The Folkestone Town Sprucer is under attack by Shepway District Council. Sprucer Peter Phillips and his team of volunteers are an independent community-based initiative that litter-picks, removes graffiti, repairs minor infrastructure, cleans litter-bins and signs, plus 101 other chores to help restore civic pride. Peter is arguably Folkestone’s most popular public figure. In an attempt to clear rubbish and a jungle of fly-tipping, needles and rampant overgrowth from Westbourne Gardens, a once elegant tree-lined park, the Sprucer team has been stopped in its tracks by threatened prosecution from SDC. The allegation: that trees have been lopped without permit in a conservation area – cutting that was necessary to get at the layers of rubbish dumped beneath the trees. Facing a possible £20,000 fine, Sprucer organiser David Taylor has already been interviewed under caution by SDC officers. Sprucer Peter Phillips faces a similar interview on May 12. Had they known the green square was in a conservation area, both would have sought leave to cut, although it takes six weeks for a permit to be issued, if it’s issued at all. This petition calls on SDC to immediately halt the witch-hunt, apologise to the team, grant a permit and work with the Sprucer to restore Westbourne Gardens to its original charm - a task that SDC has flunked by failing over many years to compel the owners, would-be developers, to clean-up the park, designated as an inviolate green space. Why has taken the intervention of the Folkestone Town Sprucer to focus SDC and the owners on tackling this appalling public eyesore?

This so important, there has always been an on going joke about the Dental health of people in England, well being someone who after 2 years of not seeing my own dentist I was removed from their books, meaning that just something as simple as losing a filling, I now have to see an emergency dentist with no follow ups and then being told I had to still find a new dentist to take me onto their books. So I registered on to the waiting list to be offered a place for an NHS dentist when one became available. Well I got the call saying there was a place available, but it is almost 12 miles away in a village where I would have to catch 2 buses and a train to get there, which would take 2 hours to get there. This is ridiculous, why she people have to suffer this way, especially when there is so many dental surgeries with in a 10 minute bus ride away and not one of them is taking on new NHS patients, This really needs to be looked out and to be sorted.

The government have decided to take NHS money out of hospitals, call it the 'Better Care Fund' and give it to Health and Wellbeing Boards. In Kirklees, this body has sitting on it, the Chair and Chief Officer of Greater Huddersfield Clinical Commissioning Group and the Chair and Chief Officer of North Kirklees Clinical Commissioning Group. It also has a number of councillors and a representative of a company contracted to do work for the CCGs, the representative of the council responsible for Public Health and sometimes representatives of Mid Yorkshire Hospital Trust, Calderdale Hospital Foundation Trust and Healthwatch. The NHS has always been run with a public service ethos. Increasingly multinational companies without that ethos, are being awarded contracts to deliver services and they fail to honour their promises. Any private company is vulnerable to takeover bids from larger firms. We consider it worth reminding the bodies responsible for allocating around £2.5m of public money, that money channelled away from the hospitals has a potential to weaken them and that there is no clear evidence that 'Care Closer to Home' will either keep people out of hospital or save money for the NHS. eg. A very recent Kings Fund report - 'The Reconfiguration of Clinical Services - what is the evidence?' (Nov 2014) has stated that there are consistent findings that moving care out of hospital does not cut costs or reduce admissions to hospital. In fact in one study (Roland et al 2012) it increased admissions. The report states that in fact, this kind of reconfiguration of clinical services can act as a distraction from core tasks and can increase risks. North Kirklees NHS Support Group and Dewsbury Keep Our NHS Public (KONP) have been out in Dewsbury, Cleckheaton, Birstall and Batley with paper petitions, but the area of the CCGs stretches to Heckmondwike, Mirfield, Hopton, Kirkburton, Meltham and Huddersfield and district. It is with the idea of giving people a chance to sign in all the relevant areas, that we are running it for a short time online. Please sign and share, if you have a Kirklees postcode. Thank you.

as a mother,auntie and sibling of somebody on the spectrum , I know how hard it can be.The reason for my petition is that i believe that the current system of gaining a blue badge for my child is wrong and deliberately discriminates against the condition and displays a clear lack of understanding of the true nature of the condition and the impact it has on its families

One in four people suffer from this horrible, debilitating illness EVERY YEAR. It is a significant and proven cause of job losses, marriage breakdowns, drug and alcohol abuse, violence towards women and children, homelessness and suicide. Talking therapies such as counselling & psychotherapy are by far the best way to deal with mental health problems of this kind. Unfortunately the first step to getting help is talking about the illness, but the majority of sufferers do so in silence due to the stigma associated with mental health issues. This stigma is a direct result of the careless, uninformed and often deliberately offensive remarks of people in high profile positions, such as the Sun columnist Katie Hopkins. Until these people stand in solidarity with brave and outspoken public figures like Stephen Fry and Jon Snow this stigma will continue to cause completely unneccessary pain, suffering and even death for those who are afraid to voice the torment they feel. All it takes is a little education and a modicum of compassion. I implore Katie Hopkins to look up from her self-satisfied, self-righteous life and to see the pain that she and her ilk cause with their refusal to accept that others are less able or less equipped to cope with life's hardships.

Life saving equipment such as automated defibrillators and electric chest compressors are already very expensive, but to have to pay VAT on top is making NHS services less able to provide these. In Rural areas where an ambulance can take a long time to reach a person who has suffered a cardiac arrest, an automated defibrillator can mean the difference between life and death. In the Scottish Borders we send patients to Edinburgh for heart surgery such as fitting of stents. If the person arrests in transit it is not possible for a paramedic to provide effective CPR for the entire journey, particularly in a moving vehicle. An electric chest compressor has been shown to increase survivial rate in this type of circumstance from zero (as it is not possible to physically continue effective CPR for long periods of time), to an amazing 50 percent survival rate. Sadly this piece of equipment is £10,000 plus VAT. Surely it cannot be right for the government to give a budget to the NHS and then claim a substantial part of it back in VAT.

The money paid into these pension funds has already been taxed. Now they want to tax it again. This is nothing short of highway robbery. Why should people who have scrimped and saved all their lives to try and provide themselves with a decent pension (which government fails to do) be penalised? Yet another example of rip-off government in rip-off Britain. There are enough pensioners, and people soon to reach retirement age, in this country to put a stop to this.

Having different levels of pension payment is discriminatory and contrary to the United Nations Social Protocol and the Commonwealth Charter, both of which the British government has signed People retiring overseas to be near their families for their final years each save the UK around four thousand pounds every year through non-access to the NHS and other pensioner benefits People retiring overseas release houses for other families so helping the housing crisis There are thousands of people in Britain who would like to emigrate but cannot afford to do so because of the frozen-pensions' policy. It would benefit the taxpayer to enable these people to emigrate and save the country the #4,000 a year detailed above It would meet the "fairness" criteria which is supposedly the foundation of every Conservative policy.

Help prevent fraud, scams, time wasters and people who are ignorant and hang up when told politely that 'I'm not interested'..

Rotherham Hospice serves many local people, there are paid staff, volunteers as well as visitors. For how many people work there and then visitors there just isn't enough parking space. With little parking this may put people off from visiting There is a steep drive way which is not very helpful for visitors

To prevent these potentially toxic drugs being over-prescribed to under six year olds causing possible neurological harm and consequent serious side effects before a young child's brain has finished developing to maturity. Several professional bodies for child mental health workers actively share this concern about the short and long term risks to the children affected by these increasingly common 'quick fix' medical interventions for behaviour management.

After a 5 year fight, our landlord is demanding a huge sum of money for repairs bills and that we vacate our premises, destroying the business we've worked so hard to build up over the past 6 years. We've established a lovely spiritual community here, employing many therapists who provide help to many in need of healing. All we ask is for justice to prevail.