May 2007

Alan Johnson, independent schools and the Charities Act 2006

May 26, 2007

I take my hat off to Alan Johnson: he’s managed to achieve a public profile far ahead of his Labour deputy leadership rivals this week with his brutal condemnation of Margaret Hodges remarks on housing, and now with his suggestion that independent schools should have to share their resources with the state sector if they [...]

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The Attorney General, and Andrei Lugovoi

May 25, 2007

What’s wrong with Lord Goldsmith? He’s been insisting today that Andrei Lugovoi must be extradited to the UK, even though it’s perfectly clear Russia cannot lawfully extradite him, and that the 1957 Convention does not oblige them to. So I’m astonished that Lord Goldsmith is talking publicly as though the UK has a proper legal [...]

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The Charman divorce

May 24, 2007

John Charman’s miffed that the Court of Appeal has upheld a financial award of £48,000,000 to his ex-wife Beverley on their divorce after 27 years. There’ll be a lot written on this in the newspapers tomorrow I dare say, but unsurprisingly the first robust sense comes from John Bolch at Family Lore. I agree with [...]

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Terri King’s successful unfair dismissal claim

May 24, 2007

I’ve just heard a report on BBC News 24 about Southampton Employment Tribunal’s compensatory award of £18,000 for unfair dismissal to Terri King. Ms. King was sacked by her employer, Lymington Citizen’s Advice Bureau, for breaching their client confidentiality policy. This was following a call to her from a client who talked about how her [...]

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EU citizens, social housing and Margaret Hodge

May 23, 2007

Nearly Legal – an excellent blawg with particular strength in housing law – wrote interestingly the other day about Margaret Hodge’s comment about economic migrants and access to social housing. But isn’t the position for EU citizens simpler than that? It seems to me that any EU citizen (excluding Romanians and Bulgarians for the time [...]

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Remedy UK loses judicial review

May 23, 2007

RemedyUK has lost its judicial review claim against Patricia Hewitt, and she’s claiming costs against them, which they’re miffed about, not surprisingly. They’re not intending to appeal, so she can get on with the way ahead for the second round of interviews that she proposed to Parliament recently.

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HIPs delayed until August

May 22, 2007

So, following an interim restraining order from the Administrative Court preventing her from bringing in requirement for house sellers to produce Energy Performance Certificates pending the full hearing of RICS’s judicial review, Ruth Kelly has decided to beat a tactical retreat and consult on RICS’s proposals for detailed changes to the EPC rules., and delay [...]

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Andrei Lugovoi

May 22, 2007

I’m glad the DPP has recommended that Lugovoi be charged with the murder of Alexander Litvinenko. I’ve no idea whether he’s guilty or innocent, of course. But the CPS obviously thinks there’s enough evidence to prosecute, and it’s good that they’re acting on that, and that a murder in London is not going to be [...]

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Lord Grabiner? Baroness Scotland?

May 17, 2007

Various newspapers have been reporting that the next Attorney General may be Lord Grabiner, a well-known commercial silk, and Labour peer since 1999. For some time I had suspected Baroness Scotland was the obvious choice, but I suppose she might be a candidate for Minister of Justice. In any case, my money’s on Grabiner now [...]

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Missing Madeleine McCann

May 17, 2007

I very much agree with Iain Dale about the media coverage of the “suspect” Robert Murat and indeed of the Russian man who’s now in the spotlight. I really wish the BBC and other media would think again before going headlong towards an American-style approach to reporting crime stories. I think restraint is in the [...]

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