Wirral council has written to the Justice Select Committee opposing new charges for Freedom of Information Act requests.

The council has received 3,675 requests for information in the last five years.

Cllr Ian Lewis, cabinet member for customer and community engagement, said notable requests had arrived during attempts to close libraries and leisure centres and, more recently, during the attempts by a whistle blower to lift the lid on over charging of adults in care homes in the borough.

Old Labour foes Peter Kilfoyle and Jane Kennedy are going to go head to head for the party's nomination for Merseyside's Police and Crime Commissioner.

Ms Kennedy was the first out of the blocks, but Mr Kilfoyle has now confirmed that he too will be standing.

Seasoned observers will remember how the pair fell out, publicly over the selection of Luciana Berger to replace Ms Kennedy in Liverpool's Wavertree seat ('student politician').

Liverpool council has tonight voted to ditch its council leader and have an elected mayor instead.

Sixty-two councillors voted in favour of the measure, three were against, and there were 12 abstentions in the vote held in the council chamber, my colleague David Bartlett reports.

That kind of result will please the government whose pet project this is. In deciding to ditch a referendum - which 10 other cities will hold in May - and go straight to a mayoral election, the city council has reportedly secured some £130 million in extra funding.

It's been interesting to observe this little democratic (or not as the Lib Dems would have it) experiment that my former home city is undertaking right now in deciding to go for a mayoral election on 3 May...

Welcome back Jane Kennedy to frontline politics in Merseyside.

Today she confirmed the rumours that she was considering running for the job of police and crime commissioner for Merseyside.

The Labour party will start the process of shortlisting their candidate next month, and Mrs Kennedy is the first out of the block.

Cabinet documents released under the 30-year rule show how Margaret Thatcher was urged to abandon Liverpool in the wake of the 1981 riots by her then chancellor Geoffrey Howe.

This city's papers, and many national titles, have carried the story with various characters from then and now giving their views on the revelations.

There was nothing much new here. The Iron Lady has been demonised on Merseyside for many years, but there were those surrounding her even more Thatcherite than she was, driven by an extreme form of neolibralism and disdain for the industry that made Britain a world superpower.

It turns out Merseyside has quite a lot to be grateful to the EU for, more than 2 billion euros in fact.

Given the current debate taking place about our relationship with Europe in the wake of David Cameron wielding his veto last week I thought it salient to remember how Merseyside has benefitted from the EU.

Been to a show at the arena? The EU helped pay for that. Caught a flight to Ibiza or Lanzarote from Liverpool John Lennon Airport? The EU helped pay for the airport's expansion.

In fact the EU has been involved in funding most of the major projects that have taken place across the region in the past decade and a half.

Walk through any town centre across Merseyside and you will be able to spot investments that were paid for with European funding.

The debate around full disclosure of the documents relating to the Hillsborough disaster is due to take place in the House of Commons this evening as the families of the 96 made a fresh call to The Sun newspaper to reveal their controversial police sources.

Hillsborough Family Support Group chair Margaret Aspinall, who lost her 18-year-old son James in the disaster, demanded the paper name who told them the lies that caused such deep hurt in this city.

In the four years I served as a local councillor, and during the past 18 months as a member of parliament, I have consistently avoided questions of local government reorganisation.

Here's why: I've always found that it's not structures that matter, it's leaders. I

found the debate on mayor versus leader and cabinet models of local governance pretty dry, and I suspect I'm not the only one.

You have to wonder what is happening to politics when a councillor gets suspended from duty for four months for branding town hall officials "Nazis" over unpopular proposals for a town centre?

It is not the most sensible use of language, but does it really warrant a four month suspension?

Read the story about Knowsley council Liberal Democrat Ian Smith's suspension HERE.

He could have used a much more elaborate language to deliver a much more devastating critique. But passions run high over the future of Prescot, and he went too far.

With a densely populated country like England it will never be easy to come to a decision about a significant expansion to the country's transport infrastructure, especially when such a decision involves crossing from one part of the country to the other.

That said just because a choice is hard and opposition is loud, doesn't mean that such a decision shouldn't be made.

And with High Speed 2 we have both, as well as emotions running high on either side of the argument.

The No lobby with cries of; cost and environment, the Yes lobby with cries of; growth, jobs and connectivity, added to that, in the North, there is a real necessity to expand private enterprise and to balance our economy, so moving away from an over-dependence on the public sector.