Sue Jones obituary

My friend Sue Jones, who has died of cancer aged 67, did enormous good for the people of Harlow in Essex as a welfare rights adviser. Although she was not from Harlow originally, over a period of 40 years she came to imbue the town’s spirit, and became a champion for it.Sue arrived there in the mid-1980s to work as a benefits and employment adviser in the Welfare Rights and Advice Service, which at the time was run by the local council. She eventually rose to be the service’s chief executive when it floated away from local authority control.I worked with Sue when I became a local councillor and then when I was elected as Harlow’s MP

Some probation officers given a week’s notice of serious offenders’ release, union says

Probation officers have been given as little as a week’s notice to prepare for serious offenders to be freed in England and Wales under the government’s early-release scheme, the Guardian has been told.About 2,000 prisoners are expected to be let out on Tuesday 10 September amid warnings of a coming spike in crime. But members of the probation officers’ union Napo were only informed on 3 September that this would include some serious offenders being released into their supervision.Officers are usually given more than three months to prepare services to help monitor and rehabilitate a serious offender. The development comes as the prison population reached a record high on Friday

Survey showing UK’s loss of pride in its past is encouraging, says historian

A striking fall in pride in Britain’s history, but widespread support for the arts, shows the public are choosing “Shakespeare over invasion, exploitation and occupation”, a leading historian has said.The findings from the British Social Attitudes survey, published this week, show that while levels of pride in Britain’s achievements in sport and the arts remained high over the past decade, there was a 22-point fall in the proportion of people saying they were proud of Britain’s history.Prof Alan Lester, the editor of a new book on empire featuring guest essays from the eminent historian Liam J Liburd and the journalist Sathnam Sanghera, described the results as an “encouraging sign” that the public were becoming more discerning about Britain’s past.“It shows an awareness that history is complicated, that Britons have done both admirable things and deplorable things in the past, and we need to break down history into the kinds of things that we see as sources of pride and those which we need to move beyond.”He credits this shift in public consciousness to the Black Lives Matter movement and Britain’s changing demographics

Untouched parts of England’s green belt at risk amid housing target pressure

Huge expanses of green belt land in England could be built on to meet government housing targets, it has emerged, with guidelines saying that councils lacking enough brownfield sites will be expected to offer untouched plots for construction.The proposals, set out in consultation documents for the revised planning rules across England, prompted condemnation from campaigners, who accused ministers of making misleading promises about protecting the green belt.There is also concern that the new national planning policy framework (NPPF) waters down targets for affordable homes, with a previous stipulation that at least 10% of new homes would have to be affordable being scrapped.When the draft NPPF was unveiled in July, part of a pledge to build 1.5m new homes over five years, it was announced that councils that failed to meet construction targets could be forced to use “grey belt” sites, low-quality areas of the green belt such as former car parks and petrol stations, and sites on the edges of towns and villages

Prisons crisis needs ‘radical solutions’ in England and Wales, say former top judges

Five of the most senior former judges in England and Wales have warned that “radical solutions” such as the earlier release of killers and rapists on licence should be considered to ease the prison overcrowding crisis.The four surviving former lord chief justices – Lord Woolf, Lord Phillips of Worth Matravers, Lord Thomas of Cwmgiedd, and Lord Burnett of Maldon – and Sir Brian Leveson, the only surviving president of the queen’s bench division, have recommended a review at the halfway stage of the determinate sentences of all prisoners serving longer than 10 years.Other proposals include the release of all prisoners serving indeterminate sentences who are over tariff and removal of all those who are elderly, dying or who have dementia from prison.The former judges say there is no justification for the doubling of custodial sentence lengths over the last half century. The number of people in prison has risen from about 40,000 in 1991 to more than 88,000 today