"Urgent action needed to beat the clock in climate fight"- Welsh Lib Dems Jane Dodds MS calls for more mental health support for rural Wales "Now's the time to capitalise on Green energy"- Welsh Lib Dems "It's time to call an end to child poverty"- Welsh Lib Dems "Urgent action needed to beat the clock in climate fight"- Welsh Lib Dems Today, the Welsh Liberal Democrats have called on both the Welsh Labour Government and the UK Conservative government to get serious on tackling the climate crisis. According to BBC analysis, the year 2023 has been confirmed as the hottest ...
In preparing the Liberal Democrat Voice preview of the week ahead in the Lords, I had noticed an intriguing question from one of the new Labour Peers, Lord Sahota, on the question of tax return processing. Intriguing, because it isn't that often that the Lords addresses the management and effectiveness of HM Revenue & Customs. And, given that I didn't even know if there was a Treasury Minister in the Lords, I was also curious to see who would have to get up and defend us on behalf of the Government. The answers turned out to be: criticism of HMRC's ...
PMQs Horizon scandal: It should never have had taken this long to get justice Minister admits Dowden made 'mistake' by failing to sack Vennells from £17,500 government job PMQs Horizon scandal: It should never have had taken this long to get justice Responding to the Prime Minister's announcement that the government will be setting forward new primary legislation to overturn wrongful convictions during the Horizon scandal, Liberal Democrat Home Affairs spokesperson, Alistair Carmichael MP said: The announcement is to be welcomed but hundreds of wrongfully convicted postmasters should never have had to live this long with such appalling injustice. It ...
If I'm feeling too lazy to walk into town for a coffee and a trip round the supermarket, I can catch a bus to Desborough in my road. This little town now has a Costa by the bus stop and a Co-op store in what was once the yard of its railway station. This video is full of appealing photographs of that station, which was known as Desborough and Rothwell from 1899 until it closed in 1968. Desborough also had narrow and standard gauge lines to the north and south that served ironstone quarries and brought their product to the ...
Sir Ed Davey, leader of Britain's Liberal Democrats, has faced harsh criticism this week for his role in the Horizon IT scandal, after it was revealed that he failed to act on claims that sub-postmasters were being wrongly accused of theft and false accounting by the Post Office. note Anna Gross and Rafe Uddin on the Financial Times website. They go on to say that the blame should be shared far more widely, But experts and campaigners say that members of all three main political parties could have done more to address claims over the nearly two-decade scandal that has ...
If there is one think everyone in the UK is agreed upon at the moment it is that the Horizon scandal represents a terrible and devastating miscarriage of justice. The ITV drama Mr Bates v The Post Office follows events through the experiences of Alan Bates, a a former sub-postmaster who identified problems with the Horizon IT system in the early days and later helped to create a campaign group to highlight both the nature and scale of the problem - as well as the impact it was having on so many innocent people. Mr Bates v The Post Office ...
Embed from Getty ImagesI first came across David Storey when his novel Saville won the Booker Prize. It was one of those books about the progress of a working-class grammar school and his alienation from his background that used to be everywhere. The grandfather of this school of literature was D.H. Lawrence, and I was studying his novel The Rainbow for A level at the time. Our teacher talked about Storey's debt to Lawrence and suggested we might want to read Saville. Storey's own life story was like one of his novels on speed. At one time he was studying ...
If there is one universal constant in this world it is bureacratic inertia, a tendency for government to plough on regardless, irrespective of the storms gathering around it. This has never been seen more clearly than in the Post Office Horizon scandal, when a failed ICT project to enable benefits to be paid over Post Office counters was transformed into accounting software for small sub-postmasters. This scheme inevitably failed to work properly, ruining the lives of over 700 famlies when the bureaucrats in both Fujitsu and the Post Office decided to blame the victims rather than admit to their own ...
We all know that NHS dental appointments can be almost impossible to access in many areas of the country. Liberal Democrats have been highlighting this for months and calling on the Government to do more to ensure people can access this key service. Yesterday, Tim Farron spoke in an opposition day debate on dental services and said that he had been told that some children were missing school to go abroad for dental appointments because they couldn't get them locally: I have heard at first hand from my constituents about the shocking scale of the difficulty of getting access to ...
MPs vote on blocking water firms receiving tax cuts unless they stop sewage discharges 10 water firms paid no tax last year after government's previous round of tax cuts on industry Water firms who paid £1.4bn in dividends to overseas owners are now set to receive permanent tax cuts from government Liberal Democrat amendment vows to block "water industry gravy train, where money and sewage flows freely" Today, MPs expect to vote on a Liberal Democrat amendment to block disgraced water firms receiving a tax cut. The Government's Finance Bill allows water firms to fully expense the costs of investment ...
At council committee on Monday night, Michael welcomed proposals for some improvements at Greater Balgay. These include installation of new fence to the north of Rose Garden, installation of bollards at Balgay Hill and repair to wall north of Balgay Cemetery. We continue to raise residents' issues about maintenance at Greater Balgay and recently reported damage to part of the boundary fence between the cemetery and Royal Victoria Hospital immediately north of Elliot Road.
