The Government is said to consider shutting down schools whose exam results fail to reach the required target for three years in a row. Teachers would be forced to reapply for their jobs when their school is relaunched.

High street banks plan to charge customers up to £2.50 for using their rivals’ automatic cash dispensing machines.

Tony Blair announces plans for harsher penalties for motorists who are caught driving after drinking more than the legal amount of alcohol. He also proposes raising the age of taking a driving test from 17 to 18.

A Downing Street spokesman says that the UK Government will continue diplomatic sanctions against Austria, despite the decision by far-right Freedom Party leader Joerg Haider to step down. 

At least one arrest was made and a quantity of firearms seized in Birmingham in a security operation related to alleged Islamic terrorism.

Tony Blair announces a five-point plan to slash waiting times for NHS patients. Mr Blair’s speech comes as a massive recruitment campaign is launched in areas of the country where nursing shortages are greatest, and £120 million is set aside to fund student nurse places and train more doctors.

In a television interview, Lord Archer, the disgraced Conservative peer, announces his return to public life as an actor in The Accused, a play he says he wrote after resigning as the London mayoral candidate for the opposition Conservatives.

The Home Secretary, Jack Straw, decides that former Chilean dictator General Augusto Pinochet is medically unfit to stand trial in England and will not be extradited on torture charges. A medical report concludes that General Pinochet has extensive brain damage.

The Prime Minister is to take part in the Millennium Volunteers Scheme, where companies give staff a day off to work on community projects. He will help schoolchildren with their reading in his constituency in north-east England.

The devolved Scottish Parliament holds its proceedings over Gaelic education in the original language of Scotland, Gaelic, even though only a couple of deputies actually speak it. Gaelic is the second official language of the Scottish parliament. Just 70,000 people are now fluent in it, mostly in parts of the Highlands and the Western Isles.

The media claim to have scored a victory for consumers as Lloyds TSB, Abbey National and Barclays decide to reverse their decision to make customers pay up to £2.50 per withdrawal at cash points.

Tony Blair and his wife, Cherie, obtain a court injunction against the Mail on Sunday to stop the publication of extracts from a book by their former nanny, Rosalind Mark, about her time with the Blairs. The nanny says that she never gave permission for her diaries to be published.

The Chancellor of the Exchequer, Gordon Brown, is planning a crackdown on welfare benefit cheats and tax fraudsters in response to a report commissioned by the Government. One measure will be to stop future payments to people convicted twice of fiddling the benefits system. The inquiry by the Labour peer, Lord Grabiner QC, estimates that almost £500m has been lost in benefits paid out to 120,000 claimants believed to be working while signing on.

In a challenge to the Labour Party, Ken Livingstone, the left-wing MP, announces that he is standing as an independent candidate in the election for mayor of London. Mr Livingstone lost the party nomination in a ballot he says was rigged. Labour suspends Mr Livingstone and warns that he could be expelled.

E-commerce companies enter the Financial Times Stock Exchange Index of the top 100 companies. The newcomers include the Internet service provider FreeServe and Psion, which makes personal organisers. Some high-tech companies have yet to make a profit but they are able to join the FTSE 100 index because of their market value.

On his first visit to the Scottish Parliament, the Prime Minister makes a low-key speech about devolution.

Licensing laws in Britain will soon harmonise with the rest of Europe. Under the changes which are due to come into force next year, pubs will be allowed to stay open for 24 hours.

The Government issues a warning to immigrants and asylum seekers from Eastern Europe who have come under the spotlight for begging in London. The Government is ready to give the police extra power to remove beggars from the streets.

A £500-million aid package is approved by the Government to help British Aerospace develop the new A3XX super-Jumbo aircraft. Unions believe the decision will create 22,000 new jobs at BAe and its suppliers, and safeguard up to 60,000.

The Government plans to shake up failing secondary schools. Hundreds of schools might be taken out of local authority control to be run by sponsors, including private business, churches and charities. They will be called City Academies, and could be opened within a year.

President Bill Clinton and Prime Minister Tony Blair say that research into mapping the human genome should be made freely available to scientists around the world. The initiative was prompted by concerns that biotechnology companies would try to stop others having access to breakthroughs in genetic research so they could make profit from the information.

The British company which helped produce the world’s first cloned mammal, Dolly the sheep, says it has now created the world’s first cloned pigs. The company, PPL Therapeutics, now wants to produce genetically identical pigs for possible use in organ transplants for humans.

Dairy farmers from across Britain protest in London about the crisis facing their industry. They say they are being paid a third of what consumers are charged for a pint of milk — not enough to cover their production costs.

BMW angers the Government by announcing the break up of the Rover group based in the English Midlands. The most prestigious part of it, Land Rover, is to be sold to Ford. The rest of Rover would be bought by the British venture capital firm, Alchemy Partners.

The Conservative party wins the first by-election to the Scottish parliament, forcing the Labour Party into third place. Labour had previously held the Ayr seat with a majority of just 25 votes. The campaign was dogged by the controversy over the Government’s plans to repeal the ban on schools teaching about homosexuality.

Labour MPs call on car buyers to boycott BMW because of the way it has behaved in the hand-over of its British subsidiary Rover (BMW is accused of lying about its intentions four days before the sell-off was announced). The leaders of the campaign are drawing up a list of senior figures who drive BMWs so they can be targeted.

Queen Elisabeth makes her first visit to Australia since the country voted last year against replacing her as Head of State with an elected president.

The Liberal Democrats hold their spring conference at Plymouth. Charles Kennedy, who became party leader last August, attacks the Government’s "pale green" policy, accusing it of diluting its pledges on global warming and calling for a five-year moratorium on growing genetically-modified crops. Other speakers criticise the Government on health, education and fighting crime.

Britain is to introduce tighter immigration controls on Eurostar train services through the Channel Tunnel. The new controls are one of a number of measures aimed at easing public concerns about the number of asylum seekers entering Britain and claiming welfare benefits. A new detention centre for asylum seekers has just been opened in Cambridgeshire. The Government says it will speed up the handling of cases, dealing with them within a week.

Cherie Booth QC, the Prime Minister’s wife and a leading employment lawyer, makes an outspoken attack on the discrimination faced by working women. Rigid working hours and leave patterns, the culture of long working hours, and the unacceptability of career breaks all create an environment which, she says, discriminate against women with families.

In his annual budget speech to Parliament, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Gordon Brown, says the economy is now in surplus by £17 billion and expected to grow by about 3 percent this year. As a result, he promises additional funding of more than 6 percent above inflation for the National Health Service and an extra billion pounds for education. Replying for the Conservative party, leader William Hague accuses Mr Brown of raising taxes by stealth and driving businesses out of Britain.

The Most Reverend Cormac Murphy-O’Connor is appointed Roman Catholic Archbishop of Westminster. He has a reputation of being hard on moral issues such as abortion and women priests.

The Royal College of Pathologists issues guidelines to ensure that organs are not removed from dead people without the fully informed consent of relatives.

The British Trade and Industry Secretary, Stephen Byers, travels to Germany for talks on the future of the car manufacturer Rover which its German owner BMW plans to sell off. He hopes to convince BMW to reinvest in the West Midlands which may be hit by big job losses. The future of Rover’s big research centre in Warwickshire is also likely to be mentioned.

The Prime Minister calls for further wide-ranging reforms to the National Health Service, in return for nearly £2billion of extra funding announced in the new budget. The extra funding still leaves annual British spending on health slightly below the European average.

More than 50 leading British artists from Tracey Emin to Howard Hodgkin are to relaunch the Tate Gallery as a home for British works only. It follows the departure of the Tate’s international collection to its new home—the Tate Modern, located besides the Thames in London. Six new galleries of Tate Britain, as the old Tate will now be named, will allow more paintings to be brought out of the Tate’s vast archive. Currently the gallery displays just 15 percent of its collection.

The House of Lords votes by a majority of 15 against the new guidelines for sex education in schools, arguing they fail to differentiate between marriage and other forms of stable relationships. The new guidelines were put forward as a compromise after the Government was defeated in February in its efforts to repeal Clause 28 of the 1988 Local Government Act, which forbids the promotion of homosexuality in schools.

American Beauty by British film director Sam Mendes wins five Oscars at the 72nd Academy Awards, including best picture, best director and best actor for Kevin Spacey. Actor Michael Caine takes the best supporting actor prize for The Cider House Rules. Phil Collins wins best original song for "You’ll be in my heart" from Tarzan.

An urgent inquiry is under way into how an MI6 officer mislaid a laptop computer containing classified material (MI6 is under the responsibility of the Foreign Office). The incident is revealed days after the news that an MI5 laptop computer with classified information on Northern Ireland was stolen at a London Underground station.

In a speech to regional newspaper editors the Prime Minister argues that the Government’s radical devolution programme has strengthened the UK despite fears of a revival of English nationalism.

The report Closing the Digital Divide suggests that people in deprived urban areas should have access to computers, the Internet and e-mail. It recommends setting up internet points in locations where people feel at ease, including pubs, community centres, post offices and bus and train stations.

Novelist Anthony Powell, author of the 12-volume sequence A Dance to the Music of Time, dies aged 94. The sequence, which took him more than 20 years to write, chronicles the changes in British society between the outbreak of the First World War and the 1970s, wittily observed from Powell’s own upper-middle-class background. His first novel Afternoon Men was published in 1931. Anthony Powell divided critical opinion and refused a knighthood offered to him by the Government.

The Government rejects a major report calling for a relaxation of the country’s drug laws. The Home Office stresses the need to maintain firm control on drug uses and a Government spokesman says the proposed redefinition of cannabis and ecstasy as less harmful drugs would send out the wrong signals. The inquiry by the Police Foundation had also proposed more lenient penalties for the possession of soft drugs and tougher action against drug traffickers.

The Home Secretary, Jack Straw, urges charities and businesses to prepare for the new Human Rights Act, which makes it unlawful to deny people their basic rights. It could lead to the prosecution of private schools that fail to stop bullying or private hospitals that deny patients life-saving medication.

Tony Blair praises the Muslim faith as "beautiful" and says he has drawn inspiration from the Koran. He says he should be very surprised if Labour did not have Muslim candidates standing in winnable seats in the next election.

Up to 18,000 London Metropolitan Police officers will be forced to take new driving tests. This is part of a package of measures to try to reduce the number of crashes involving police vehicles answering emergency calls.

The Government delays the partial privatisation of the state-owned atomic energy company British Nuclear Fuels Limited. A series of reports found that workers at the company’s Sellafield reprocessing plant had falsified quality control data and that an adequate safety culture was lacking.

The president of the British Geriatric Society and the President of the Royal College of Physicians claim in the British Medical Journal that long-term care for the elderly is still not properly funded. They say that care for the elderly is "a national disgrace."

The treasurer of the opposition Conservative party, Michael Ashcroft, is made a life peer, provided he lives permanently in Britain. Mr Ashcroft has been criticised for his business dealings and for the large party donation he made from his tax haven in Belize, the South American country he represented as ambassador to the United Nations. He is one of 33 life peers, 20 of whom support the Labour Party.

The new Scottish parliament building, at Holyrood, in Edinburgh, is going to cost four times as much as originally intended. Architect John Spencely says that the final cost would reach £230 million, compared to an original estimate of £50-£60 million. He also warns that the building is not likely to be ready until 2003, two years behind schedule.

The Department of Health warns about 4,500 patients that may have been infected with hepatitis C. Patients who underwent surgery at 19 hospitals in England and Wales as far back as 1978 are being notified. So far six patients are known to have been infected.

Prince Charles formally opens Lambeth Palace, the official London residence of the Archbishop of Canterbury, to the public.