Care UK profits up 25%

Care UK profits up 25%

The pressures on local authority budgets will result in more business for private sector care services, Care UK said, as the health and care group reported a 25 per cent rise in full-year profits.

“In social care, you’ve still got a tranche of services that are delivered in-house,” said Mike Parish, chief executive of Care UK.

Free care at home for ‘all who need it’: Brown pledges £670million but critics say it won’t help everyone

Gordon Brown today pledges to introduce free care for 400,000 of the neediest old people in their own homes as he launches a last-ditch political fightback.

With Labour flatlining in the polls, the Prime Minister will put social care for the elderly at the centre of the party’s last Queen’s Speech today before a General Election expected next spring.

Read more on this story in the Daily Mail

Facebook ‘fails to protect children’

Jim Gamble, head of the Child Exploitation and Online Protection (Ceop) Centre, said Facebook and MySpace could do more to keep youngsters safe.

He said he was disappointed the two internet giants have not adopted a panic button for children who fear they are at risk.

Read more on this story in The Telegraph

Queen’s speech 2009: child poverty bill

The bill will impose a new legal duty on the government to eradicate child poverty by 2020. Child poverty campaigners describe the millions of children living in households below the breadline as “a major scar on British society and a cost we can no longer afford”, and the government has missed previous targets in an area that Labour made a key priority when it came to power in 1997.

The aim, ministers say, is to reduce poverty so that low-income families do not lose out on opportunities, for example for children to go on school trips, and to help create a fairer society. Campaigners say that 4 million children, or three in 10 of all children, live in poverty.