Local authority round-up 10 October 2025
10th October, 2025
Our Local Authority round up provides brief summaries of topical information on a weekly basis, to keep you aware of the changes and updates relevant to you.
Health & Social Care
Online GP appointments come into fruition rather than calling surgery or visiting in person.
From 1st October 2025, patients in England are able to request appointments, ask questions and describe their symptoms online throughout the day rather than calling their surgery from 8am. This new system has been rolled out to free up the practice phone lines for patients who need them the most, and make it more convenient when accessing appointments.
In order for this new system to work, GP practices in England are required to keep online consultation tools open from 8am to 6:30pm, Monday to Friday. To facilitate this move, an extra £1.1 billion funding for general practice (the biggest increase in funding in over a decade) has been issued and an extra 2,000 GPs have been hired across England. The rollout of this new system has already cut waiting times for one surgery from 14 to 3 days, with most patients being seen within one week.
For more information, please click here.
Housing
Proposed requirements for providing ‘vital information’ upfront in house buying process.
In a bid to reform the house buying process, the Government have unveiled a proposal to help halve the number of failed transactions when buying homes. The proposal includes introducing a requirement on sellers and estate agents to provide buyers with information about a property upfront. For example, the condition of the home, leasehold costs, and how many people are in the chain waiting to move.
The aim of making this information mandatory and available at the start of the process is to help reduce the time-scale and simply the often complicated conveyancing process. Further to this, it is proposed that buyers could see a side-by-side comparison on estate agents and conveyancers which includes their track record. Within this proposal, It has also been suggested that a new mandatory qualification and Code of Practice to raise standards within the conveyancing profession is introduced.
For more information please click here.
Education
Increase in teacher bursaries and scholarships to incentivise more specialist teachers in classrooms.
A new government initiative is being introduced by way of bursaries and scholarships worth up to £31,000 to incentivise future teachers to train in subjects such as, chemistry, maths, physics and computing. The incentive is set to boost outcomes for young people across the country by having access to more specialised teachers.
In response to this scheme, the government has seen an increase in teachers training in Physics and Computing up by 33 per cent and 42 per cent. Alongside this increase, languages and maths have seen growth of around 15 per cent compared to last year.
As part of the government initiative to recruit more trainee teachers in further education, a bursary up to £31,000 for those teaching in key shortages STEM subjects will also be available, as well as £15,000 for SEND-specialist trainees, and finally, £10,000 for those training to teach English. The idea behind this scheme is to gain more exceptional teachers in front of classrooms to drive higher standards in schools to inspire the next generation and boost outcomes for young people.
For more information, please click here.
Upcoming events:
Seminar: Contract Law Update
We are thrilled to announce that Professor Ewan McKendrick KC, will be joining us once again for our insightful overviews of the latest in contract law.
For this series we are collaborating with BCL Legal, the UK’s number one legal recruiter. We will be hosting a session in Manchester and Leeds on 22nd October and 25th November respectively.
Professor of Anglo-American Private law at the University of Leiden and Emeritus Professor of English Private Law at the University of Oxford, Professor McKendrick will share with us the latest insights and case law on the following topics.
- Recent cases on the interpretation of contracts, in particular the interpretation of exclusion and limitation clauses
- Implied terms and the termination of contracts
- Agreed damages and penalty clauses
- The application of the Contracts (Rights of Third Parties) Act 1999
- The drafting of conditions precedent, material adverse change clauses and MOUs
- Incorporation of contracts terms, variation and rescission of contracts
- A summary of other leading developments
These updates are a must attend for all in-house legal teams. We have a session in Manchester from 9:00 am – 1:00 pm on 22nd October, and a session in Leeds from 9:00 am – 1:00 pm on 25th November.
If you’d like to attend our Manchester seminar, please click here. If you’d like to attend the following session in Leeds, please click here.
Please note that this briefing is designed to be informative, not advisory and represents our understanding of English law and practice as at the date indicated. We would always recommend that you should seek specific guidance on any particular legal issue.
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