‘Second chance’: why minister wants to jail fewer women in England and Wales

Pat had been in trouble with the police before, when she was 16 and had been spat out of the care system with no qualifications, no housing and no support. Nearly 50 years later, she heard a knock on the door again.There had been a fire in the estate where she lived, and another resident said she had seen Pat start it. “I was in the police station for nearly two days before I got to the magistrates court,” she said, worrying one finger over the top of her hand. “The magistrate said he was sending it to the crown court, and sending me to prison, basically

Robert Goodman obituary

In 1992 a man with poorly controlled schizophrenia climbed into the lions’ enclosure at London Zoo and was badly mauled. This and other horrifying incidents in the early 1990s prompted widespread concern about services for mentally ill people.Better statistics were urgently required. Official surveys initially focused on adults, but in 1999 the Office for National Statistics decided to survey children and young people’s mental health for the first time, turning to the child psychiatrist Robert Goodman to guide their team of psychologists and statisticians.As well as being a distinguished child psychiatrist, Goodman had invented two child psychiatric assessment tools that now underpin population surveys worldwide: the Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire (SDQ) and the Development and Well-Being Assessment (DAWBA)

Kent meningitis outbreak: key questions answered

A sixth-form pupil and a university student in Kent have died and 11 people are believed to be seriously ill in hospital after an outbreak of a rare form of invasive meningitis. We take a look at the disease, and how the situation is being managed.Meningitis is a serious condition in which the membranes surrounding the brain and spinal cord are infected with bacteria or a virus and become inflamed. It can come on suddenly and can be fatal.The current outbreak appears to involve invasive meningococcal disease

Inquiry launched into HMRC anti-fraud scheme that wrongly cut child benefits

The UK’s public spending watchdog has launched an investigation into a controversial government anti-fraud scheme that resulted in thousands of families being wrongly stripped of their child benefit payments.The National Audit Office (NAO) will examine how HM Revenue and Customs designed and implemented a scheme that used flawed Home Office travel records to identify parents suspected of living abroad while still claiming child benefit.The inquiry follows a series of articles in the Detail and the Guardian which exposed how HMRC relied on faulty travel data which recorded outgoing journeys, including airline bookings that were never used, and frequently failed to record return journeys by holidaymakers and business travellers.HMRC took the data in good faith from the Home Office and ended up incorrectly suggesting that families had emigrated and were fraudulently claiming the support from abroad.Among those who hadn’t even flown abroad but were stripped of child benefit was a woman who did not board the plane after her child had an epileptic seizure at the departure gate, and another woman who did not travel to Norway after the wedding she was planning to attend was cancelled

More than 100 Labour MPs call on PM to stop assisted dying bill being blocked

More than 100 Labour MPs have called on Keir Starmer to stop the House of Lords from blocking the assisted dying bill and give it more time to return to the Commons, with the legislation now certain to fall owing to lack of time.The private member’s bill, sponsored by Labour’s Kim Leadbeater, seeks to give terminally ill people in England and Wales with less than six months to live the right to an assisted death. It will fall when the parliamentary session comes to an end in May because peers have used multiple amendments and lengthy debates to prevent it from being put to a vote.A number of ministerial aides – parliamentary private secretaries – are also believed to have written to the prime minister separately. Ministers have told the Guardian they have also made the case to Starmer, saying it would be a moment to show some leadership on an issue popular with the public as well as a way to demonstrate he will not allow the Lords to block the will of the elected House of Commons

Fewer Britons giving to charity, study says, with donations down by £1.4bn

Britain is rapidly losing the charity habit, with public donations to good causes plummeting by more than £1.4bn last year and millions of people saying they can no longer afford – or do not want – to give, according to an analysis.The Charities Aid Foundation (Caf) said in its annual report that, while the British remained generous at heart, society was witnessing a big transformation in attitudes towards charitable giving. Just half of people gave to charity in 2025, down from 61% a decade earlier.Charity giving was no longer a “deeply embedded cultural norm” amid rising living cost pressures, and a more sceptical society, said the Caf managing director, Mark Greer: “Charities can no longer depend solely on habitual generosity or goodwill from the public,” he said