Making sign language part of every child's experience will help to reduce the exclusion of deaf and speech impaired children and adults, but the benefits will be to all children e.g. on brain development, vocabulary, empathy and expressiveness and to society generally e.g. more inclusion, increased understanding between deaf and hearing communities and individuals.

CAMRA fully supports the production and availability of real ciders and perries. In many cases the proposed action would make small scale cider production uneconomic. This is wholly disproportionate given that a small producer selling up to 33 pints a day has no capacity to affect EU trade to any meaningful degree. The case for rejecting the request by the EU to tax small cider producers: - Someone producing less than 70hl (12,000 pints) will generally be making less than £10,000 a year in sales. This means the tax exemption only applies to very small businesses, such as hobbyists or farm-gate producers. If a duty were to be levied on these producers it would make their operations uneconomic and lead to wide-spread closure. - 80% of Britain’s 500+ cider makers are currently small producers. A tax will severely impact on consumer choice and will cause irreparable damage to one of the nation’s most historic industries. - An exemption from this duty is essential to supporting the growth of a vibrant but still small cider and perry market. - A tax charge of up to £2,700 would drive many small cider producers out of business costing jobs, harming the countryside and dramatically reducing consumer choice.

We the undersigned condemn HMRC’s decision to bring in unpaid benefits claimants to undertake PAYE processing work on taxpayers records. We note this comes at a time where HMRC is unable to deliver on its business targets due to chronic understaffing. Movement to Work (MTW) is a government scheme aimed at 18-24 year olds who are not in education, employment or training. Officially a programme of vocational training and work experience, it actually is the latest incarnation of the government’s ‘workfare’ programme – providing employers free labour by making the unemployed work for their benefits. The Civil Service is one of the core providers in this scheme, meaning that the government itself is one of the main beneficiaries of unpaid labour. In HMRC, the employer wants to double those brought in from 1,000 to 2,000, and if successful that number could increase even further. The potential for these placements to carry out work that should be done by paid staff, covering up staffing shortfalls in a climate of job cuts and office closures, is patently obvious. Personal Tax has taken the brunt of job cuts in HMRC, with over 5,000 staff lost in the past five years. This has created a staffing crisis wherein the Department has failed to answer adequate numbers of calls and been left with huge backlogs of work, which they have then tried to cover up through the use of overtime and dragging workers out of other work areas (often with the result of additional backlogs there) to answer calls during peak times. The use of claimants is just another way to mask the backlogs. Why employ additional staff if you can get the work done for free? Why offer existing staff overtime if you can draft in more claimants to do the job? Why bargain with the workforce through their trade union when it’s so easy to draft in the unemployed at no additional cost? Why take any steps to prevent further job losses or office closures with a reserve army of labour on call? The first tranche of MTW placements in Bootle number just ten. But the potential for this number to increase exponentially remains a threat to our jobs and working conditions, especially as they are being put on Work Management Items, the contingency work for the AO grade in Personal Tax, at a time when the department wants to half the number of items on hand. It must also be said that MTW is exploitation of the placements themselves. They are doing the work of paid staff for no more than their dole, and treated as a disposable resource by an unscrupulous employer who doesn’t want to pay the rate for the job or foot the bill for the actual number of staff needed.

This development involves the demolition of the former nurses home and the construction of 17 luxury flats, together with a 3-storey deep basement. This nurses home currently contains 70 units for housing. It is practically on the doorstep of 3 primary schools and 2 nurseries. The proposed development will have a serious impact on the health and safety, education and well-being of over 1000 primary school children in the three nearby neighbouring schools and two nurseries; it will cause harm to adjacent heritage assets, and there is a risk of structural problems from the proposed basement. We say that, for the above reasons, the grant of planning permission is therefore “grossly wrong”, and the permission should be revoked. A letter will be delivered to Mr Pickles’ office on Friday 13 March, 2015 and can be found on our website which provides more background on New End and the impact of the development: www.newendnw3.co.uk Please sign this petition to show your support for this call to action. Yours sincerely, Jessica Learmond-Criqui Resident of Hampstead and co-ordinator of the Campaign for Revocation of Planning Permission on 29 New End

Because Lord Green subsequently became a trade minister and is a member of the House of Lords. We need transparency and accountability and unless he gives an account of his activities, his position in untenable.

I have created this petition because I believe BSL should be taught as a language in school. My daughter was born profoundly deaf she is 11weeks old and I would love for her to grow up in a world where hearing people are more excepting and understanding of deaf people and deaf culture. Why should it be deaf people that have to struggle to lip read, be left confused when people around them are talking, risk major surgery to stand a chance of some hearing threw implants, when we could so easily fit into their world by learning to sign. Help make this happen, stand up for the deaf community, accept deaf people have a right to fit in and be understood. Make a better future for my daughter and all deaf children like her. Thank you.

We deserve a certain standard of behaviour and serious protocols in the House of Parliament to ensure the business of running our country is done in an efficient and balanced way. Politicians should stop employing tactics to side rail issues that are important to us, the population of this country.

Because these are dangerous to dogs

The NHS is being taken apart. The Health and Social Care Act 2012 abolished the legal duty on the government to provide key NHS services in England, and took marketisation to a new level. We need a law to reinstate that legal duty, stop marketisation and privatisation, and to re-establish accountable public bodies. Without a law, the process now rapidly underway will continue. This is why barrister Peter Roderick and public health Professor Allyson Pollock drafted a NHS Reinstatement Bill in August 2014. This Bill was put out for consultation, and dozens of individuals and organisations responded. The consultation on the proposed NHS Reinstatement Bill ended in December 2014. Revised to take account of the consultation results, the Bill proposes to fully restore the NHS as an accountable public service by: -reinstating the government's duty to provide a comprehensive universal health service, -reversing 25 years of marketization in the NHS by abolishing the purchaser-provider split, -ending contracting, -making the NHS TTIP-proof and -re-establishing public bodies and public services accountable to local communities. You can find out more about the bill here: http://www.nhsbill2015.org/nhs-reinstatement-bill-new-version-published/.

Mary Street Parcel Office is in a convenient centrally located position. But Royal Mail intend to close the Mary Street Parcel Office and move all parcels to Wearfield, at Sunderland Enterprise Park, near Wessington Way. The Wearfield site it is more difficult to access by public transport. Many people will have to take 2 busses to reach it, and then walk to the new site. This will unfairly affect those without their own transport, as well as those with mobility issues including the elderly and those with disabilities affecting their mobility. The move will result in job losses. 5 out of 10 employees in Mary Street will loose their jobs. Staff are having to attend interviews for the remaining 5 jobs. On top of this there will be an environmental impact as customers are forced to have their parcels redirected rather than picking them up at their own convenience whilst already shopping in town. In order to cut costs Royal Mail are putting profit before people. Please sign the petition to let Royal Mail bosses know that the people of Sunderland demand the service that they are paying for and will not stand for the job losses or environmental impact caused by this unfair and ill considered move.

I keep hearing of brave veterans being left with only £10 of their War Pensions after being means tested. The rest of the basic War Pension, after this first £10, is counted as income when the Department for Work and Pensions calculates what level of means-tested benefits to pay and affects veteran's benefits and is, therefore, lost. Benefits affected are such as Income Support, Income-based Jobseeker's Allowance or pension credit. This is basically and morally wrong. The government work out how much you need to live on, but this pension should not be counted. These men and women fought and put their lives on the line to allow us to live safe lives today. Please don't take that well earned pension away from them, which also takes away their faith in this country and make them wonder why they bothered in the first place. Leave them some dignity and keep off their War Pensions.

Crufts claims to be the biggest and best dog show in the world. For this reason it is in a powerful position to send a message to the world that Crufts operates a policy of zero tolerance of abuse and takes appropriate action in every single case to ensure that all dogs are treated with compassion, respect and dignity at all times. I believe that the handler of the Best in Show Winner 2015 did not do this, despite several requests from Crufts judges. Their attempts to address this on their official Facebook page today is not enough. I believe she broke the rules and should be stripped of the title.