We, NHS workers and users recognise the hard work domestics do every day to keep the hospital and public safe. We support their fight to keep their jobs in the NHS. When hospital cleaning services are privatised infection rates go up and workers’ pay is cut. We also stand against the hospital’s attempt to make the domestics paid their own nationally agreed NHS pay deal by cutting their bank/overtime hours. Bedford Hospital is targeting its lowest-paid workers, many of whom are migrant women — we believe this is an attack on equality.

I am Roland Zollner, a barrister from Liverpool, who has retired from the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS). It is now almost a decade since the Government announced swingeing cuts to the CPS, the Courts, legal aid and the entire Criminal Justice System. Real term pay-cuts of up to 42% are pushing lawyers away from criminal law towards more financially rewarding areas of practice. The explosion of digital evidence has put – as one FDA CPS member put it – “an almost intolerable burden on prosecutors”. Yet while disclosure has become more time-consuming since 2010, the budget of the CPS has fallen by 25% in the same period. As a result, 95.7% of prosecutors surveyed by the FDA now think the department does not have enough lawyers to deal with disclosure issues. “Due to many years of underinvestment, our Criminal Justice System is crumbling.” – Christina Blacklaws, President of the Law Society “A properly functioning Criminal Justice System is fundamental to the rule of law. It is a damning indictment of our times that those in power need reminding.” – The Secret Barrister “Our system of justice, which was once held up as world-class, is now very sick. But it would not take much investment to put it right.” – Richard Atkins QC, Chair of the Bar Council Help us put it right: sign the petition.

South Yorkshire Fire Authority is planning to save up to £4 million a year by cutting the number of firefighters crewing a fire appliance from five to four. This change will see the loss of 83 jobs and put the lives of people in South Yorkshire at risk. Five is the minimum number of firefighters needed to safely tackle a blaze and to rescue a member of the public trapped inside a burning building. Committing fewer firefighters to an incident risks leaving those inside with less support in a life or death situation. South Yorkshire Fire and Rescue Service say the only other alternative is to slow down response times by reducing the number of fire engines immediately available. It is unacceptable that budget shortfalls will result in firefighters and the public being put at greater risk.

HMRC’s ill-considered office closure plans, which they still euphemistically call ‘Building Our Future’, will have a particularly heavy impact on PCS members working in International House in Ealing. Many members working in the office have been redeployed previously, some several times, before being based at Ealing having therefore already gone through the “torment” of earlier office closures. As a result many Ealing staff do not live in Ealing and this combined with a significant proportion of staff having caring responsibilities and/or disabilities - making it near impossible for them to commute to Stratford. The closure of International House, if the work there is not relocated locally to another premises will mean that HMRC will no longer have a presence in Ealing, leading to a detrimental local socio economic impact in the area, the impact to the local economy could be as much as £1million per year.