Eastenders star Jacqueline Jossa, who plays Lauren Branning in the soap, has given birth to a baby girl. Mum and baby are said to be doing fine, as is her Only Way is Essex boyfriend, Dan Osborne. The announcement was made via Jacqueline´s Twi...
Eastenders star Jacqueline Jossa, who plays Lauren Branning in the soap, has given birth to a baby girl. Mum and baby are said to be doing fine, as is her Only Way is Essex boyfriend, Dan Osborne. The announcement was made via Jacqueline´s Twi...
Following The Prince of Wales as he looks forward to the 40th Anniversary of The Prince's Trust and celebrating the achievements of the charity.
Ant and Dec today announce a brand new and unique documentary project, as they set out to spend time with HRH The Prince of Wales to mark the 40th anniversary of his Prince's Trust for ITV and track the journey since His Royal Highness set up the organisation in 1976.
As long term ambassadors for The Prince's Trust, over the next year the pair will accompany The Prince on key engagements and get more involved in the work The Trust does to support vulnerable young people in the UK. The 90 minute special will air on ITV early in 2016, the year The Prince's Trust celebrates its 40th anniversary.
Ant and Dec are a similar vintage to The Trust – both were born the year before it was founded in 1976 – and together with The Prince they will reflect on the four decades that have passed since The Trust set out to improve the lives of disadvantaged young people in the UK, meeting some of those it has supported along the way and hearing their extraordinary stories.
Ant and Dec will gain a close perspective on The Prince's work as they visit courses and Prince's Trust Centres to get an inside look at the efforts made to help 13 to 30 year olds, many of whom come from a care background, and who deal with a range of challenges, such as homelessness, mental health issues, unemployment, difficulties at school and crime.
Ant and Dec said: “We are hugely excited to be working with HRH The Prince of Wales on our first project of this kind. We've worked with The Prince's Trust for years and know what an incredible job they do of supporting young people right across the UK. This is a unique opportunity for us to get under the skin of a great organisation and its founder, to pose the questions we've always wanted to ask and to see the achievements of the young people celebrated.”
Commenting last year on the occasion of the duo's National Television Award celebrating 25 years in television, The Prince of Wales said: "I have had the great pleasure of meeting them on many occasions over the last fifteen years, as avid and generous supporters of The Prince's Trust, taking time out from their extremely busy schedules to support and inspire those young people who come to us in disadvantaged and difficult situations.
As role models, they have led by example, showing a work ethic and a dedication that I know is appreciated by, and encouraging to, the many courageous young men and women who come to my Trust seeking guidance in trying to make a better life for themselves and in turn, in some cases, their families and communities."
Martina Milburn CBE, Chief Executive of The Prince‘s Trust, said: “The Prince's Trust has made positive changes to generations of vulnerable young people since its inception and we're really excited that Ant and Dec are going to be highlighting the work we do to mark this milestone in our history.”
The documentary will be directed by award-winning director Michael Waldman for Spun Gold Productions, producers of popular ITV programmes including Love Your Garden and Prince William's Passion: New Father, New Hope. Filming will start early in 2015 and they are already working closely with Clarence House and The Trust to bring the story of the organisation to life.
The documentary is commissioned for ITV by Richard Klein, Director of Factual and Andrew O'Connell, Commissioning Editor Factual.
Andrew said: “We are delighted to be following The Prince's Trust over a year to celebrate this landmark occasion. This special programme will see Ant and Dec spending time throughout the year with The Prince and seeing at close hand the work he does within the Trust aimed at enhancing young people's lives up and down the country. This promises to be a major event in the schedule and a real treat for our viewers!"
Daniela Neumann, Creative Director at Spun Gold, adds: “We are so very proud to be producing such a landmark documentary to mark the 40th anniversary of The Prince's Trust. We can't wait to provide viewers with unprecedented access into the charity and more importantly highlight its life changing work that has touched so many lives and made a profound impact on our nation. It is always an honour to work alongside The Prince of Wales, and Ant and Dec are undoubtedly the nation's most loved presenters. With their warmth and down to earth approach it is going to be such a moving and illuminating film.”
Filed under: http://www.theleader.info/article/46419/Actress Priyanga Burford stars as UKIP MP Deepa Kaur in this fictional documentary about the first 100 Days of a UKIP government. Here, she reveals more. What's UKIP: The First 100 Days all about? It imagines a scenario where UKIP have won the...
New Blood is a bold and surprising 7 x 60' crime thriller created and written by Anthony Horowitz, made by Eleventh Hour Films.
Commissioned by Charlotte Moore, Controller BBC One and Ben Stephenson, Controller BBC Drama, New Blood sets out to show a unique side of modern London, through the eyes of two outsiders.
Anthony Horowitz says: “For a long time I've been wondering how to take a fresh approach to crime drama and I hope that with New Blood I've succeeded. This is a show about the so-called Y generation - young people starting out in their careers, the powerless against the powerful. It's so refreshing to be writing about two central characters who are still in their late twenties and 21st century London is the perfect setting. Ben Stephenson has been hugely supportive and I'm delighted to be back at the BBC.”
Junior investigators Stefan and Rash, who work for two different law enforcement divisions, are brought together by two seemingly unrelated cases.
Rash and Stefan are opposites in almost every way. What they do share are the same frustrations with life - underpaid, unappreciated and undermined. Lumbered with huge university loans, they can't afford to buy a house and have little or no job security. They are both British but not part of the establishment.
New Blood will see Stefan and Rash come up against the uber rich and powerful – corporations, individuals, governments and the new breed of criminals who hide behind legitimate facades and are guarded by lawyers.
As Stefan and Rash's friendship is cemented across the series they come to understand that by quietly pooling resources and combining their different skills they make a formidable crime solving force. And at the same time they might be able to help each other up the promotional ladder - if they don't get themselves fired along the way.
Jill Green says: “This is Eleventh Hour Films first BBC Drama commission so it's an exciting moment - and thrilling to be at the helm of a brand new Horowitz crime drama that truly embraces multicultural London with a really fun 'bromance' at its heart.”
Charlotte Moore, Controller BBC One says: "I'm thrilled to welcome Anthony Horowitz back to the BBC. In New Blood he has created a contemporary crime series that will take BBC One viewers into a modern and complex world, one that moves the genre into exciting new territory."
Casting to be announced in due course.
Filed under: http://www.theleader.info/article/46417/An investigation by Channel 4 Dispatches into the private car parking industry reveals:
Changes to the law
Thanks to new camera technology and a change in the law, parking companies no longer have to put a ticket on the windscreen. They can now get the owner's address from the licence plate and post the ticket later. So hundreds of companies have sprung up and business is booming.
Five years ago just half a million tickets were sent through the post to motorists for parking on private land.
Last year there were two and a half million. That's more than £100m being demanded from motorists.
Automatic Number Plate Recognition (ANPR) cameras came into their own because of the change in the law in 2012. Now private parking companies can post a ticket to a vehicle owner as soon as the camera has spotted that it has overstayed.
Parking expert Alex Shipp says: “Before then you couldn't really take anybody to court without proving who the driver was, which is almost impossible. Now, you can take them to court if they're the registered keeper and that has fuelled a massive increase in court hearings, legal claims and debt recovery letters. Parking companies have simply become more aggressive.”
Hospital Trusts ignoring hospital parking guidance
The biggest outrage provoked over parking charges has arisen in hospitals.
Many health trusts now use private companies to run their car parking operations.
The problems come when the trust allows the company to keep some or even all the money raised from the Parking Charge notices it issues.
Last August, the Government moved to defuse public anger over hospital parking when Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt issued new guidance to health trusts.
From now on, parking charge notices should only be imposed in hospitals if it is “reasonable”. But because Mr Hunt only issued “guidance” it did not change the law.
Channel 4 Dispatches sent out Freedom of Information inquiries to all 156 health trusts in England and Wales to find out what kind of contracts they had signed. Nearly all of them replied and the answers were not encouraging:
One third of trusts - 55 - are still giving all or some of the money from parking tickets to their contractors
Four trusts have ignored the guidance by negotiating new contracts after the guidelines were introduced.
The Department of Health told Dispatches it was “disappointed to hear that some Trusts are not following the…hospital parking guidelines… patients have to deal with the added stress of unfair parking charges… Contractors should receive income to cover the normal costs of providing parking services”, but charges “must be applied reasonably”.
Dubious Tactics
It's not just the way that parking companies pursue motorists through the courts that concerns campaigners. It's the dubious tactics some of their employees use when they slap tickets on the windscreen.
The British Car Parking Association is the body that acts for most parking enforcement companies. It has a code of practice which insists that its members treat drivers in a “professional, reasonable and diligent way”.
However, Channel 4 Dispatches has discovered that some practices leave a lot to be desired.
The Citizens Advise Bureau say the number of people coming to their website on this issue has trebled last year compared to the year before with people losing a hundred and twenty five pounds on average and as much as three hundred pounds in some cases.
Whistleblower
Until a year ago, Tony Taylor worked as a team leader for one of Britain's biggest parking companies UKPC. He claims UKPC pressurised wardens into using those tactics to boost the ticket tally.
The company say he resigned after complaints that he used underhand tactics in issuing tickets.
Tony Taylor explained some of the tactics used by some parking wardens. He says: “Ghost ticketing is a way where you issue a ticket to a vehicle, you place the ticket on the windscreen, you take the photographic evidence then you remove the ticket from the windscreen, this then stops the driver getting the reduced rate. because he is totally unaware he's received a ticket on the windscreen.”
Ghost ticketing was not the only sales term that Tony Taylor says he learned during his two years with UKPC.
Tony Taylor says: “I used to get text messages and one text message would have gone to all the wardens phones and it says hi guys, Christmas is coming you're car parks should be very busy now, give them sites a good banging” [issue as many tickets as you can].
“I would get an email or a phone call to give the wardens a motivation call…Motivation call basically means call the warden and put pressure on him, if you don't get that amount of tickets out you're down the road you've lost your job.
Tony Taylor also showed me a company email revealing that the more tickets you issue, the more money you're paid. He claims that in some cases the bonus could be worth more than a warden's wage.
UKPC Right To Reply
In reply, UKPC told Dispatches that they have a “rigorous training programme” for wardens “to ensure that they act in a professional manner at all times”
“There is, of course, nothing wrong, in encouraging wardens to work hard to issue tickets to drivers who have parked in breach of the terms and conditions.”
They described Tony Taylor as “disgruntled former employee".
The company said they “do not instruct or encourage their wardens to undertake any sort of underhand tactics”.
Case Study: Pensioner's issued with parking charge notice in excess of £1 per second
80-year-old Ron Lucas was a victim of a parking charge notice.
A few months ago he visited his local post office with his wife Cynthia for ten minutes. Or ten minutes and 88 seconds, to be precise.
Ron Lucas says:
“All we were doing was posting a parcel. We came out, got in the car and drove home.
About three weeks later we got a parking charge notice in the post saying that we'd gone eighty eight seconds over an allotted ten minutes. We were asked to pay one hundred pounds. If I paid within fourteen days, it was sixty pounds.
I thought it was totally disproportionate, because let's face it, a hundred pounds for eighty eight seconds is in excess of a pound per second. So when I received that parking charge notice I was absolutely furious.”
When Ron complained, the parking company told him that there had been “severe problems with unauthorised parking, resulting in vehicles…occupying valuable space”.
Ron Lucas says:
“I could appeal but if I appealed and lost then the charge would go back to a hundred pounds. they threatened me with bailiffs as well. I'm eighty years old, and I felt I didn't want all the aggravation and the confrontation, and so with great reluctance I paid it.”
Secrets of the Parking Wardens: Channel 4 Dispatches, Monday 16th February 2015 at 8pm.
Filed under: http://www.theleader.info/article/46416/The latest edition of The Leader newspaper is out now, available in any of hundreds of outlests around the area. If you haven´t picked up your copy yet, don´t worry, we can save you the journey out by giving you the latest copy in virtual...