We will do what we can to help them work with the European Commission to meet this challenge.". Dylan Thomas was inspired to write some of his most famous works in one, as was Roald Dahl and now the novelist Philip Pullman. So if you are encountering writer's block, perhaps you should go down to the bottom of your garden. No longer associated with potting plants or brewing questionable substances, the shed has been reborn as the "garden office" and is attractive, spacious and increasingly popular among people who work from home.The advantage of having an "office" in a shed, rather than your kitchen or living room, is that your workspace is completely separate You leave home in the morning and "commute" to the garden. After enlargement on 1 May, they will automatically be regarded as meeting basic EU standards - even though the European Commission has no proof this is the case. It has constantly stressed that a relatively small number of heavily polluting vehicles were responsible for a large proportion of the problem and announced its intention to focus on cleaning them up.Three years ago it started the CleanUp scheme, administered by the official Energy Saving Trust, to pay three quarters of the cost of installing anti-pollution devices on the dirtiest commercial vehicles. The devices have a dramatic effect - reducing emissions of tiny particulates, the deadliest pollutants from exhausts, by 90 per cent.For its first two financial years the scheme failed to spend all the money budgeted for it But last year it took off spectacularly.

Extra money had to be found, increasing spending to £13m, £4m over budget. Even so, it had to be suspended in November, before the new financial year.But this year funds are to be sharply cut back to £7m - little more than half of what was spent last year - rather than being increased to support the boom in the cleaning up of thousands of dirty vehicles. In a further discouragement, the amount of money available for each vehicle has been slashed by about 25 per cent.An Energy Saving Trust document, seen by The Independent on Sunday, admits that the cuts have been brought in to "manage demand", which had been expected to be "high".The trust vigorously defends the cuts. It says that lowering the amount given to each vehicle enables more of them to be cleaned for the same money. It adds that the cut in the total budget is due to more money being given to other schemes, such as subsidising motorists who buy "green" cars.. Plans to hire thousands of Eastern European doctors, dentists and nurses to work in the NHS are in disarray because of doubts about their professional skills, The Independent on Sunday can reveal. Measures to reduce deadly traffic fumes have been heavily cut back because they were too successful, The Independent on Sunday can reveal.

"We should stress that, mercifully, the number of deaths is small for such a common disease, but proper studies suggest that most of these are preventable. If there are worries about the figures, there's nothing to suggest it is better or worse for asthma than anything else."'Medicine and Me: Asthma' at the Royal Society of Medicine, 1 Wimpole Street, London on 28 April Tickets £10. See .uk for further details.The 'IoS' would like to hear about your asthma experiences. Write to asthma independent.co.uk. We need a nationally funded inquiry into asthma deaths."Earlier studies had found that asthmatics with aspirin sensitivity died after being given the painkiller, or were given beta-blockers that interfered with their asthma drugs.

In other cases, there were delays in giving life-saving treatment but some asthmatics also failed to use their drugs regularly. Liz Lynch, the mother of one severely asthmatic woman who died in 2002 at the age of 29, said ignorance about the condition was a common experience for her daughter, Bernadette. Staff at their local hospital in Glasgow routinely accused her daughter of failing to take her medicine, even though her notes showed that her body was failing to absorb her steroid drugs."Especially in A&E, they always blamed her, saying she hadn't been taking her drugs. She was told once in intensive care that 'one of these days, it could be too late'," said Mrs Lynch, who plans to raise her daughter's experiences at the IoS-sponsored conference."The doctors wouldn't take responsibility," she said. "I think they were fed up with her, the amount of times she was in.