As the round pound enters its final week, shoppers are today being reminded they have just seven days to use these coins before they swap the high street for the history books.

From midnight on Sunday, the round pound will lose its legal tender status and no longer be accepted in shops and restaurants.

HM Treasury and The Royal Mint are calling on people to hunt down any remaining coins and spend, bank or donate them to charity.

The Exchequer Secretary to the Treasury, Andrew Jones, MP, has paid tribute to the fantastic effort of the British public who have returned more than 1.2 billion old coins in the past six months.

He said:

The hard work of the British public has paid off and I am delighted that more than 1.2 billion round pound coins have been returned. Added together, these coins match the weight of around 3,500 elephants or 900 double-decker buses. That is a lot of coins!

There is still time to get involved and with just a week to go, I would encourage anyone who is yet to do so to dig out their remaining coins before Sunday.

CEO and Deputy Master of The Royal Mint, Adam Lawrence, said:

The round pound has been in circulation for over thirty years but, as the deadline approaches, we are keen to encourage everyone to track down their final coins and use them.

After the 15 October, the 12-sided £1 coin will be the only £1 coin being spent in the UK. As the deadline is triggered, we are proud that the security features on the 12-sided £1 coin will help to safeguard our currency for years to come.

Further Information

First introduced in 1983, the old coin has become vulnerable to sophisticated counterfeiters, with as many as one in thirty thought to be a fake. To stop the financial burden this places on taxpayers and businesses and prevent counterfeiters from continuing to profit, it is crucial that as many old round pounds are returned as possible before the 15 October deadline.

With the deadline fast approaching, if after the 15 October members of the public and businesses continue to find round pound coins stashed away, they can still be banked or donated to charity.

HM Treasury and The Royal Mint have partnered with Children in Need and are encouraging the public to donate any old coins to Pudsey’s Round Pound Countdown.

Home Secretary Amber Rudd has announced a new national hub to tackle the emerging threat of online hate crime. It will ensure better support for victims and help drive up the number of prosecutions.

The hub, run by police officers for the National Police Chiefs Council (NPCC), will work to ensure online cases are managed effectively and efficiently.

It will clearly set out the force responsible for further action in each case, removing any uncertainty which could arise when, for example, a victim is located in one area, with the alleged perpetrator in another.

Specialist officers will provide expert case management and better support and advice to victims of online hate crime. The hub will ensure all online cases are properly investigated and will help to increase prosecutions for online hate crimes.

Home Secretary Amber Rudd said:

Online hate crime is completely unacceptable. What is illegal offline is illegal online, and those who commit these cowardly crimes should be met with the full force of the law.

The national online hate crime hub that we are funding is an important step to ensure more victims have the confidence to come forward and report the vile abuse to which they are being subjected.

The hub will also improve our understanding of the scale and nature of this despicable form of abuse. With the police, we will use this new intelligence to adapt our response so that even more victims are safeguarded and perpetrators punished.

The hub’s primary aim is to improve the police response to the problem of hate crime online. Following referral to the national hub via Truevision, the police website to report hate crime, individual complaints will be assessed, and relevant cases will be assigned to the appropriate local force for investigation. As such the hub will streamline and simplify current processes, avoid duplication, make full use of expertise and reduce the burden of online hate crime investigation on local forces.

Victims will be kept updated throughout, as police forces seek to bring perpetrators to justice.

The national online hate crime hub will:

• assess whether the circumstances relate to a crime or non-crime incident
• combine duplicate reports
• seek to identify the perpetrator
• refer appropriate cases to online platforms hosting external content, such as social media companies, so that hateful material can be removed
• feed any intelligence into the wider National Intelligence Model, the police data base which gathers intelligence on a wide range of crimes, to guide policing strategies and inform forces’ priorities
• produce an evidence package for local recording and response where there is a positive line of enquiry
• update the complainant with progress and explain where there is no enforcement action possible
• advise local police colleagues on effective responses. The hub could develop and drive best practice through the network of hate crime leads in individual forces

It is expected to be operational before the end of the year.

Joint statement from Norway and the UK welcoming the lifting of US economic sanctions on Sudan

I am absolutely delighted to be here today to welcome you all to the legal profession, and to congratulate you on this wonderful achievement.

I have no doubt that every single one of you in this room today has worked incredibly hard to get to this point, and it is my great privilege to share this moment with you.

In fact, I know this only too well through my own experience as a lecturer for CILEx. When I was lecturing my class was entirely of students who were juggling working and childcare responsibilities.

While you have all achieved something notable just by being here today, I want to encourage you to think of this as just the beginning. As CILEx lawyers, you now have more opportunities open to you than ever before.

Many of you will go on to have successful careers in private legal practice – indeed hundreds of CILEx members who have sat where you are now have worked their wayon to become partners at solicitor firms.

Many of you will seek independent practice rights, and set up your own firms.Others will take the public sector route, working as government legal advisors, for local authorities, or as CPS prosecutors.

But there is another potential goal that I would like you to hold in your minds, and that is to enter the ranks of the judiciary.

While this may seem like a distant prospect right now (indeed you must be at least 5 years post qualified), it is an ambition that I hope at least some of you will choose to eventually pursue.

We are fortunate in this country to be served by one of the world’s finest judiciaries, but we have still yet to truly unlock the full pool of talent available to perform this most critical public function.

The great personal drive, and diversity of membership and perspective of CILEx members makes you ideally suited to serve in our courts and tribunals. And we must ensure that you are given the opportunity to do so.

As an organisation, I know CILEx is committed to supporting members who wish to pursue careers in the judiciary, and I would urge all of you to at least consider the prospect.

Of course, a career in the judiciary is just one of the many positive ways in which you, as graduates and lawyers, can give back and contribute to the community.

The Attorney General and I are passionate advocates for pro bono legal support, and for the provision of public legal education.

Chartered Legal Executives like you possess skills and experience which you can use to make a great deal of difference in people’s lives. You will do this every day in your paid employment, but I want to encourage you to consider the options available to also donate some of your time to those most in need.

This can take many forms – it can be on ad hoc basis, or come through more structured volunteering, such as at your local Citizens Advice Bureau. The CILEx Pro Bono Trust also offers opportunities for you to get involved in. We have seen recently – in the wake of the terrible tragedies this country has faced – just how powerful a force pro bono can be.

The legal community has rallied admirably to support the victims and families of the London and Manchester terrorist attacks, and the Grenfell fire. Through a great collective pro bono effort, these people have had access to advice, support and advocacy in their hour of greatest need.

Some of you may be thinking ‘but I work in conveyancing, or debt recovery, that’s not my area of specialism’ – but you are legally trained: legal research, client care, document analysis, processes, procedures, policies – these are skills that you are qualified in – and no matter your area of law there are those who you can help.

But emergency pro bono support is not the only contribution you can make. Through the provision of Public Legal Education, lawyers like you play an invaluable role in providing people with awareness, knowledge and understanding of their rights and the rights of other citizens. This builds the confidence and skills they need to deal with disputes and helps ensure access to justice.

Public Legal Education helps people recognise when they may need support, what sort of advice is available, and how to go about getting it.

It is a field I have been involved in since entering private practise in the 1990s. At the bar I worked for the Speakers In Schools scheme and in organising the Welsh heats of the Bar Mock Trials competition.

There are many ways to teach people about the law, from interactive presentations, mock trials and role play exercises to awareness raising campaigns or information in leaflets and online. Different organisations tailor this to different groups, from educating primary and secondary school pupils to prison inmates, community groups and homeless people.

I am very pleased to have the strong support of CILEx in the Public Legal Education Panel that I recently established. This Panel seeks to coordinate and enhance the provision of Public Legal Education in England and Wales, and complements the good work already undertaken by the Attorney General’s pro bono committee.

CILEx Graduates and Chartered Legal Executives like you already make a fantastic contribution to public legal education, but I know collectively we can do even more to education and empower our community.

I want to conclude by wishing all of you the very best in your career ahead.

Law is a hugely challenging profession, but also an immensely rewarding one.

As you celebrate your wonderful achievement with your friends and family today, I encourage you to look forward to the future with optimism, to take risks, and to push yourself to achieve even more than you ever imagined you could.

Thousands of lives have been saved since the Department for Transport (DfT) introduced the maximum legal drink drive limit 50 years ago this weekend (7 October 2017).

The landmark Road Safety Act 1967 made it an offence to drive a vehicle with a blood alcohol concentration of over 80mg of alcohol per 100ml of blood – a limit which remains in place to this day.

This law made an important impact and since 1979, when official statistics first began, the number of drink drive deaths per year has plummeted from 1,640 right down to 200 in 2015 – a fall of 88%. We strive to further reduce this number by launching a new THINK! drink-drive campaign at the end of November 2017. THINK!, which reached its own 50th birthday in 2014, has successfully challenged a number of behaviours and attitudes to improve road safety, including drink driving. The iconic campaigns have helped reduce the number of deaths on British roads from 22 per day in the 1960s to the current level of 5.

Roads Minister Jesse Norman said:

This is a remarkable milestone, and I am proud of the work this department has done to reduce the number of deaths from drink driving over the last 50 years.

The change in attitudes to drink driving during this time has been profound, and there is little doubt that the introduction of the drink-drive limit helped to give us what remains one of the safest road networks in the world.

There is still much further to go, but we are making good progress. Our THINK! campaigns should help to reduce the number of drink drive incidents even further.

50 years of THINK! drink drive campaigns

RAC road safety spokesman Pete Williams said:

The introduction of a legal maximum limit for the amount of alcohol permissible in driver’s blood has without doubt saved hundreds of lives on the UK’s roads since 1967. The breathalyser is central to this as it gave police the ability to assess accurately at the roadside whether a driver was over the limit.

High-profile police drink-drive campaigns send strong messages to motorists about the tragic consequences of driving under the influence of alcohol and let offenders know they will be caught and punished.

In 1967 DfT’s predecessor, the Ministry of Transport, launched a major publicity campaign around the new act. The campaign comprised TV, film and newspaper advertising and saw millions of leaflets distributed with vehicle licences.

DfT previously marked 50 years of drink drive campaigning in 2014.