Chancellor George Osborne is committed to cutting a further 100,000 Civil Service jobs by 2020 and shrinking the entire Government Estate by 75% before 2023. Government services that the public rely on are being decimated as a result of job cuts. Examples from the Passport Office, HMCTS, Land Registry, HMRC, DWP and elsewhere show that cuts in the Civil Service are having a negative impact on service users. Communities are being cut-off from local services. The Civil Service is near to breaking point, the digital technology replacing local services untested and unstable making the planned cuts unsustainable. In Stoke-on-Trent the HMRC have announced that Blackburn House tax office will close by or before 2020 with the loss of between 250-300 jobs to the local economy. Locally DWP has lost around a third of its workforce in the area since 2010 to the detriment of service delivery and the welfare of its remaining workforce. The impact of the loss of this significant number of jobs to the local economy and labour market cannot be underestimated. There is no clear evidence that growth in private sector jobs within the area will replace these jobs. We call on the Government to halt the cuts to Civil Service jobs in Stoke-on-Trent and North Staffordshire and invest in Central Government services within the region.

Margate has The Turner Centre and Dreamland to attract visitors. We have our beautiful Royal Harbour, Tunnels and wonderful cafe culture but we need more reasons for families to visit. Thanet as a whole would benefit from the added tourism as we would be able to offer a better package, more reasons to visit. The wheel would not incur huge capital investment, ongoing leasing fees would be paid for out of revenue, therefore no risk to the council.

Brief summary of the NHS Bill In short, the Bill proposes to fully restore the NHS as an accountable public service by reversing 25 years of marketization in the NHS, by abolishing the purchaser-provider split, ending contracting and re-establishing public bodies and public services accountable to local communities. This is necessary to stop the dismantling of the NHS under the Health and Social Care Act 2012. It is driven by the needs of local communities. Scotland and Wales have already reversed marketization and restored their NHS without massive upheaval. England can too. The Bill gives flexibility in how it would be implemented, led by local authorities and current bodies. It would: 1.) Reinstate the government’s duty to provide the key NHS services throughout England, including hospitals, medical and nursing services, primary care, mental health and community services, 2.) Integrate health and social care services, 3.) Declare the NHS to be a “non-economic service of general interest” and “a service supplied in the exercise of governmental authority” so asserting the full competence of Parliament and the devolved bodies to legislate for the NHS without being trumped by EU competition law and the World Trade Organization’s General Agreement on Trade in Services, 4.) Abolish the NHS Commissioning Board (NHS England) and re-establish it as a Special Health Authority with regional committees, 5.) Plan and provide services without contracts through Health Boards, which could cover more than one local authority area if there was local support, 6.) Allow local authorities to lead a ‘bottom up’ process with the assistance of clinical commissioning groups (CCGs), NHS trusts, NHS foundation trusts and NHS England to transfer functions to Health Boards, 7.) Abolish NHS trusts, NHS foundation trusts and CCGs after the transfer by 1st January 2018, 8.) Abolish Monitor – the regulator of NHS foundation trusts, commercial companies and voluntary organisations – and repeal the competition and core marketization provisions of the 2012 Act, 9.) Integrate public health services, and the duty to reduce inequalities, into the NHS, 10.) Re-establish Community Health Councils to represent the interest of the public in the NHS, 11.) Stop licence conditions taking effect which have been imposed by Monitor on NHS foundation trusts and that will have the effect of reducing by April 2016 the number of services that they currently have to provide, 12.) Require national terms and conditions under the NHS Staff Council and Agenda for Change system for relevant NHS staff, 13.) Centralise NHS debts under the Private Finance Initiative (PFI) in the Treasury, require publication of PFI contracts and also require the Treasury to report to Parliament on reducing NHS PFI debts, 14.) Abolish the legal provisions passed in 2014 requiring certain immigrants to pay for NHS services 15.) Declare the UK’s agreement to the proposed Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership and other international treaties affecting the NHS to require the prior approval of Parliament and the devolved legislatures, 16.) Require the government to report annually to Parliament on the effect of treaties on the NHS.

Without my car, I'm not safe. I use my vehicle to get to work, the supermarket, the shops, the cleaners, the hairdressers, to visit family, to volunteer, to do everything I need to do. Without my car, I cannot get about. I cannot safely walk to the bus stop, and should I use public transport I have no guarantee that my mobility will remain long enough for me to get to my destination or even get home. I've been stranded in city centres and other places because I used public transport and then wasn't strong enough to return to a bus stop and get home. Many people with motability vehicles rely on these to get by. Without my car, I couldn't work. If I can't work, I can't pay my rent. If I can't pay my rent, I don't have anywhere to live - disabled people are facing these choices today. Many disabled people have 'mild-moderate' support needs. That means, social services cannot afford to help them in this climate of cuts and their only way forward is disability benefits or a motability vehicle. Without the motability vehicle, we become vulnerable. We can exert ourselves, get weaker, get to a place where we become more reliant on the state, cannot work, cannot socialise and collectively cost more in healthcare. That argument doesn't matter though. What matters is that collectively we have a right and a need to access a full and equivalent life and bit by bit rights are being stripped away. Re-evaluate and stop removing people's motability cars.

After long resisting the call to make land ownership transparent in Scotland, the Scottish Government has finally said that it will make provision for ‘a public register of persons who control land in Scotland’ – but the details remain unspecified and, with the Holyrood parliamentary session ending on 23 March, there may be no time to review or amend the proposals. We need the Scottish Government to fulfil their belated promises on transparency of land ownership. In 1617, James VI of Scotland (& I of England) brought in the Register of Sasines Act to counter fraud in land transactions by creating a register of title to record who had sold what to whom, but today in Scotland – four hundred years later - the owners of at least 3.45 million acres (22.1% of all rural land) cannot be identified, largely because the owners shelter behind nominees, many registered in offshore jurisdictions (eg the British Virgin Islands). It is clear that the prime reason for concealing ownership is to avoid tax (eg Land and Buildings Transaction Tax and Inheritance Tax) and to ‘launder’ ill-gotten cash. Parliamentary committees (and the SNP 2015 Conference) have urged the Government to make radical improvements to the law and ensure transparency in land title, so that the people of Scotland can know who owns Scotland. But the Government resisted all changes to its Land Reform Bill until mid-February, when the Minister relented and stated that she would be making provision for ‘the creation of a public register of persons who control land in Scotland’ so that they could no longer ‘hide behind obscure company titles or trust arrangements.’ The belated conversion of the Minister is welcome, but it may come too late to implement the measures in full before Holyrood breaks up on 23 March. We are now very short of time and we need to get it right in this Parliamentary Session: a four hundred year delay is enough!

Because the government is telling us we are all in it together.Prove it by Using the same method as public workforce pay is set by.

Having watched PMQs for decades, today, 24th Feburary 2016, underlined what a farce it has become. The Prime Minister has now fallen so low as to mock the way people dress. Although this may be common behaviour on the playing fields of Eaton, it completely debases his high office and our great country. Despite some wonderful innovations from the leader of the opposition, Jeremy Corbyn, the Prime Ministers behaviour has worsened, and he continues as he did in 2010 to not answer straight questions to which the British public deserve straight answers. There seens to be a misconception from the Prime Minster that PMQs is a time for levity whereas it performs an essential constitutional function for British citizens to get information directly from the Prime Minister. In short it is time the Prime Minister grew up and lived up to his responsibilities to the people of Great Britain.

Parliament is shown to a worldwide audience, who see abusive behaviour and verbal noises on a daily basis, of a type usually only heard in a farmyard. You may be able to laugh it off but the rest of us cringe with shame. You represent 60 million people in this country but look like football hooligans on a piss-up. Any similar behaviour on the part of any other one of us would result in instant dismissal, rather than the support of his colleagues and a thumbs up from the boss. Have a little pride in your position as the Speaker of the House and do the right thing, and stop the embarrassment of PMQs every week.

Democracy is a farce if cheating in an election is permitted regardless of how late the wrong doing is discovered and whether or not police action is possible. Political parties that gain office through electoral fraud should not be allowed to continue with impunity, they must demonstrate that they have legitimate support of the electorate.

Because justice needs to be done both these men are totally innocent and have been wrongly convicted of murder.

£3.30 per hour is not a wage that can be lived on, in fact a person earning this amount of money cannot afford to rent in most places and would even struggle to afford transport to get to where they are doing their apprenticeship. A person working the same 40 hours, as most apprenticeships stipulate, could earn up to four times as much as those who are in apprenticeships, for the same amount of work. It is preposterous that a person on an apprenticeship working 40 hours a week should earn only £120.00 on average.

At present there is no cohesive or structured information. The information we do get is all from persons, politicians or companies with vested interests or emotional feelings of one kind or another. At present coverage is hotch potch and it's pot luck to whether you get information or not. Many times it is only one point of view. If we all knew that we would get sensible information at a certain time on a certain channel , I feel that many of us would benefit enormously. This would enable us all to vote more intelligently. It might even be better to be on many channels.