* regions
Ahead of Wednesday’s Budget, the Medical Defence Union (MDU) has issued an open letter to the Chancellor of the Exchequer urging her to take decisive action to tackle the soaring legal costs of clinical negligence claims. In the last year alone, the NHS spent more than £800 million on legal fees relating to clinical negligence… Read more »
The Supreme Court has ruled in favour of a non-religious father and his child that the exclusively Christian teaching of Religious Education (RE) and collective worship in Northern Ireland are ‘indoctrination’. Alongside mandatory Christian collective worship and a ‘stigmatising’ right of withdrawal, this is therefore discriminatory under human rights law. This ruling will have wide-ranging… Read more »
Latest articles
By Peter Wozniak The government is setting out the details of its plans to encourage regional development today. Regional development agencies, set up under Labour in 1999, will be scrapped under the proposals and replaced with ‘local enterprise partnerships’ (LEPs). Vince Cable has announced the move in parliament, while deputy prime minister Nick Clegg will… Read more »
by Peter Wozniak The UK government did not collude in the murder of the notorious loyalist paramilitary Billy Wright in prison, the inquiry into his death has found. The Billy Wright inquiry, which has taken five years to complete at a cost of £30 million, found that although Northern Ireland authorities were guilty of negligence… Read more »

