General News
TfL: The UK's biggest professional cycle race, the Tour of Britain, will return to the Capital's streets this year on the final stage of its 8-day UK tour. On Saturday 18 September 2010, 96 professional cyclists will race for a total of 100km on a 10km circuit around the Royal Docks in Newham, an Olympic host borough.
The TfL London Stage, which will take riders past the Thames Barrier, is set against the dramatic backdrop of the Canary Wharf skyline. This is the seventh time that Transport for London (TfL) has brought the Tour of Britain to the Capital. Last year, the final stage of the Tour attracted 150,000 spectators to the Capital's streets.
PCS: Voters in cabinet ministers' constituencies are being asked by representatives of the Public and Commercial Services union to support a campaign against cuts to civil service redundancy terms. Across the UK, union reps & officials are taking battle buses around towns & cities with sitting ministers, starting with a London tour that included civil service minister Tessa Jowell’s Dulwich & West Norwood constituency.
The tours highlight the union’s opposition to drastic cuts to the civil service compensation scheme, which governs payments in the event of redundancy or early retirement. The government’s decision to implement changes to the scheme without the union’s agreement is being challenged at a judicial review in the High Court in London. A parliamentary motion supporting the union’s campaign against the cuts was signed by 176 MPs, 121 of whom were Labour backbenchers.
CLG: Communities Secretary, John Denham, has accepted the Audit Commission's report on Doncaster Council and has said he will use his statutory powers to intervene. The Chief Executive criticised in the report has already left the council and has been replaced by Jo Miller as acting CE on an interim basis.
The report has identified severe failings across the council and the Government is now urgently discussing the form that intervention should take, including active consideration of appointing Commissioners to take over some or all of the council's functions.
The Audit Commission report into Doncaster Council found that the council was failing due to a culture of poor governance (following a corporate governance inspection) and recommended that the Secretary of State use his powers to issue a direction to intervene and set out steps that could be taken to improve the council's performance.
Socitm: Socitm and the LGA have just published a note encouraging local authorities to take part in the Open Election Data Project, which both organisations are supporting. The note explains the benefits of making election data open and provides information about support available to councils who want to make this happen.
TS – WWF: As air travel chaos continues across Europe, more & more businesses are discovering the advantages of environmentally-friendly video conferencing. Firms that have already invested in video conferencing facilities will have been far more resilient to the Europe-wide flight ban. Video conferencing saves money, increases productivity and reduces carbon emissions.
With air travel set to become one of the UK's biggest contributors to carbon emissions, the switch to virtual meetings is something WWF is working hard to encourage. They are helping businesses & public bodies to cut 20% of their flights through their One in Five Challenge: if every business in Europe made similar cuts to their business flights, 22m tonnes of CO2 a year would be saved – equivalent to taking a 33% of the UK's cars off the roads.
Newswire – CBI: The Government's new workplace pension scheme could deter millions of savers because of its high & complicated charges, the CBI has warned. Businesses are worried that staff (& particularly the lower paid) will baulk at the proposed charging structure of the National Employment Savings Trust (Nest), which loads fees towards the earlier years after a pension is opened in 2012.
While the Government says the contribution charge will be lowered after about 20 years, the CBI believes the current charging structure must be changed as a matter of priority to bring it more into line with the low-cost, simple solution, which the Turner Commission envisioned in its review of pensions in 2006.
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