C HANGES are on the way. First our familiar 22 Squadron search and rescue (SAR) helicopter is likely to be replaced in 2012 by a consortium which includes the Royal Bank of Scotland. And second Devon County Council is to lose the city of Exeter from its charge.

Both are government decisions that seriously affect us in North Devon. I must admit to a sinking feeling when I heard the helicopter news. Not only will it see night cover from Chivenor withdrawn, but SAR is being hired out to a commercial company. The favourite candidate is a group of companies called the Soteria Consortium.

Soteria has the sound of fog about it, something confusing and intangible. Unlike the RAF, which sounds like The Royal Air Force, a phrase I understand. I looked up this new consortium and found it's made up of three organisations. One, CHC Helicopter Corporation, claims to be the biggest commercial helicopter company in the world; the second is a technology company called Thales UK, which assures us it "leverages its skills and expertise to help customers round the world", and the third is the Royal Bank of Scotland which was so rubbish it had to be rescued by public funds and is now nearly all state-owned.

I must learn to give people the benefit of the doubt, but my sinking feeling is centred on the certain knowledge that these three parts of Soteria need above all to make profits for shareholders rather than offer a public service. The sinking sensation isn't improved by the presence of a bank that shares joint responsibility for our massive national debt nor am I impressed by silly jargon like "leveraging". The only leverage I admire in this context is the winch operation that lifts people out of danger and into the safety of the helicopter.

We can only trust that these people will, if they do take over, give the same service to our military and civilians that the RAF has done, and they do it within the same budget or less. Anyway I have a purely personally bias. To me the Soteria Consortium sounds like a new book by Dan Brown — all smoke and mirrors but no substance.

And now to big change No 2, the loss of upwardly mobile Exeter from the county council fold. The city has been allowed by the government to break away and form a unitary council independent of what it obviously regards as lumbering, rural, poor old Devon. The MP for Exeter, in applauding this decision, says it will benefit the people of both Devon and Exeter. He doesn't tell us how this benefit will accrue to the rest of the county, except to say that the city ran itself for 800 years before 1974 and so it has to be a good thing. That doesn't sound like 21st century sense to me.

Only time will tell, of course, but the decision has earned many more brickbats than bouquets around the county. For North Devon's local councillors and officers it brings relief that they aren't to be swept away by another reorganisation. But everyone is left scratching their heads at a Government exercise that cost us £2m going round in circles for a couple of years before coming to the answer that Exeter MP Ben Bradshaw preferred. Surely we haven't spent so much time and money just for Mr Bradshaw to gather a few more votes. No, the alternative is to accept that, like Tony Blair, he was promoting "what he honestly believes to be right" no matter how unpopular. Indeed.

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I WAS intrigued to read in last week's

Journal

of the suspension from parish council duties of John Gill, a Fremington councillor.

The three-month hiatus in his service was imposed after a standards committee found he'd breached the councillor's code of conduct by shouting at the female clerk. The relevant section of the code requires that members treat others with respect.

No doubt Mr Gill was doing his best for his community, but, despite his seniority, it sounds like he has much to discover about tact, diplomacy and technique. The report about his three-month suspension tells readers that he was an investment banker for 20 years before retiring to North Devon.

I suspect there's a clue there to this red card for Mr Gill and I'm sure some readers are nodding their heads and exchanging knowing winks. There's a belief that investment bankers share a collective personality involving a lot of noise and waving of arms. I expect three months in the sin bin will give the councillor time to learn how to avoid being tarred with the same brush as his former colleagues.