News round up: Whitehall resists Treasury costcutting call

By Mithran Samuel on March 20, 2009 in Children, Family support, Older people, Social care leaders, Workforce

Whitehall resists Treasury costcutting call

The Treasury is fighting an increasingly bitter battle to extract £5bn of spending cuts from Whitehall departments next year, and hundreds of millions from local government.

The Treasury demands are the first sign of Whitehall having to adjust to a tighter public spending climate after a decade of growth, but Alan Johnson, the health secretary, appears to have won a battle to ringfence the NHS.

Lone parent policy reform ‘successful’

Government policies to help lone parents and reduce the levels of poverty their children live under have been successful, according to a report by academics at the universities of Bath and Bristol.

Writing in The Economic Journal, Paul Gregg, Susan Harkness and Sarah Smith say their work “strongly suggests that the increases in income and employment associated with the reforms have profoundly changed the quality of life of children in lone-parent families”.

Charities face black hole as legacy values collapse

Charities are facing a new £200 million black hole in their finances this year as the value of legacies collapses, according to research.

Some of the best known charities including Cancer Research and the RSPCA rely heavily on money from bequests.
Read more on this story in The Times

Drugs to halt Alzheimer’s disease are expected within decades

Drugs that can halt or slow the progress of Alzheimer’s disease are expected to become available within a decade, but research will be hampered unless the Government commits more funding, scientists say.

Up to eleven medicines are in late-stage clinical trials and results should be reported in twelve months to three years. They target key biological processes that are thought to cause Alzheimer’s and related dementias.