More risk-taking in public services urged by minister

More risk-taking in public services urged by minister

Cabinet minister Andy Burnham today casts aside traditional Treasury caution, calling for “completely new thinking” on public services, including greater risk-taking, less reliance on targets, and a new focus on measuring performances through surveys of patients, parents and other users.

Read more on this story from The Guardian today

Schools offered cash to sponsor academies

Top state schools are to be offered up to £300,000 to sponsor an academy, ministers revealed yesterday.

Read more on this story from The Guardian today

Life through a lens: how Britain’s children eat, sleep and breathe TV

A generation of “multi-tasking” children are living their daily lives – including eating and falling asleep – to the accompaniment of television, according to a survey of youngsters’ media habits.

The findings, from the market research agency Childwise, will fuel concerns that childhood is increasingly about private space and sedentary activities and less about play, social interaction or the child’s own imagination.

Read more on this story from The Guardian today

In Ruins: The Ujima housing association

It is an inglorious end to one of the British black community’s great success stories. Thirty years after being set up by six idealistic housing officers to provide accommodation and work for minority ethnic youngsters in the inner city, and having grown into a respected £1bn organisation, Ujima housing association will this week effectively cease to exist.

Read more on this story from The Guardian today

Testing times: Charity Commission’s Suzi Leather

Call it work in progress, suggests Charity Commission chair, Dame Suzi Leather. She is talking about the commission’s guidance on how charities must in future demonstrate public benefit, published today following introduction of the requirement in the Charities Act 2006 and an extensive consultation. “This is a large first step, but certainly we are not yet at the end of the road,” she stresses.

Read more on this story from The Guardian today

Individual budgets: using a self-directed support plan for personal care

Brenda is an unlikely harbinger of revolution. She is elderly, confined to a motorised wheelchair, frail, and almost entirely dependent upon her husband for her personal care. Yet the way she has reorganised her care, using a personal budget and a self-directed support plan, provides a model not just for the reform of social care but for many other public services.

Read more on this story from The Guardian today

Choose a care home by stopping off for dinner – and stay the night if you can

Families choosing a care home for an elderly relative should have a meal there before making a decision, the charity Counsel and Care advised yesterday in a new guide.

Read more on this story from The Daily Mail today

Women renew equality battle

Hundreds of female cleaners, caterers and school crossing guards on Tuesday renewed a four-year battle for equal pay at the Court of Appeal. About 800 women are involved in the Redcar & Cleveland council case, which relates to pay differences before April 2004. A similar claim brought by female care workers for Middlesbrough council is being considered by the appeals court at the same time.

Read more on this story from The Financial Times today

Adding up the cost of social care

Amid concerns about the affordability of care for elderly and disabled people, the BBC and London School of Economics (LSE) have joined forces to launch an online tool that estimates the cost of care according to individual circumstances.

Read more on this article from The Guardian today

Coming of age: Ruth Marks, commissioner for older people in Wales

Is Ruth Marks charming? The question stops the commissioner for older people in Wales (the first role of its type in Britain), in her tracks. She bursts out laughing. “Ask my staff,” she says. “Or my mum.” It is a seemingly flippant question, but an important one. Employed to be the voice and champion of older people throughout Wales, Marks will have to use all her charm and perseverance with the Welsh assembly and in the media to have a real impact.

Read more on this article from The Guardian today

Ombudsman again strikes out at Trafford Council

The Wright family knew better than to bank on a big windfall when the local government ombudsman recommended that Trafford Council, Manchester, pay them £100,000 compensation for failing to meet the needs of Carly Wright, 25, who has profound disabilities but has been forced to live in the cramped family home since August 2005.

The plainly exasperated ombudsman, Anne Seex, has now issued a second report on the case, expressing disappointment at Conservative-run Trafford’s refusal to accept her recommendation and its “unwillingness” to recognise that the sum merely reflected what it should have paid for her care over the period. Instead, the council has offered the family just £10,000.

Read more on this article from The Guardian today

Doctors rebel over plan to prevent treatment for failed asylum-seekers

Ministers face a doctors’ rebellion over plans to deny failed asylum-seekers the right to free health care while they are in the UK. In an unprecedented move, 275 GPs have said they will defy any new law by carrying on freely treating refugees, many of whom are torture victims, children and pregnant women.

Read more on this story from The Independent today

Hundreds of seriously ill people deported every year

Hundreds of seriously ill foreigners are deported every year, Britain’s immigration chief admitted as she defended the removal to Ghana of a woman with terminal cancer.

Read more on this story from The Independent today

Independent schools forced to be ‘more open’

Independent schools are to be made to open their doors to more children from poor homes under guidelines announced to stop them being run as “exclusive clubs”.

Read more on this story from The Daily Telegraph today

Government may revive fatherless baby Bill

Plans that could allow lesbian couples to create a child with no biological father may be brought back by the Government, it emerged last night.

Read more on this story from The Daily Telegraph today