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My blogposts on Section 75 Health and Social Care Act and NHS England Procurement Regulations (SI 2013/057)



 

Since 7 January 2013, I have written a number of blogposts detailing the legal and policy implications of the Health and Social Care Act and the statutory instrument 2012/057.

These are on the “Legal Aware” blog. 

Main article:

Competition Regulations issued under Section 75 of the Health and Social Care Act (2012) will lock CCGs into arranging all purchasing through competitive markets

SI 2012/057:

National Health Service (Procurement, patient choice and competition) Regulations 2013: what is “best value”?

The legal issues in the statutory instrument (2013, No. 257) on NHS procurement in England

Possible letter to send to the Clerk of the Committee

VERY IMPORTANT. Tomorrow is the last day to the write to the Clerk about SI 257

Lord Owen’s Bill:

Lord Owen’s NHS (amended duties and powers) Bill: an eight-clause Bill to restore a comprehensive NHS accountable to parliament

History:

Was “The Health of Nations” by Dr Madsen Pirie and Dr Eamonn Butler a blueprint for NHS privatisation?

 

This one on stakeholder reaction is published on the ‘Socialist Health Association’ (independently authored) blog:

Rainbow coalition warns about section 75 NHS Regulations

 

 

"Legal Aware" review of the year 2012



 

January

A rough guide to the online application form for City law firms

February

Have we got an objects-focused curriculum?

March

Recommendations of the Legal Awareness Society at BPP for the Legal Education and Training Review

April

Prof Philippe Sands and Carl Gardner “counting time” – not an ‘omnishambles’

May

BAILII – worthy of your urgent attention

June

#LawTechCampLondon 2012 : where law confronted innovation

July

British Gas and oligopolies – the need for regulation

August

My Master of Law dissertation on the legal enforceability of Gartner’s rights for a cloud computing customer

September

The brand new “Corporate Client Strategy” project of the BPP Legal Awareness Society

October

Full text of Attorney-General’s speech to BPP this week on parliament and judiciary

November

I will be supporting the BPP Student Engagement team for the BPP Innovation Award

December

Book Review: The English Legal System 2012-3 by Prof Gary Slapper and Dr David Kelly

The Corporate Client Project – now receiving applications



 

 

 

 

 

 

The corporate client project for students

 

We are currently looking for law or business students with an interest in commercial or corporate law to give mini-presentations on the corporate strategy of their choice.

 

This might be a real client of a firm engaged by a firm after his or her training contract, or a real client which is genuinely otherwise of interest to the law or business student.

 

If you know of anyone who might be interested in this new innovative project, please feel free to forward this email to him or her.

 

There is no application process to take part, save to say the applicant should be genuinely motivated about explaining the relevance of corporate strategy to people in the commercial or corporate law disciplines, at whatever level.

 

Please respond by emailing this account as soon as possible, legalaware1213@gmail.com stating who you and what course you are studying, or have studied, or will study, with BPP.

 

If you are at a loss in thinking about a suitable client, or a suitable area of client, you might find it interesting to watch our short presentations on the ‘LegalAware’ website.

 

They are to be found as follows:

 

Arbitration

 

Climate change & the law

 

Competition

 

Corporate social responsibility

 

Debt finance

 

e-commerce

 

Employment & pensions

 

Insurance

 

Intellectual property

 

IPOs & rights issues

 

Islamic finance

 

Joint ventures

 

Share acquisitions

 

Technology & Media

To provide inspiration, you may be particularly interested in the FTthe EconomistLegal Week, or Lawyer 2 Be.

 

Best of luck! Law firms are particularly interested in those trainees who are very knowledgeable about the economic, business or financial climate around them; and graduate recruitment partners and their colleagues look for ‘commercial awareness’ amongst a plethora of other competences.

THE LINK TO OUR OFFICIAL PAGE ON THE BPP STUDENTS SITE IS HERE (AT THE END OF THIS PAGE, YOU CAN JOIN THE SOCIETY, IF YOU HAVEN’T ALREADY DONE SO.)

BPP Legal Awareness Society

BPP Law School, Holborn

24 October 2012

 

Flier: Corporate Client Project

Psychometric tests (like the SHL one) for training contract applications – free resources with 11 days left!



Psychometric tests for training contracts are extremely important. Within a week or two of submitting your application form online, your firm will send you a link to an online psychometric test (or two) for you to do strictly under exam conditions on your own. It is critical that this is your own work, and your law firm may even wish you to do a test at their main offices to verify any test result you have reported as having done by yourself.

‘Legal Recruit’ is my relatively new, innovative platform for law students to practice online verbal reasoning test skills in advance of their training contract application. It is nothing to do with BPP, although a small group of us in the student society, the BPP Legal Awareness Society, have designed it from scratch this year. Its location is here.

 

The deadline for the current set of applications is in 13 days’ time from the publication of this blogpost; that is, midnight on the evening of July 31, 2012 (i.e. before August 1, 2012).

You can attempt a full length practice test of 30 questions, requiring answers of either ‘TRUE’, ‘FALSE’ or ‘CANNOT SAY’, similar to the SHL test. You will then get a detailed report on your performance, giving an indication of the %ile in which you would fall based on our sample of 200 graduates who’ve taken the test. All you need is to supply an email that works – you can submit a fake name if you wish, and none of us are able to look up individual performance test scores.

The practice test is situated here; I do not suggest you register for a subscription at this late stage, just look at the free videos and materials on the website which will provide you with a complete explanation of the online verbal reasoning test. We should emphasise that we do not know any of the SHL questions; and the only way to practise SHL questions is to look carefully at their practice materials.

For nearly all firms, you will have to do an online verbal reasoning test within about a week of submitting your online application form. The most common suppliers of this test are SHL and Kenexa, and we hope that practise using the ‘Legal Recruit’ platform will be beneficial.

You might find these free resources useful in preparation of this test:

A factsheet of free worked examples

December 2010 free book of 150 worked examples for online verbal reasoning tests

April 2011 free book of 150 worked examples for online verbal reasoning tests

Book 1 (verbal reasoning) book sample

Book 2 (situational judgement) book sample

Background to online testing

Background to verbal reasoning tests

Background to situational judgement tests

Background to competences (the critical abilities all law firms look for)

Background to difficulties and online assessments

How to complete the online application form for training contract applications

How to write a cover letter for training contract applications

I genuinely wish you the very best of luck for your application! It’s a very important thing to do.

Whose blood is it anyway?



 

The joke that ‘If they could privatise the air, they would’ conveys the criticism that the Conservatives would privatise something which has thus far been able for free, and ironically conveys the hatred of Ed Miliband towards the ‘quick buck society’. Privatised utilities in the business world are considered a failure for a number of reasons. Firstly, it is widely considered that the public sector privatisations were not adequately restructured prior to their privatisation during the Thatcher government in the 90s. Secondly, the end products of privatisations such as railways, gas, water or telecoms have not always been, arguably, in the public’s interests. They are mostly ‘oligopolies’, in other words a few big entities in the marketplace, who can mutually collude in a legal way to keep prices high, not necessarily improve quality in a comparable way, leaving their customers in a worse position than they had previously.

Donating blood in the NHS has always been a rather symbolic ritual in the NHS, made famous by the famous sketch by Tony Hancock in ‘Hancock’s Half Hour’. Mark Kleinman for Sky has reported that the Department of Health has appointed Lazard, the investment bank, to explore a privatisation of Plasma Resources UK (PRUK) in a move that could raise tens of millions of pounds for the taxpayer.  In a written statement in the House of Commons yesterday, Simon Burns, the health minister, said a sale was necessary to ensure PRUK “can successfully compete in the global market. An independent review found that the best interests of the company, the taxpayer and patients would be met by investment from private sector”.

The resentment of a private sector influence in the NHS is traditionally resisted by those who argue that such entities are run as businesses in the NHS anyway. As an example, NHS trusts have been in the news because of their risk of insolvency. For example, it was recently announced that South London Healthcare would become the first NHS trust to go into administration “as debts spiral out of control”. Most people can give blood. If you are generally in good health, age 17 to 65 (if it’s your first time) and weigh at least 50kg (7st 12Ib) you can donate.  Many of the rules implemented in the UK on who can give blood are a requirement of European law. However, there are a number of expert committees that regularly review the evidence relating to exclusions and deferrals from blood donation. Policies which specifically relate to the safety of blood for patients are recommended to the Government by the independent advisory committee on the Safety of Blood, Tissues and Organs (SaBTO).

The seminal case of Moore v Regents of the University of California (1990) is the US landmark case which dealt with the issue of property rights in one own’s body parts. The judgment has been made widely available. John Moore underwent treatment for hairy cell leukaemia at the UCLA Medical Centre under the supervision of Dr. David W. Golde. Moore’s cancer was later developed into a cell line that was commercialized. The California Supreme Court ruled that Moore had no right to any share of the profits realised from the commercialisation of anything developed from his discarded body parts.

For thousands of years the human body has been considered inviolable, and this seems to represent the majority of societal values as a whole. At one extreme of the argument, prostitution has been called the world’s ‘oldest profession’, but the law over this area has been ‘complicated’ (see for example the Policing and Crime Act, 2009). However, the boundary between what is ‘me’ and what is ‘outside’ me is not clearly defined (Gold, 1996), particularly when internal organs, tissues and reproductive materials can be easily separated from the body and given to another or offered for research and experimentation. People have powerful feelings of ownership over such tissues, as the parents involved in the Alder Hey and Bristol Royal Infirmary child organ scandals have shown. This idea of self-ownership promotes the concept that individuals have a collection of rights that enable them to determine what is done with their bodies (in the seminal work, ‘Medical Law’, Kennedy and Grubb, 1994).

To analyse how English legislation and case law governs the human body and its constituent parts with regard to the use and control of parts once they have been removed, medical lawyers to the fundamental principles that guide property law. According to Grubb (1998), the rules of private property operate to distribute in society those resources that are valuable and for which there is greater demand than supply. Grubb explains that ‘property’ is used to describe the relationship between a thing and an individual, and that this generates a range of legal rules that govern that relationship, in particular the person’s right to use the thing, exclusively control it and dispose of it.

It could be argued that this general reluctance to regard the body as property (Dworkin and Kennedy, 1993) is founded on historical respect for the body (Nuffield Council on Bioethics, 1995). This, in turn, implies that the body should not be used at will or abused and suggests that property rights may encourage the commercialisation of the body, turning it into a commodity.  More recently, the law has recognised that regenerative body materials, such as hair (R v Herbert, 1961), blood (R v Rothery, 1976) and urine (R v Welsh, 1974), can all be the subject of property rights and are capable of being stolen.

So, when you donate blood in future, you might also have to enter into paperwork over who owns your blood, and it will be interested to see how this is dealt with. For example, City law firms have been known to make enormous sums of profit in trading over rather abstract things such as “carbon credits”, and you can legitimately argue that blood is less abstract than a carbon credit. An interesting question is who owns the blood you have already donated; in other words, whether the new ownership rules might have retrospective effect. A parallel can be seen in natural resources such as water, what Harold Macmillan, in reference to Thatcher’s ideological drive to privatisation, used to call ‘selling off the nation’s China’ in a very unapproving way. A number of things have been done in the name of austerity – such as the legal aid cuts which have seen welfare benefits for disabled citizens being taken out of scope with a record number of proven appeals for benefits being withdrawn completely illegitimately. Whose blood is it anyway? We live in interesting times.

 

 

 

Society meeting: Thursday 12 July, Apple/Samsung patent dispute



We have a meeting of the BPP Legal Awareness Society tomorrow evening at 6.15 pm (until 7.15 pm) in room 2.6, BPP Law School, Red Lion Street, Holborn, London.

Any current, past or future student of BPP may attend. You may be studying any discipline, and we as a society actively encourage students from any discipline, from any site, to attend. Please however be mindful that you will be asked for ID by security should you attend, and members of reception are not able to recognise you immediately.

The aim of this meeting is to look behind the purposive nature of the law of patents in the English courts, and to look at how the recent Apple/Samsung dispute was decided in the High Court (judgment delivered 18/19 June 2012). This will require a discussion of how patent claims are looked at general. Because of the nature of society, we will be considering carefully the commercial strategy of Apple and Samsung internationally in achieving competitive advantage, but paying attention why they might have sought to pursue civil litigation for this.

As such, you may find this meeting particularly interesting if you are studying the commercial law and intellectual property special elective on the Legal Practice Course at BPP. It may also be useful if you are wishing to demonstrate the competence of ‘commercial awareness’ in your training contract interview this summer. Deadlines are during this month, usually culminating on midnight of 31 July (i.e. prior to 0.01 1 August 2012).

To download the poster, press here

 

Our new podcast on legal education



 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Thank you to Katie (head of the BPP Legal Awareness Society podcast team, and current BPP student on the GDL) and Quennezy (BPP Legal Awareness Society, and current BPP student on the BPTC) for recording this podcast on behalf of the Society on legal education.

In this short podcast of about 8 minutes (there is silence for the first 12 seconds or so of this podcast), Katie and Quennezy consider whether the current curriculum is ‘fit for purpose’ based on their own experiences, and whether legal recruiters are justified in selecting people from a II.1 (or above) pool, or a pool of Oxbridge graduates. We hope very much you enjoy your podcast. Many thanks to Matthew Clarke aka @kernowpods for recording our new jingles just before Christmas last year!

 

 

Legal Aware is now a national project – thank you!



The BPP Legal Awareness Society (click here for details) was born at the BPP Business School, St Mary Axe, the City in February 2011. To begin with, our meetings tended to be attended by MBA students and Masters students in marketing and finance.

In January 2012, we started holding our fortnightly meetings instead at the BPP Law School, Holborn.

However, we have always wished to make clear that the BPP Legal Awareness Society can be attended by any past, current or future student of BPP, from any site or discipline. Our meetings are especially useful for training contract applicants wishing to receive valuable hints or tips about psychometric tests for training contracts; also we give emphasis to topics and issues particularly relevant to business law practice, employment, media law, and corporate finance.

We have always had a popular Twitter thread, followed by a huge number of law and business students, lawyers, law firms, barristers, members of the public interested in law, journalists, and others. Our blog is increasingly recognised, for being very active, reflecting many aspects of law especially corporate law, and furthering commercial awareness for law students and how to perform best in psychometric assessments; this blog is the only student blog which we are aware of that has 14 different videos devoted to corporate law suitable for student level made by students, ranging from technology to Islamic finance. But, latterly, we have messages of support from across England from members of law and legal education community, commending us on our innovative approach to legal education. We are very passionate about promoting business acumen for law students, and we are pleased with the feedback now.

We are proud of our identity of being an independent society run by students for students at BPP, in the context of an excellent holistic legal and business education. We are also proud of our success in raising awareness, amongst the general public, of the importance of law and regulation to improving the competitive advantage of businesses.

Here’s our latest poster, which you are free to download.

 

 

Legal Aware blog: But now for an unusual intervention from Prof Lord Robert Winston..



Prof Lord Winston was made a Labour peer in 1995, and he has been Chairman of the House of Lords Select Committee on Science and Technology.  Just remember that this independent student society does not advocate any particular political parties, but it is noteworthy that Lord Winston is a very senior member of the medical profession. Here for example is an extract from his entry in Wikipedia:

Winston is a Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences (FMedSci), an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering (HonFREng) and Fellow of the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists (FRCOG), and of the Royal College of Physicians of London (FRCP), and is an Honorary Fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons (FRCS Edin), Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons (FRCPS Glasg), and the Institute of Biology (FIBiol). He holds honorary doctorates from sixteen universities.[5] He is a member of the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council where he chairs the Societal Issues Panel, and patron of The Liggins Institute, University of Auckland, New Zealand.

The Legal Awareness Society is an independent student society at BPP and does not reflect the views of BPP University College. It exists to promote a discussion about law can impact upon business, and in turn on how both can meet the needs of Society. The Health and Social Care Act (“NHS Act”), furthering ‘competition’ and private sector involvement in the NHS, is an important piece of legislation which affects many private sector businesses, many stakeholders also constituting society, including the general public, and was granted Royal Assent on 27 March 2012.

A final word…

 

GDL revision sheet on principles of judicial review



 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

You’re likely to consider the general principles of judicial review in England before going to consider in detail one or more of the arms of ‘grounds for judicial review’ such as procedural impropriety or legitimate expectation. You might find this revision sheet (Principles of judicial review) useful, but please be guided by your law school/learning provider for exact details (especially with regard to course materials, cases and texts).

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