Consumers are preparing for a hike in airfares next week as new flight taxes or 'air passenger duty' rates come into effect on 1st November for all routes out of the UK.
Air passenger duty was introduced in 1994. Initially, costs were calculated according to whether travellers were flying long-haul or short-haul.
Since 2009, however, these costs have changed to fall into four distance bands -- A, B, C and D, where D is the most expensive.
"I don't want to leave," says 64-year-old Romsey Town Council manager Glyn Darby. Alas, because of his age, he says he has no choice.
Mr Darby turns 65 on Sunday and under the present statutory retirement procedure employers can force staff to retire at this age regardless of the circumstances so long as they follow the correct procedure.
In July, the government announced plans to phase out the so-called "default retirement age", but this came too late for Mr Darby.
A former Inverness nursery school supervisor has commenced legal action for unfair dismissal and sex / pregnancy discrimination.
Rosemary McCallum, 28, began working at Les Enfants Nurseries in January 2009 and looked after two to three-year-olds. After a few months, she was promoted to room supervisor and assumed responsibility for managing around five staff members.
Shortly after this, she became pregnant and went on sick leave for a week.
When she returned to the nursery, the company handed her a letter containing four statements from anonymous members of staff criticising her performance and inviting her to a disciplinary hearing.
A whistleblower at multinational pharmaceutical company GlaxoSmithKline has won £61m damages after the company sacked her for exposing a series of contamination problems at a drugs factory in Puerto Rico. The payout is believed to be the biggest ever for a whistleblower
Cheryl Eckard, 51, first complained about problems at Glaxo's huge Cidra factory in July 2002. She alleged that staff were "skimming" drugs to sell them on the Latin American black market; drugs of different types and strengths were found in the same bottle; a diabetes medication (Avandamet) was shipped in tablets of the wrong strength; and an antibiotic ointment used to treat skin infections in babies (Bactroban) was contaminated with a micro-organism associated with bacteraemia, urinary tract infections, meningitis, wound infection, and peritonitis.
A recent case in the Court of Appeal testifies to the struggle parents from different countries go through when they split up and one of them wants to return to their home country.
The case in question -- R (A Child) [2010] EWCA Civ 1137 -- involved a mother who wished to raise her five-year-old son in Perth, Australia, and a father who wanted the boy to remain in England.
The UK Border Agency has today published a study which looks at the jobs being done by migrants who are in the UK under Tier 1 of the points-based system.
Tier 1 is for highly skilled workers, investors and entrepreneurs, but the study reveals that around a third of the 1,184 people sampled are being employed in lower-skilled jobs such as shop assistants and supermarket cashiers.
A former hotel manager launched a claim for constructive dismissal this week claiming she was forced to quit her job because of persistent bullying from a chairman of a Scottish Premier League football club.
Janet Meldrum, 61, of Greens Road, Stevenston, resigned from Park Hotel after a string of incidents involving Kilmarnock FC chairman Michael Johnston.
The four-star hotel, which is located next door to the Killies' Rugby Park stadium, is in fact owned by the club, and Ms Meldrum says Mr Johnston was a regular visitor.
She first submitted a grievance about him in 2008 because he was "nit picking" her work and undermining her.
A barmaid sacked by text message after she overslept for a shift working at a pub has won £14,355 following an employment tribunal hearing in Dundee.
Hundreds of call centre employees made redundant in the North East over the summer won claims for unfair dismissal at an employment tribunal in Newcastle yesterday.
1,158 staff working at Garlands call centres in South Shields, Middlesbrough and Hartlepool were laid off after the company called in administrators.
Around 300 of them say they are still owed three months wages because they were not given a 90-day consultation period before being laid off.
A corrupt barrister who earned millions of pounds running a bogus college and immigration advisory firm in London was jailed for eight and a half years yesterday.
A petition and Twitter campaign calling on Vodafone to pay a reputed £6bn in unpaid tax were launched last week. The e-petition already has over 1000 signatories and the Twitter campaign was averaging a tweet every 2-3 minutes yesterday evening.
The petitioners claim that Vodafone evaded the tax by using Luxembourg as a routing location for their £112bn ($183bn) acquisition of German mobile phone company Mannesmann and subsequent profit "stashing". The deal was signed in 2000 and at the time it was the biggest corporate merger in history.
Recent press reports, however, indicate that HM Revenue & Customs boss Dave Hartnett allegedly let Vodafone forgo £4.8bn when he settled a longstanding tax dispute with the company.
The UK Border Agency arrested a bride and groom literally at the alter yesterday, as part of its continuing crusade against sham marriages and immigration fraud.
UKBA officers interrupted the wedding just as it was about to start at Sheffield Register Office, located in a busy shopping district in the city, and led away a 36-year-old man originally from Afghanistan and a 21-year-old Slovakian woman in handcuffs.
The Guardian reports the couple, wearing full wedding attire, were escorted past shoppers in the busy plaza along with two guests who had been invited to the wedding. The four were then taken to a police station for questioning.
Two of the social workers who were sacked following the horrific death of baby Peter Connelly have lost their claim for unfair dismissal against Haringey Council, it has emerged.
The council fired Gillie Christou and Maria Ward in April 2009 for "gross misconduct".
At last month's tribunal hearing, however, the social workers claimed they were sacked solely because of "political and media pressure" over Peter's death and as such their dismissal was unfair. "Heads had to roll -- regardless, I suggest, of the evidence," said their legal counsel Nick Toms.
The UK Border Agency has announced the monthly limit for "tier 1" highly skilled non-EU migrants was reached ten days before month-end in October.
While it has temporarily stopped issuing visas, the Agency is still accepting applications however. Successful applicants will just have to wait until after 1 November before their visas are processed.
A runner who competed for England at the Commonwealth Games in Delhi recently has commenced legal action for constructive dismissal against her former employers, claiming they reneged on offers to help her compete.
Athlete Michelle Ross-Cope, 38, from Waterhayes in Newcastle, worked as a finance assistant at Freshpack Ltd.
She finished sixth in last week's Commonwealth Games marathon, but says increased sporting success came at a price and put a huge strain on her relationship with the company.
A disabled man nicknamed 'Ironside' by his boss has won £6,000 compensation, following an employment tribunal hearing in Manchester.
Brian Davies, 51, decided to sue his employer 'Remploy' after he heard manager Steve Wellens refer to him by name of the wheelchair-bound detective played by Raymond Burr in the classic American TV series.
Mr Davies suffers from brittle bones and has been using a wheelchair all his life. He described the nickname as 'derogatory'.
An NHS doctor who blew the whistle on medical equipment she considered 'only fit for the bin' has claimed that she was victimised before an employment tribunal in Inverness this week.
Dr Christine Paterson, 50, worked as a locum at the NHS Highland practice of Kinlochbervie and Scourie until May 2006.
She says that shortly after telling her manager that the practice electrocardiogram machine did not work and that drugs were out of date, she suffered various instances of victimisation and detriment, which culminated in her locum contract being cancelled.
Around 300 former Garlands call centre employees laid off over the summer have filed claims against the company claiming their redundancy rights were violated.
Over 1,000 employees were made redundant at the Garlands call centres in South Shields, Middlesbrough and Hartlepool after the company called in administrators.
The Shields Gazette reports that the company's chief executive Chey Garland announced the lay offs on May 17 over the "in-house radio system".
In dramatic circumstances, Ms Garland explained the firm could no longer support trading after the "termination of key contracts" and gave staff one hour to collect their belongings and leave the call centres before the doors closed.
Lawyers representing extremist cleric Abu Hamza say he will become 'stateless' if the Home Office strip him of his UK passport.
Hamza, 52, came to the UK from Egypt in 1979 on a student visa and acquired British citizenship through marriage.
This was subsequently withdrawn in 2003 by David Blunkett after he praised the September 11 attack on the World Trade Center in Manhattan.
He was then jailed in February 2006 for inciting murder and racial hatred, and is currently residing at Belmarsh Prison midway through a seven-year sentence.
He is also fighting an attempt to extradite him to the United States to face terrorism charges.
Unite, Britain's biggest trade union, has announced it will ballot its British Airways cabin crew members over a settlement deal to end a year-old dispute with the airline.
As documented on this blog, British Airways chairman Willie Walsh provoked the union's ire in October 2009 by announcing 1,700 cabin crew redundancies, "imposing" contractual changes on the remaining 14,000 cabin crew employees (now estimated at around 10,000), and trying to "introduce a second-tier workforce" by recruiting new cabin crew on poorer pay and conditions.
Since then, recriminations have flown back and forth between British Airways management and union officials, exacerbated by bitter court disputes in December and February over the legality of a strike ballot and imposition of cost-cutting proposals, which resulted in an estimated 6,700 cabin crew taking part in 22 days of strikes this year.
The Supreme Court of the United Kingdom enforced an ante-nuptial agreement -- sometimes called a prenuptial agreement or 'prenup' -- between a wealthy German heiress and her relatively impoverished French ex-husband this week.
The decision marks a radical shift in British law. Previous rulings considered prenups contrary to public policy on the basis that they might encourage couples to split up.
Moreover, there has long been a feeling that such agreements necessarily entail the exploitation of the vulnerable and financially weaker party -- historically women who might have children to care for.
The head of an elite cyber crime police unit lied under oath, an employment judge has said.
Detective Superintendent Charlie McMurdie runs the high-profile Police Central e-Crime Unit (PCeU) and recently gave evidence at an employment tribunal hearing involving a former subordinate, whistleblower Detective Sergeant Howard Shaw.
Shaw claimed McMurdie colluded to force him out of the PCeU after he blew the whistle on "misconduct and dishonesty" by another of McMurdie's subordinates, Detective Inspector Kevin Williams, in October 2008.
A French teacher who condemned 'utterly chaotic' state schools at the Tory Party conference last month has reportedly left her job at an inner city academy in Camberwell, south London.
Katharine Birbalsingh, 37, won a standing ovation at the conference, in which she said teachers were 'blinded by leftist ideology', exams were dumbed down and 'well meaning liberal' teachers refused to discipline black children for fear of being called racist.
According to the Daily Mail, however, Ms Birbalsingh's performance 'horrified her headmistress', who asked her to work from home after the conference 'while her position was reviewed'.
Chancellor George Osborne has announced that UK financial institutions have until next month to sign up to the new Code of Practice on Tax Avoidance, which requires banks to "comply with the spirit, as well as the letter of tax law".
The Code was introduced in February under former Chancellor Alistair Darling's watch.
Speaking on BBC One's Andrew Marr Show on Sunday, however, Osborne said so far only four of the 15 major British banks have signed up to it -- Lloyds Banking Group, Royal Bank of Scotland, Northern Rock, and Standard Chartered -- and three of them (Lloyds, RBS, and Northern Rock) are still majority-owned by the government.
A leading business advisory committee has warned the government its immigration cap on skilled workers from outside the EU threatens to eliminate the UK's global competitive edge.
The Professional and Business Services group -- which was set up in September 2008 by the then Chancellor of the Exchequer, Alistair Darling -- has compiled a list of businesses badly served by the immigration cap.
Let's face it: driving a bus all day, you don't have too many opportunities to exercise.
So perhaps it comes as no surprise that when Blackpool Transport bus company decided to suspend two drivers for being 'too fat', it caused an uproar -- even among the svelter members of the workforce.
Indeed solidarity is such among transport workers in the northwest that strike action now seems a real possibility.
Four men are on trial for murder at the Old Bailey this week charged with hacking to death a Punjabi woman who wished to divorce her husband.
The prosecution allege Harpreet Aulakh, 32, of Greenford, west London, offered £5,000 to "a room full of Punjabi men" to kill his wife Geeta.
After 19-year-old Sher Singh, of Southall, Harpreet Singh, 20, of Slough, and 30-year-old Jaswant Dhillon, of Ilford, east London, accepted the offer, the prosecution allege Mr Aulakh gave detailed instructions on where and when to execute his wife.
Some employees on sick leave hate their managers so much it should be considered a disability, an employment tribunal in Newcastle has heard.
Alison Doyle, 44, went on sick leave from Northumbria Police Authority in 2001 after suffering an attack while making an arrest. Following the attack, a doctor assessed the constable as permanently disabled and unfit to perform police duties because of a back injury and severe anxiety. As a result, Ms Doyle received enhanced pension rights.
Northumbria Police Authority challenged the assessment, however, and in 2005 the dispute reached the high court, which overturned Ms Doyle's permanent disability certificate.
A bin man who was sacked after he criticised council leaders on a newspaper's internet message board during a pay dispute has launched a legal bid for unfair dismissal compensation.
Father-of-two Paul French, 50, worked as an Edinburgh city council bin man for 11 years until his dismissal in March 2010. Using the pseudonym 'Paul the bin man', Mr French criticised council leaders over cuts to refuse collectors' pay and the use of private companies to break strike action.
An Edinburgh employment tribunal has ordered expenses scandal MP Jim Devine to pay his former assistant Marion Kinley £35,000 in compensation for bullying and harassment.
Ms Kinley, 47, from Glasgow, also won claims for breach of contract and unfair constructive dismissal after the tribunal ruled Mr Devine bullied and harassed her out of her job.
The real-life soap opera that is Liverpool Football Club swings back to Sue-Ellen and JR Ewing country today.
After another day of great drama at London's high court, Justice Floyd ordered the club's owners, Tom Hicks and George Gillett, to withdraw their Texas state court petition to facilitate the orderly sale of Liverpool FC to New England Sports Ventures (NESV).
He gave the duo until 4pm BST today to comply with the order or risk being charged with contempt of court -- a serious offence that can carry a prison sentence.
A former oboist at Welsh National Opera, who is claiming wrongful dismissal, has accused former conductor Carlo Rizzi of "bullying" at an employment tribunal in Cardiff this week.
Oboe player Murray "Sandy" Johnston, 61, was sacked in 2008 after playing for the company for 34 years.
He says Rizzi began singling him out for criticism in 2004. He told Johnston to work on his "ensemble playing" (i.e., playing with a group of other musicians) and blending the sound of the oboe with the rest of the woodwind section, and then with the wider orchestra.
Former James Bond actor Sean Connery, now aged 80, and his wife Micheline Roquebrune are scheduled to appear in court in Marbella today on corruption charges.
The charges relate to Connery's 1998 sale of a mansion in the Costa del Sol for a reported Ä6.4m (£5.6m).
Following the sale of the property, developers constructed a four-story 72-unit luxury apartment building on the site.
The municipal government in Marbella claims planning permission was "restricted to five family homes". They also say the owners of the land made a tidy Ä53m profit on the development and therefore owe Ä2.7m in unpaid taxes.
They've dubbed the investigation into the development Operation Goldfinger, in honour of the 1964 Bond classic in which Connery starred.
As already discussed in earlier posts today, the American owners of debt-ridden Liverpool FC, Tom Hicks and George Gillett, have won a temporary restraining order in Texas state court to block the sale of the club to New England Sports Ventures (NESV).
The news emerged at around 9pm UK time by way of a statement published on law firm Fish & Richardson's website. The statement is reproduced in full below:
'The owners of Liverpool Football Club today reported that a Texas State District Court has granted a temporary restraining order (TRO) enjoining the Board of Liverpool Football Club (LFC) from executing a sale of the Club to New England Sports Ventures (NESV). The court set a hearing date of October 25, 2010.
In a dramatic twist late last night, a state court in Texas granted the American owners of debt-ridden Liverpool Football Club, Tom Hicks and George Gillett, a temporary restraining order (TRO) to stop the £300m sale of the club to New England Sports Ventures (NESV), the owners of Boston Red Sox.
The TRO request, signed by Judge Jim Jordan of the 160th District Court in Dallas, was part of a lawsuit filed by Hicks and Gillett against Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS), NESV, Liverpool chairman Martin Broughton, managing director Christian Purslow, commercial director Ian Ayre, and financial director Philip Nash.
Many furious Liverpool fans have questioned the authority of an American court to block the sale. The fans fail to realise, however, that RBS, Broughton (in his role as chairman of British Airways), and NESV all have significant connections with Texas, which allows the state court to exercise personal jurisdiction over them. Any violation of the order could lead to criminal charges of contempt.
The Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) won a high court case against the owners of Liverpool Football Club yesterday in London.
The owners of the debt-ridden club, Tom Hicks and George Gillett, tried to sack two board members and replace them with their own appointments to prevent the knockdown £300m sale of the club to Boston Red Sox owners New England Sports Ventures.
In so doing, High Court Justice Floyd ruled the pair had breached a refinancing arrangement agreed with RBS in April.
In a recent case before the Employment Appeal Tribunal (EAT), a partner of a law firm was ordered to pay compensation to a solicitor he supervised after he gave her a bad reference which resulted in a prospective employer withdrawing a job offer.
Two illegal sperm traders who earned £250,000 by operating an online fertility service were sentenced at Southwark crown court yesterday.
The pair, Nigel Woodforth, 43, and Ricky Gage, 49, escaped immediate imprisonment after being convicted of three charges of providing sperm without a licence or third-party agreement, and instead received nine-month sentences suspended for two years,
Around 800 women signed up for the service, which operated under various names including Sperm Direct Limited and First4Fertility, and was ran out of the basement of Woodforth's home in Reading, Berkshire.
The service operated by Gage and Woodforth promised women a "life-changing opportunity towards motherhood". It also boasted of having more than 300 donors nationwide and a 37% success rate.
One woman told the court she paid around £600 per menstrual cycle. In return, she was given a chance to choose the ethnicity, height, hair colour, education and hobbies of her sperm donor. A courier would then deliver a box, wrapped in grey polythene and containing a pot of sperm and a 10ml syringe.
A leading union official has branded Hewlett Packard's decision to cut a further 1,300 jobs in the UK as "butchery".
Unite union says HP has cut more than 6,000 jobs in the UK over the past two years. This comes despite recent financial results for the company published in August showing revenues up 11 per cent and operating profits up a whacking 14 per cent. If this rate of performance continues, the union stands to earn nearly $130 billion in revenues this year.
Unite says most of the jobs are being outsourced to HP locations outside the UK.
A former Stringfellows stripper who earned £200,000 a year at the Covent Garden club appeared before an employment tribunal yesterday to claim unfair dismissal.
Nadine Quashie, 28, said she was officially self-employed - which would bar a claim for unfair dismissal - but a series of "petty" rules imposed by club boss Peter Stringfellow effectively made her an employee.
Two Polish criminals convicted of human trafficking were sentenced to a total of six years imprisonment in Sheffield yesterday after pleading guilty to trafficking offences.
Lukasz Adamowicz and Jerzy Bala were members of a highly organised criminal gang running one of the UK's largest human trafficking operations.
They lured workers to the UK from Poland on the promise of paid work and a better life by placing advertisements in Polish-language newspapers and on websites.
In reality, the workers were forced to work up to 12 hours a day and then housed in a derelict property at night, unable to leave.
HM Revenue & Customs has started sending out letters to around 5.7m people affected by the PAYE tax code errors.
Earlier this autumn, the Revenue reported that around 4.3m people paid too much tax as a result of coding mistakes and are due refunds totalling £1.8bn, or an average of £420 per taxpayer; while 1.4m underpaid and will be asked to pay an additional £2bn, or an average of £1,428 per taxpayer.
The first letters telling taxpayers whether they will get a rebate or face having to pay extra money were sent out a couple of weeks ago.
A former traffic warden from Barnsley in South Yorkshire has claimed that his former colleagues tampered with ticket machines and ignored "grace periods" in order to issue more penalties.
Andrew Williams is suing Barnsley council for constructive dismissal. Appearing before an employment tribunal in Sheffield, he alleged that colleagues bullied him out of his job after he blew the whistle on their "fixing" ticket machines to reach parking ticket targets set by the council.
A former Radio Clyde breakfast show DJ has lodged an employment tribunal claim against the station alleging sex discrimination.
Comic Des McLean, 43, was laid off in August and replaced by co-presenters Suzie McGuire and George Bowie.
He claims the station's managers told him that they preferred a "male/female combination" for their morning show and organised a champagne party to celebrate the shake-up.
The Public and Commercial Services Union (PCS) says the Home Office decision to close the Identity and Passport Service (IPS) Office in Newport, south Wales, will have "devastating consequences" for the local economy.
PCS general secretary Mark Serwotka says the Newport closure will see the loss of around 250 jobs and scores more at IPS offices across the UK are under threat.
Approximately 70% of employees at collapsed computer games company Realtime Worlds have still not received statutory redundancy pay it has emerged.
The company's administrators, Begbies Traynor, say they distributed applications to claim redundancy in August. Several affected employees have questioned this, however.
On top of the complaints about redundancy pay, around 120 former Realtime workers have banded together to pursue an employment tribunal claim for non-payment of their final month's salary.
The company also faces potential liability for failing to properly consult.
A Glasgow employment tribunal awarded a former Chivas Brothers engineering administrator £65,000 in compensation for unfair dismissal this week.
Mary Robertson worked at Chivas' Kilmalid plant in Dumbarton. She was dismissed in December 2008 for "gross misconduct" after the company claimed she breached the spending limit on the company credit card she was given.
Chivas alleged the limit was set at £5,000 per month and that Ms Robertson exceed it by around £15,000 on average over a period of four months.
Immigration minister Damian Green has coming out fighting in response to criticism from the Confederation of British Industry (CBI) over the introduction of an interim cap on skilled workers from outside the EU.
Earlier this week, John Cridland, CBI Deputy Director-General, criticised interim arrangements for an immigration cap, saying: "The system is being poorly managed and proving a real headache for firms trying to keep on valued foreign members of staff, or recruit specialists from overseas.
A West Midlands recruitment professional claimed her boss subjected her to a persistent campaign of sexual harassment, discrimination and victimisation at a Birmingham employment tribunal this week.
Debbie Smith, 49, earned £90,000 a year working for Pertemps recruitment group before she was allegedly forced to leave following a series of 'humiliating' sexist remarks by the company's chairman Tim Watts.
A female estate agent who was sacked by her boss for failing to cover her hair with a headscarf has won over £13,500 in compensation for unlawful discrimination.
Ghazala Khan, 31, was dismissed in June 2009 less than two weeks into her job at Go Go Real Estate in Leeds, West Yorkshire, after the company's owner, Masood Ghafoor, told her that his wife and female relatives all wore full veils or burkas, and said her parents had granted her "far too much freedom" in allowing her to uncover her hair. He also suggested that she was a "bad Muslim".
A former Royal Mail employee sacked for taking time off to care for her asthmatic son has won almost £9,000 for unfair dismissal.
An Aberdeen employment tribunal heard that Alison Balch was dismissed with just one week's notice following a six-month trial period in 2009 "on the grounds of failure to demonstrate suitability for employment ... in particular in relation to attendance".
Before her dismissal, however, she received no formal warning about her absences. Moreover, as a new employee on a six-month trial period, she should have been given a performance review after three months in the job by her line manager. Although the review was written up into a report, she didn't get to see it until the end of her trial period -- three months later.
Attempting to defuse the row over plans to cut child benefit for higher-rate taxpayers, David Cameron has indicated the government will introduce an annual £150 tax break for married couples by 2015.
The prime minister said: "I have always supported the idea of supporting marriage through the tax system, specifically supporting the idea of a transferable tax allowance. The idea of a transferable tax allowance is in the coalition agreement.
"It's something we would like to do this parliament."
Over recent years, many wine dealers and investment companies have peddled the idea that wine is the ultimate recession-, inflation-, tax-proof investment asset -- worth its weight in gold.
When you pass on, the story ran, HM Revenue & Customs wouldn't assess inheritance tax (IHT) on the current market value of the wine, but rather on the price it was bought at.
Theoretically, this would mean that for a vintage case of wine purchased fifty years ago for £400 but now worth £4,000, you'd only have to pay £160 rather than £1,600 in IHT.
In many ways Obion County in rural Tennessee represents the libertarian Tea Party dream. Rural and sparsely populated, it's home to a largely white and God-fearing set of people, far removed from the hurly-burly and big government folks in Nashville, Memphis or (heaven forbid) Washington D.C.
This week, however, the perils of small government -- or "government a la carte" as it's come to be known -- came home to roost.
Gene Cranick, a homeowner located just outside the city limits of South Fulton (pop. 2,391) in Obion, forgot to pay $75 for the subscription fire protection service. This had drastic consequences when a bonfire on his property grew out of control and the fire department refused to help.
London mayor Boris Johnson has called for a change in the rules governing trade union strike action.
He told the Conservative Party conference in Birmingham that industrial action by London Underground members of the National Union of Rail, Maritime and Transport Workers (RMT) and Transport Salaried Staffs Association (TSSA) was "nakedly and blatantly political, and has nothing to do with health and safety".
He also complained that only 35% of TSSA members and less than a third of RMT members voted in favour of strike action.
A man from Cheshire who fraudulently claimed disability living allowance was jailed for six months yesterday after he pleaded guilty to a charge of false accounting at Warrington Crown Court.
David Simpson, 45, from Widnes, claimed £35,410 in disability benefits after telling officials he was "virtually invalid" for nine years.
Following an anonymous tip-off, however, covert surveillance by the Department for Work and Pensions caught him performing as an entertainer called "Wavey Davey" at children's parties across the North West of England and also as a gymnastics instructor.
New allegations of misconduct by Tory party spin doctor Andy Coulson emerged last night on Channel 4's respected current affairs programme 'Dispatches'.
An anonymous witness whose words were spoken by an actor appeared on the programme to recount his experience working as a senior journalist at the News of the World during Coulson's tenure as editor of the newspaper.
He told the programme that Coulson personally listened to intercepted voicemail messages. "Sometimes, [journalists] would say: 'We've got a recording' and Andy would say: 'OK, bring it into my office and play it to me' or 'Bring me, email me a transcript of it'.
The government has announced new proposals to punish local councils that wrongly ban events and activities on health and safety grounds. One idea under consideration would be to force councils to pay compensation where they unnecessarily block events taking place.
Lord Young will flesh out his proposals at the Tory party conference in Birmingham this week and has already spoken about how he wants to "curb the excesses of health and safety culture".
"It has gone to such extremes," he told the Mail. "What I have seen everywhere is a complete lack of common sense. People have been living in an alternative universe."
A business development manager at the University of Gloucestershire has won £6,000 damages after she was given an "ultimatum" to move departments after she blew the whistle on financial mismanagement in the Faculty of Education, Humanities and Sciences.
Janet Merrigan alleged faculty budgets were being blown on excessive staff pay, overseas travel and consultancy fees.
She claims that after she made the disclosures in a series of emails and conversations with bosses in June 2009 files were removed from her computer and she was excluded from meetings and sidelined in her role.
A Tory minister and Japanese car makers Nissan have called for an immigration cap 'exemption' for the automotive industry.
The annual immigration cap came into effect earlier this summer, much to the chagrin of the UK business community and even some in the Cabinet -- Secretary of State for Business, Vince Cable, is a vocal opponent and has said it is doing "huge damage" to the economy.
Now Conservative MP Mark Prisk, the Minister for Business and Enterprise, has called on the Home Office to grant the automotive industry an exemption from the cap. "We do not want the immigration cap to be a brake on the automotive industry in this country," he said. "We are looking at how the rules would work for the number of non-EU technical staff per company."
[Continued from: Equality Act now in force: what's in and what's out? (Part 1)]
Equality Act provisions held back until Spring 2011
The totemic Equality Act came into force today. Well, most of it. Around 10% of the Act's provisions have been held back pending further government consultation.
Before we take a look at the provisions held back, let's take a look at the ones that made it.
Campaigners from the Environmental Justice Foundation and Greenpeace have distributed harrowing evidence (including video footage -- see below) of illegal fishing off the coast of West Africa this week, which has prompted many in Europe to call for a more rigorous investigation by governments into the fishing industry.
Investigators discovered dozens of pirate fishing ships roaming the Atlantic Ocean and operating beyond the law.
Many of the trawlers never dock. They not only deplete fragile marine stocks, they are crewed by untrained and illiterate workers working up to 18 hours a day in appalling conditions.
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