Blogs

"Private security staff who operate prison vans will decide from today whether young adults awaiting trial in London are mentally strong enough to survive in the toughest prisons." I had to read that sentence a few times before I realised I read it right in the first place. Indeed, according to the Guardian, White Van Man will be doubling up as Sigmund Freud. What is going on? The article continues "Serco private escort officers staffing the vans which move prisoners between courts and prisons in London will decide whether a young adult on remand is too much of a suicide risk to be held at an adult prison and should be sent instead to Feltham young offender institution." If I were one of these van drivers I would point blank refuse - you can not put that sort of responsibility on security staff who have no training or understanding of psychology.

Nobody has spun a story better than Alistair Campbell. He was one of the big players behind new Labour and one of the big reasons they have won three elections. He is portrayed as a heartless and ruthless character and will use every trick in the book to get policy through. While Blair was the smiling face with the "like me, like me" speeches, Campbell was always lurking in the background - it all seemed rather sinister to me. He also always seemed to have the last laugh as well. Though now he is about to be apoplectic with laughter.

More bitter experience. More unfinished business.

LP has pointed out The Guardian article in which Lord Falconer declares that Tony Blair has "big regrets" about not tackling the culture of public-service provision earlier. "I don't think we even really clocked that agenda until four or five years on", he is reported as saying.

This is looking like a theme. Why would the departing leader and his supporters be drawing attention to his failures? Has anyone got an alternative explanation to the one I posited yesterday?

Government

Forget the legacy and the lecture circuit. Tony Blair has no intention of retiring from the front-line, nor even of being a good back-seat driver. He is preparing for the next phase of his political career, not for life after politics. How else are we to interpret his article in yesterday's Telegraph?

Mr Blair is positioning himself as the voice of wizened authority, of hardbitten realism, of painful lessons learned through bitter experience. Even the picture accompanying the article displays a harder-nosed Blair, staring out from the paper with a look of contempt that seems strangely familiar.

Anthony Blair	Alan B'Stard

The Telegraph interpreted Mr Blair's article as an admission that he "got it wrong on problem families". But that was merely a tasty morsel offered out to a right-wing journal. It was not the main message. The main message was that you need experience to understand the real causes and solutions to social problems, experience that Blair has and Cameron does not.

JG has been highlighting the MTAS fiasco. Besides the fine illustration it provides of this Government's incompetence and refusal to take responsibility for their mistakes, it also sheds an interesting sidelight on another bad Labour policy. On Thursday's Question Time, Caroline Flint, the Public Health Minister, explained the necessity to scrap the old system in the following words:

"I have heard, for example, from clinicians about how applications used to turn up at hospitals, they'd put them in a pile and literally pull them out at random. So it was all agreed that that system wasn't right."

A bad system is no reason or excuse to introduce something worse. And one of the main criticisms of MTAS is that it made the selection process more, not less random. But equally importantly, does this not describe almost exactly the "lottery" approach to assigning places in schools to students, introduced by egalitarian Labour councils and approved by this Labour government? Why is a random approach wrong for selecting junior doctors but right for selecting students?

But let's be fair and give credit where credit is due if a Minister manages to be sensible (a task made all the more compelling by the fact that Ms Flint is by a long chalk the hottest minister and probably the hottest MP in parliament, and that is not intended to damn with faint praise). Yesterday's Telegraph reports that Ms Flint has taken a robust and rational stance against the call from Alcohol Concern to make it illegal for parents to give their children alcohol. If parents can't teach their children how to drink responsibly, it is hard to know who should have that responsibility. And how would such a law have been enforced? Ms Flint is to be congratulated on resisting blinkered pressure groups, giving short shrift to such a nannyish idea, and choosing masterly inaction over ill-considered action.

Now if she could only teach the rest of her colleagues to apply the same approach, we might have fewer MTAS-style fiascos.

Congratulations to Dr Crippen for his massive success in getting the deficient NHS recruitment IT system shut down. Whilst it is too late for all those people who have had their personal details disclosed and for the tax payers who have had to stump up for this mess, at least it is a real disclosure that this government can not do IT projects. Now will the government accept that it can not do IT projects and shelve plans for the ID card scheme? I doubt it, but I hope the electorate take note. An ID card scheme will be far, far bigger on scale and will hold personal details (like the MTAS) on all of us. Do you still trust the government to keep the details secure? I certainly don't, and I don't want to pay the billions of pounds to test this fear either. Scrap it now, Gordon (you are in charge, right?) for the sake of our security and our bank balances.

The Home Improvement Pack (HIP) disaster is slowly coming to the boil. The Law Society believes that Home inspectors could make up to £250 million a year on producing packs that never get used! If a property has been on the market for 6 months it will require a new HIP, leading to nearly half a million packs being pulped every year. With each one costing at least £500, the total bill would hit £250 million. Whilst 6 months will not be a legal requirement, in reality renewals will be required if the property is to sell. Nearly two million homes are put on the market every year, with a quarter going unsold after a year, it is estimated.

After reports yesterday about the Government issuing warnings to keep quiet about the their plans for fees on rubbish collections (on top of council tax), there are more reports today of "behind the scenes" policy making that would not go down well a week before major local and Scottish elections if they were big news. It appears that valuation officers are compiling an electronic database logging details of every home in the country - despite the government saying that this would not happen until after a general election. Internal government handbooks for the Valuation Office Agency, an arm of the Inland Revenue, showed that inspectors were empowered to enter homes and log features. The council tax manual states that although the revaluation exercise is delayed, "it is imperative that every opportunity is taken to maintain and further improve the extensive electronic database".

Government

Home inspectors could make up to £250 million a year on producing packs that never get used, causing huge waste for home owners trying to sell their homes, according to the Law Society. The prediction comes as leading professionals continue to call for a delay in introducing the controversial home selling scheme, which is due to start in June.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2007/04/27/nhips27.xml

Government:

• Health Minister Andy Burnham today published new guidance to help health bodies and practitioners deliver high quality convenient care closer to people's homes. Under government plans, GPs and Pharmacists with special interests will need to go through a new rigorous and fair form of accreditation to ensure they have the necessary skills to deliver efficient and effective patient care in the community that was traditionally only available in hospitals.

• The UK's current water policy framework is not robust enough, Environment Minister Ian Pearson said today as he launched a debate on a revised National Water Strategy. Speaking to an industry audience at an IPPR seminar on the link between climate change and water, Mr Pearson called for preconceptions and policies to change to meet the increasing challenges posed by changing climate, housing patterns and lifestyles.

It just gets worse! On NHS Blog Doctor, Dr Crippen is reporting that any applicant can see any correspondent sent by a candidate on the Medical Training Application Service (MTAS) system, just by changing a couple of figures. This NHS recruitment system really is a shambles to say the least!

...read the comments for confirmation. Please take this out of the DoH hands, they are clearly completely incompetent.

The Guardian has revealed that there are 17 trusts that are heavily in debt and finally the NHS and Department of Health has admitted the problem. The debt is to the tune of hundreds of millions of pounds at each of the trusts - 12 of which are not creditworthy enough to be lent money from government funds, according to David Nicholson the NHS chief executive. The DoH must now enter a phase of complete re-organisation to to help them survive.

This week's Picking Losers stories seem to be have been dominated by the rubbish collections and, less surprisingly, the NHS. Today is no different. I'll start with rubbish collections...

Government

• Householders will face a new tax on rubbish from next year under proposals to be announced by David Miliband next month, The Times has learnt. The Environment Secretary will disclose much tougher targets to recycle waste and will give councils new powers to levy charges on nonrecyclable rubbish. New regulations are expected to be attached to the Climate Change Bill to be introduced in July. The new proposals are likely to aggravate a public outcry over fortnightly collections of domestic waste brought in by cash-strapped authorities. Some councils, particularly those facing town hall elections, have changed back to weekly collections.

Government  

• A plan to help improve the training and development available to school teachers and contribute to raising school standards in England is published today by the Training and Development Agency for Schools (TDA). The new national strategy for serving teachers' Continuing Professional Development (CPD) will ensure that effective, high quality training is available in the areas that need it most. Schools will be able to make better, more informed decisions about the training in which they invest.  
• A consortium of leading charities and a top London university have won a £30m grant to provide a new academy for parenting practitioners, following an announcement by Children's Minister Beverley Hughes today.
  

There is worrying news about the levels of MRSA and other "hospital" superbugs from an independent study done by Dr Foster Research. The study of 167 NHS hospital trusts in England found that infection control was in a state of disarray. Only 10 of the trusts had isolated 90% of individuals with MRSA - a standard that infection control experts regard as fundamental in the battle against hospital-acquired bugs. Trusts are reacting slow and screening patients outside the guideline times in most cases. Even more worryingly, deaths linked to hospital superbugs have increased dramatically.

A story that has been brewing for sometime now is that of the Home Improvement Packs or HIPS. By June 1st of this year everyone selling their house will have to have an inspector come round at the cost of £600-£1000 to issue the seller with the pack. The problems associated with this scheme have been foreseen for a long time but the government has done absolutely nothing about it.

When will this government learn that the more it interferes in our lives the worse things get? Why do they insist they know better all the time? The latest piece of interfering comes in the form of a £30m initiative (paid for by us...) for a new academy to coach parents on how to control tearaway children.

The old saying in politics goes "Turkeys don't vote for Christmas", and it seems the turkeys in the House of Commons are no different. Senior Ministers will back plans to give exemptions to MPs in certain areas of the Freedom of Information Act. The measures will mean restrictions on the release of MPs expenses claims in to the public domain. So whilst the rest of the public sector will be under the scrutiny of FoI, the very people who voted it in in the first place will be exempt.