Young carer ‘amazed’ as Guardian readers pay off her £2,000 fine for benefit rules mistake

A young carer who had looked after her disabled mother since she was eight said she was “amazed” and “overwhelmed” after Guardian readers paid off her £2,000 fine for a mistaken breach of widely condemned benefits rules.Rose Jones, 22, was ordered by the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) to repay £2,145 after joining a government youth employment scheme that meant she overstepped “draconian” carer’s allowance earnings regulations.Jones said she was twice wrongly advised by her jobcentre work coach that her wages earned under the Kickstart scheme would not affect her eligibility for carer’s allowance.However, less than a year after she completed the six-month scheme, under which the DWP paid her wages, she received a demand from the same government department that she pay back £2,145 of overpaid benefits.Emily Holzhausen, the director of policy at Carers UK, said it was “devastating” to see a young person with a “challenging start in life be badly let down by the DWP”

Trevor Hendy obituary

My friend Trevor Hendy, who has died aged 89, was director of development at United Kingdom Housing Trust (UKHT) in the 1980s, a period in which, among other things, he brought back to life its Arlington House property, a 900-bed hostel for working men in north London that had fallen into squalor under private ownership. Trevor oversaw much-needed improvements to living conditions there, and the hostel (of which I was a board member) is still operating.He left UKHT in the late 80s to set up a housing consultancy, Chapman Hendy Associates, with Peter Chapman, which helped housing associations to make their planned developments a reality and played a key role in the setting up of new organisations to receive the transfer of thousands of homes from local authorities.Born in Newcastle upon Tyne to Arthur, a joiner, and his wife, Nora (nee Finlay), Trevor grew up in nearby Newbiggin-by-the-Sea, where he went to the local grammar school. Afterwards he studied architecture at evening classes while working during the day as a clerk in the office of a chartered architect and surveyor

Sally Adams obituary

My mother, Sally Adams, who has died aged 73, worked for many years at Papworth hospital in Cambridge, where she was a sister in the intensive therapy unit and was one of the nurses who cared for Keith Castle, the UK’s first successful heart transplant patient, in 1979.She worked at Papworth from 1975 to 1990 (except for a two-year spell at Treliske hospital in Truro in 1986-88). Then she switched to bereavement counselling until her retirement in 2019.Sally was born in Royston, Hertfordshire, to Betty (nee Pigg), a dinner lady, and Alan Whitmore, a lorry driver. Sally attended the local Meridian school, where she decided early on that she had to be a nurse

Women in poorest parts of England and Wales ‘will spend only two-thirds of life in good health’

Healthy life expectancy for women in the most deprived areas of England and Wales has fallen to the lowest level since recent records began, with those women now likely to spend only two-thirds of their lives in good health.Women living in wealthier parts of England are likely to enjoy about two more decades of healthy life, the latest Office for National Statistics (ONS) data has shown.Female babies born between 2020 and 2022 in the most deprived areas of England were likely to spend just 65.1% of their lives in good health, compared with 81.5% in the least deprived areas, the ONS found

Vital steps to move the NHS from cure to prevention | Letters

Your articles on health inequality this week included excellent coverage of the government’s project to shift the emphasis of healthcare from treatment at the clinic and hospital to prevention through public health initiatives (Downing Street’s radical plan for the NHS: shifting it from treatment to prevention, 29 June). However, one key element is missing from the analysis that has frustrated the implementation of such necessary innovations: the way that undergraduate students are educated and socialised into medicine within longstanding conservative curricula.Historically, doctors gain an identity that is grounded in the sanctity of the “clinic” (primarily the hospital) as a well-patrolled territory with idiosyncratic rituals and language. Patients are kept on the other side of the fence. Medical education traditionally affords little work-based experience in the first two years, but after that students gain increasing exposure to clinical work

Young Europeans losing faith in democracy, poll finds

Only half of young people in France and Spain believe that democracy is the best form of government, with support even lower among their Polish counterparts, a study has found.A majority from Europe’s generation Z – 57% – prefer democracy to any other form of government. Rates of support varied significantly, however, reaching just 48% in Poland and only about 51-52% in Spain and France, with Germany highest at 71%.More than one in five – 21% – would favour authoritarian rule under certain, unspecified circumstances. This was highest in Italy at 24% and lowest in Germany with 15%