Governance Blog Archive
Here you will find an archive of Governance Blog articles published before 1 May 2022, divided into their relevant categories.
Brexit
During a House of Commons debate on Article 50 in February 2017, Brexit Minister, David Jones, confirmed that if the UK failed to secure a deal with the EU…
A key issue within Northern Ireland since the UK’s decision to leave the EU in June 2016 is exactly how this decision will affect local farming?…
Following the referendum in June 2016, the UK Prime Minister has stated that Article 50, the trigger mechanism for withdrawal from the EU, will be initiated by the end…
Democracy and Government
The European Union (Withdrawal) Bill returns to the House of Commons this week. MPs will consider the Bill in a Committee of the whole House. The Bill repeals the European…
The Westminster general election of 8 June 2017 resulted in a ‘hung parliament’, with the Conservatives as the largest party but without an overall majority. The result was: Conservative…
Transferred votes are an extremely important part of the Single Transferable Vote (STV) system. In the 2017 Assembly Election, only 18 MLAs had a sufficient number of first preference…
Justice
In September 2021, Clare Bailey MLA introduced the Abortion Services (Safe Access Zones) Bill to the Assembly. The Bill passed Second Stage on 12 October 2021 and would require…
In 2016 a man called Lance Hart shot his wife Claire and daughter Charlotte outside a swimming pool in Lincolnshire, England, before turning his shotgun on himself. Some of…
Last month, a new law came into force in England and Wales making upskirting a criminal offence. Upskirting involves taking a photo or video under a person’s…
Planning
This article explores the temporary planning measures introduced as a response to COVID-19 across the UK and Republic of Ireland (ROI). Some of these measures have, and will, require…
This blog article examines the similarities and differences between the planning systems north and south of the border on the island of Ireland. It is based on a more…
The planning system has undergone much change recently, so what are the new structures and how has the balance of responsibility shifted between central and local government?…
Statistics and Geographic Information Systems (GIS)
The risk is that a complicated number is released without context into a world that doesn’t know how to think about it. The ‘R number’ that most of…
This is a follow-up to the recent blog article, ‘Where are we on the COVID-19 curve?. The previous article used three day averages for COVID-19 deaths to compare…
Most of us by now understand the need to ‘flatten the curve’ in order to reduce the number of overall cases of COVID-19 and to keep the peak…