Devon’s interests in the debate about whether we should stay in the European Single Market and Customs Union.
However my motion that we should stay in both arrangements as we leave the EU, because of the benefits they bring to Devon’s economy and the damage which leaving them will cause, was remitted to the Cabinet who will report back to the next Council meeting in February.
I argued that the motion should have been discussed this week. Pointing out that the DUP, SNP and Mayor of London had come forward to speak for their regional interests, I criticised our MPs for failing to speak as a group for Devon and the South West’s obvious interests in keeping close economic relationships with Europe. I said the Council should speak up and make it clear to Government which kind of Brexit we wanted. All opposition councillors (Liberal Democrats, Labour, Independent and Green) supported my call to debate the motion in the meeting, but the Tory majority voted to postpone the motion for two months.
One good thing did come from the proposal – Council leader, John Hart, promised that Cabinet would look at the evidence on the impact of Brexit on Devon in coming to their recommendation for the next meeting. Although I argued that we have enough evidence to make a judgement now (see below), it will be useful for the Council to do this work. Let’s hope their ‘impact assessment’ is a bit more thorough than the Government’s!
Note. I am fully aware that the majority of voters in Seaton & Colyton, and in Devon, supported leaving the EU. This is not about that decision – it’s about getting sensible terms for the future economic links. Some points I would have made if I’d been allowed to speak fully on this:
- By value, the SW has the highest proportion of goods exported to the EU of any UK region, rising above 60% in 2015 compared to national average of 44%. The value of SW goods exports to the EU has increased markedly in the last few years. We have actually had a positive trade balance, unlike many regions.
- 70% of Exeter’s and 68% of Plymouth’s exports go to the EU. These are the two highest figures of any UK cities.
- Exeter University is one of the top recipients of EU grants. While tourism to Devon has benefited from the weak pound which Brexit has caused, recent figures have shown that international students bring greater economic benefits to Exeter than tourism does.
- While we do not have figures for the losses of EU and international staff from Devon’s NHS and care system, our officers have stated that this is a major concern.
- Farming has a larger share in Devon than in the rest of the UK economy. Neil Parish MP says that ‘The EU is a vital market for British agriculture and food & drink exports. EU member states account for 7/8 of the UK’s top agricultural export markets. In 2015, 93% of all British beef exports went to the EU – a trade worth £320 million.’
Given all this information, it is very clear what kind of relationship with the EU is in Devon’s interests:
- Neil believes that for agriculture, ‘it’s crucial the UK retains a close relationship with the EU market’.
- Meurig Raymond, president of the NFU has backed a temporary customs union with the EU after Brexit.
- Exeter University as part of the Russell Group of leading universities is lobbying to remain part of the EU Framework Programmes for research, to reassure EU staff that they have a future in the UK and to ensure new EU staff can be recruited.
- Remaining in the Single Market is vital for selling goods and services to the EU, and to ensure we recruit and retain sufficient EU workers to support our NHS, social care, farming and hospitality sectors – new figures show that migration into the SW has fallen more sharply than in the SE.
- The Customs Union is crucial for all our exporters, whether in manufacturing, farming or services, to avoid bureaucratic obstacles to trade which will hit small businesses hardest.
- The Centres for Cities estimates that a ‘hard’ Brexit, leaving these arrangements, will roughly double the hit to Devon’s and Exeter’s economies compared to ‘soft’ Brexit.
There is no point in developing a SW strategy for productivity and growth, if we don’t first stop the harm that leaving the Single Market and Customs Union will cause.
Labour joins Tories at Devon County Council to support joint ‘devolution’ with Somerset, against Independent, Lib Dem and Green opposition
Most Labour members joined the Conservative majority on Thursday in voting down my amendment for the County Council to revisit its controversial ‘devolution’ proposals to join Devon with Somerset in the so-called Heart of the South West, first in a formal Joint Committee and then (envisaged but not proposed at this stage) in a Combined Authority. I argued that the proposals for an extra layer of bureaucracy have no democratic consent – they were not even in the Conservatives’ Devon manifesto last May.
I argued that we were being asked to support ‘a regional economic strategy that doesn’t add up to a government which doesn’t know what it’s doing about devolution, and for this we’re prepared to enter a half-baked new constitutional arrangement which will probably have to be scrapped as soon as a more rational government devolution policy is devised.’
Six of Labour’s Exeter members followed the line of Exeter City Council which is joining the Tory-run County and district councils in supporting the current devolution proposals (one abstained). They believe that Exeter’s economy will gain from the (currently unknown) amount of money the devolution bid will gain from government (which of course will be giving back a small proportion of the money it is currently taking from services). I argued that the plan does not have a viable economic strategy behind it, and that rural, coastal and small-town Devon stands to gain virtually nothing from it.
Liberal Democrat and Green councillors joined Independents in voting for my amendment. The webcast will be available here.
Seaton & Colyton MATTERS 