HM The Queen has appointed Nick Hurd, Jacquie Nnochiri and Deborah Tavana as Board Members of the National Citizen Service Trust

Nick Hurd

Nick served as a Member of Parliament for fourteen years before standing down in December 2019. During that time he served three different Prime Ministers as a Government Minister over more than 8 years. Ministerial roles included Minister for Civil Society; Minister for International Development; Minister of State for Climate Change and Industry; Minister of State for Police and Fire Service; Minister of State for Northern Ireland and Minister for London and Grenfell Victims. He is a lifelong Member of the Privy Council and continues, on a voluntary basis, as the UK Prime Minister’s Independent Adviser on Grenfell.

Before politics, Nick spent 18 years in the private sector, divided between investment banking and the development of young growth businesses. This included the experience of setting up a business in Brazil for a British investment bank.

He serves as Chairman of Access – The Foundation for Social Investment and is a Senior Adviser to a number of companies and campaigns that are looking to make a positive social or environmental impact. He is a Global Ambassador for the Global Steering Group for Impact Investment (GSG) and serves on the Advisory Council of the UK Institute for Impact Investment.

Jacquie Nnochiri

Jacquie is an educational leader having worked in education for over 20 years. She is currently Head of Department and Head of Year 11 at a West London Pupil Referral Unit (PRU) where she is responsible for pastoral and career needs of students in their final year of statutory education. Jacquie monitors each students’ academic achievements, wellbeing, and safeguarding needs.

Jacquie is passionate about ensuring young people (especially vulnerable students) have access to educational tools to improve and enhance their further educational and future work opportunities and emphasising the need to develop the necessary skills students will need to help widen their networks.

Jacquie has strong links with her local community and serves as a Referral Order Panel Member with the Harrow Youth Offending Team. Jacquie also serves on her local Safer Neighbourhood Panel. As a keen advocate of mentoring young people to enable students to develop their employability skills and gain confidence for future job roles, Jacquie is currently mentoring student(s) at the School of Business Management, Queen Mary University College London. Jacquie serves as a NASUWT (The Teachers’ Union) representative at her place of work.

Deborah Tavana

Deborah started her career with Legal & General and has held executive roles in Williams & Glyn Bank, Resolution, Swiss Re and General Electric. She has experience in a range of leadership roles covering Human Resources, Communications, Governance, Legal and Operations and has also undertaken consulting and advisory work on both a regional and global basis. In addition, Deborah served for 13 years as a member of the Employment Tribunals.

Her career has always been guided by a belief in the importance of creating organisation cultures that value the whole person, whether colleague, customer or client. Deborah now works independently as an executive coach and management consultant. She also serves in a Non-Executive capacity as a trustee on the board of United Response.

Deborah is a graduate of the University of Bristol, holds an MSc from the University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology and is a Chartered Fellow of the CIPD.

These roles are not remunerated. The appointments have been made in accordance with the Cabinet Office’s Governance Code on Public Appointments. The appointments process is regulated by the Commissioner for Public Appointments. Under the Code, any significant political activity undertaken by an appointee in the last five years must be declared. This is defined as including holding office, public speaking, making a recordable donation, or candidature for election. Nick declared he was elected as a Conservative Member of Parliament. Jacquie declared she canvassed on behalf of the Labour Party in 2016. Deborah has not declared any activity.

Support for schools boosted by additional computer donations from Sellafield Ltd

News story

Sellafield Ltd donates IT equipment to schools to support remote learning,

Laptops ready to be distributed to local schools

Sellafield Ltd has donated a further 156 recycled laptops and computers to schools across West Cumbria this month as part of its ongoing work to support student access to remote learning.

This builds on a donation of almost five hundred devices in December last year as part of a wider collaborative support effort alongside local authorities, suppliers and other agencies.

Emma Graham, a senior buyer within the information services organisation at Sellafield Ltd said:

We worked quickly through the WELL project to determine the immediate need from schools, alongside our supply chain partners at ATOS and Allvotec who worked tirelessly to refurbish as many laptops as we could.

OneFM also kindly supported deliveries this time around to help us move the devices to schools as quickly as possible”.

Emma Williamson, community resilience and social inclusion team leader at Copeland Borough Council, said:

In addition to the Sellafield Ltd laptops, the swift financial support we received from elsewhere has enabled us to provide much needed resources to children and young people, to access remote learning.

The £43,000 awarded by Cumbria County Council, Copeland Community Fund and members of the Sellafield supply chain is a testament to partnership working and demonstrates how pooling our resources can really benefit the local community and have a direct impact on those in need.

Jonathan Sunter, quality of education lead at Solway Community School said:

We still have a number of students completing their distance learning on parent’s mobile phones and we cannot thank Sellafield Ltd enough for all the equipment they have provided us so far”.

Sellafield Ltd is also working with the Warrington Local Enterprise Partnership to coordinate donations in the Warrington area.

Published 22 January 2021

Regulator escalates probe into Birmingham charity for deaf community due to continued concerns

Press release

The Charity Commission has opened a statutory inquiry into One Community Organisation over serious financial and governance concerns

The Charity Commission has opened a statutory inquiry into One Community Organisation over serious financial and governance concerns.

The charity’s purpose is to deliver support to the deaf community and those with special needs, by organising fundraising events to support online lectures and education programmes for these groups.

In April 2020, the Commission opened a compliance case after it identified inconsistencies with the information the trustees had reported to the Commission about the charity. This included, for example, conflicting information about whether or not the charity owned property.

As part of this case, the Commission examined the charity’s finances which led to concerns that the trustees may have understated the charity’s income and expenditure for 2017 and 2018.

The Commission also identified concerns around potential unauthorised trustee payments. The charity’s bank statements showed over £200,000 of charity funds were transferred via online payments to a trustee’s private bank account. The purpose of these payments is not clear.

The Commission therefore escalated its case to a statutory inquiry in December 2020 to examine these matters further.

The scope of the inquiry is to examine concerns around the trustees’ management of the charity’s resources and financial affairs, compliance with their general legal duties and responsibilities, and whether any failings identified are a result of misconduct and/or mismanagement by the trustees. The Commission may extend this scope if further regulatory concerns emerge.

It is the Commission’s policy, after it has concluded an inquiry, to publish a report detailing what issues the inquiry looked at, what actions were undertaken as part of the inquiry and what the outcomes were. Reports of previous inquiries are available on GOV.UK.

Ends.

Notes to editors:

View the charity’s entry on the register of charities.
The opening of an inquiry is not a finding of wrongdoing.
The Charity Commission is the independent, non-ministerial government department that registers and regulates charities in England and Wales. Its purpose is to ensure charity can thrive and inspire trust so that people can improve lives and strengthen society.

Published 22 January 2021

December 2020 Transaction Data

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This data provides information about the number and types of applications that HM Land Registry completed in December 2020.

Image credit: NicoElNino/Shutterstock.com

Please note this data shows what HM Land Registry has been able to process during the time period covered and is not necessarily a reflection of market activity.

In December:

HM Land Registry completed more than 1,431,690 applications to change or query the Land Register
the South East topped the table of regional applications with 337,929

HM Land Registry completed 1,431,694 applications in December compared with 1,710,237 in November and 1,375,682 last December 2019, of which:

272,475 were applications for register updates compared with 271,496 in November
718,867 were applications for an official copy of a register compared with 935,949 in November
221,840 were search and hold queries (official searches) compared with 216,933 in November
14,029 were postal applications from non-account holders compared with 15,850 in November

Applications by region and country

Region/country	October applications	November applications	December applications
South East	422,216	409,245	337,929
Greater London	325,631	314,597	259,272
North West	196,957	191,689	166,638
South West	174,310	170,214	141,011
West Midlands	148,009	143,935	121,054
Yorkshire and the Humber	134,139	135,951	111,242
East Midlands	124,686	122,093	102,151
North	82,547	80,300	67,269
East Anglia	75,586	72,154	61,473
Isles of Scilly	69	43	53
Wales	77,009	69,930	63,541
England and Wales (not assigned)	77	86	61
Total	1,761,236	1,710,237	1,431,694

Top 5 local authority areas

December applications

Top 5 local authority areas	December applications
Birmingham	21,069
City of Westminster	17,307
Leeds	17,137
Buckinghamshire	15,282
Cornwall	14,724

November applications

Local authority	November applications
Birmingham	24,481
City of Westminster	21,466
Leeds	20,003
Cornwall	17,912
Manchester	16,823

Top 5 customers

December applications

Top 5 customers	December applications
Infotrack Limited	80,703
Enact	32,972
TM Group (UK) Ltd (Search Choice)	24,696
Optima Legal Services	19,316
O’Neill Patient	18,654

November applications

Top 5 Customers	November applications
Infotrack Limited	97,950
Enact	40,101
TM Group (UK) Ltd (Search Choice)	25,647
O’Neill Patient	23,826
Optima Legal Services	23,808

Access the full dataset

Next publication

Transaction Data is published on the 15th working day of each month. The January data will be published at 11am on Friday 19 February 2021.

Published 22 January 2021

37th Universal Periodic Review: UK statement on Austria

The United Kingdom commends Austria’s continued efforts to eliminate discrimination on the grounds of sexual orientation and the steps it has taken since its last UPR to improve equality for same-sex partnerships, including legally recognising same-sex marriage.

The UK welcomes Austria’s positive action in promoting media freedom internationally. We encourage Austria to take further steps to combat all forms of discrimination, including racial bias within law enforcement.

We recommend that Austria:
1. Operationalise domestically the insights arising from its October conference on ‘Human Trafficking in Times of Corona’.

Prioritise developing a strategy against racism, xenophobia, radicalisation and violent extremism, taking into account the views of civil society and underpinned by necessary legislation and budgetary resource.
Adopt an open, merit-based process when selecting national candidates for UN Treaty Body elections.

Thank you.

Published 22 January 2021