Government’s top welfare official to step down

The government’s top welfare official is to step down after weeks of fierce criticism of his department’s handling of a longstanding benefits failure that plunged thousands into debt and became known as the carer’s allowance scandal.Sir Peter Schofield, the permanent secretary at the Department for Work and Pensions, announced to staff on Monday that he is to step down in July for personal reasons.The DWP has come under increasing scrutiny since a Guardian investigation revealed leadership shortcomings unfairly landed thousands of unpaid carers with hefty bills – and in some cases fraud convictions – for carer’s allowance overpayments.The impact on carers caused public outrage and was likened to the Post Office scandal. Some carers reported suicidal thoughts after they were caught up in a system one described as like being “at the whim of a faceless machine”

Joy Davies obituary

My mother, Joy Davies, who has died aged 89, was a chemist, social worker and passionate advocate for people with severe learning difficulties.Born in Ormesby, North Yorkshire, to Olive (nee Postgate), a midwife, and Thomas Hansell, a butcher, Joy went to the Cleveland school (now Teesside High) in Eaglescliffe. She left aged 16 and decided against working on the family farm near Swainby in North Yorkshire, choosing instead to join the Ministry of Agriculture, based in Newcastle upon Tyne. Her work testing milk at farms took her all over a region that remained close to her heart all her life.In the late 1950s, she joined British Titan Products, a company that manufactured titanium oxide, as a chemist, and worked in the company’s laboratories in Billingham, near Middlesbrough

Almost 70% of NHS areas in England offer only one cycle of IVF, data shows

Millions of women in England are able to access only one round of IVF on the NHS because of health authority cutbacks and in contravention of official policy, research from a fertility charity has shown.Nearly 70% of local areas fund just one cycle for women under 40 who have been unable to conceive for two years, rather than the three full cycles they should be offered in line with official guidance, according to data collected by the Progress Educational Trust (PET).Twenty-nine of the 42 integrated care boards (ICBs), which control NHS budgets locally, now offer only the one round, after four reduced access in the past year.Sarah Norcross, the director of PET, said the impact was “devastating” for those couples who were struggling with infertility.“Infertility is already incredibly stressful for people, and it puts them under even more pressure, because there is so much riding on whether that one NHS-funded cycle is going to work

A new town for the 21st century? Seven-village build to begin after 20-year journey

After two decades of legal wrangling and planning bottlenecks, the first bricks will finally be laid on a project being hailed by developers as the blueprint for the future of community building in Britain.Gilston in east Hertfordshire will be transformed into a network of seven interconnected villages, comprising 10,000 new homes nestled within a sprawling 660-hectare (1,630-acre) landscape of country parks and woodland.Greg Reed, the chief executive of Places for People (PfP), the social enterprise leading the development, said the timeline of the project served as a reminder of the sluggishness of the UK planning system.“PfP’s journey with Gilston started at the same time my 20-year-old son was born,” Reed says. “I was thinking about all the things that have happened in his life … and it’s a bit depressing

Synthetic opioids may have caused hundreds more UK deaths than thought

Deaths caused by a synthetic opioid that is hundreds of times stronger than heroin may have been underestimated by up to a third across the UK, according to research.Nitazenes are a class of synthetic opioids that are extremely potent, and up to 500 times stronger than heroin. They were manufactured originally as a painkiller in the 1950s but their development was halted due to their extreme potencies resulting in a high risk of addiction.In 2024, the National Crime Agency (NCA) reported that 333 fatalities across the UK were linked to the drug. However, researchers at King’s College London say that the true number of deaths may have been underreported, due to concerns that samples of the drug are likely being missed in postmortem toxicology tests

The troubling rise of longevity fixation syndrome: ‘I was crushed by the pressure I put on myself’

It was a pitta bread that finally broke Jason Wood. It arrived with hummus instead of the vegetable crudites he had preordered in a restaurant that he had painstakingly researched, as he always did, weeks before he and his husband visited. “In that moment, I just snapped,” he recalls. “I hit rock bottom, I got angry … I started crying, I started shaking. I just felt like I couldn’t do it any more, like I had been crushed by all this pressure I put on myself