Governance Blog Archive
Here you will find an archive of Governance Blog articles published before 1 May 2022, divided into their relevant categories.
Brexit
This article updates a previous article on the negotiations around the Gibraltar Protocol. Gibraltar provides an interesting point of comparison with Northern Ireland in terms of arrangements following the…
John Locke once wrote, ‘we should have a great many fewer disputes in the world if words were taken for what they are, signs of our ideas only,…
The Ireland/Northern Ireland Protocol (‘the Protocol’) was the subject of a judicial review challenge at the High Court of Justice in Belfast. The hearing, which stretched over several days,…
Democracy and Government
The past seven days have seen significant developments in relation to EU referendum related action in the courts at both local and UK level. This article provides an update…
In recent years ‘Preventative Expenditure‘ (PE) has gained a high level of political consensus. There are many definitions, and this imprecision has resulted in departments sometimes claiming that all…
The May 2016 election was the last at which 108 Members would be returned to the Assembly. At the next Assembly election there will be a reduction in the…
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
Local government underwent significant structural change in 2015 with the number of councils reducing from 26 to 11, and the transfer of many functions from central to 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…