Local News

From Tuesday (1 April), Devon County Council will take over the enforcement of on-street parking from local District Councils.

This will create a single countywide service responsible for all on-street parking, with 45 Civil Parking Enforcement officers transferring to the County Council.

The move follows the County Council's review of its Civil Parking Enforcement (CPE) over the past year in order to reduce the operating deficit of this service.

After the first year the revised “in-house” service is expected to deliver annual savings of around £400,000 (measured...

Richard Cresswell, the Regional Director for the South West Region of the Environment Agency is expected to retire next week alongside a significant re-structuring of the agency. Mr Cresswell, who took up the post in July 2000, was recently instrumental in overseeing the Agency’s response to the winter flooding crisis which devastated much of the South West region earlier this year. The new structure will take effect from April 1 and will see the regional offices of the EA dissolve in place of a ‘two-tier’ system of ‘national’ and ‘area’ offices. The news follows reports last month that...

158 newly-built homes in Exeter and East Devon have been bought using equity loans from the government’s ‘Help to Buy’ scheme according to new figures released today. The 'Help to Buy' equity loan scheme, which was launched in April last year, enables people to buy a newly-built home with a deposit of at least 5% of the property price, while the government offers a loan of up to 20%. The shortfall is then covered by a mortgage. Across the South West over 1,700 homes have been bought using the equity loan scheme with 28,000 across the whole of England.. Housing Minister Kris Hopkins has...

What do half a TV, a French bullet-proof vest and an unopened pack of bacon have in common? They were all cleared from our beaches during a single weekend last September and were among the 223,405 bits of litter that volunteers bagged up and removed as part of the Beachwatch Big Weekend 2013, organised by the Marine Conservation Society (MCS). The UK’s leading beach cleanup and survey has now been running for twenty years and over the two decades the amount of litter found on our beaches has been steadily increasing. The 20th anniversary clean up, which took place between 20th and 23rd...