Government
- Exam papers will be tagged this summer in a crackdown on cheating, one of the country's biggest exam boards reveals today. Edexcel, which marks 13 million question papers a year, will install a radio-controlled device in bags of exam papers held by schools.The tag will tell it how many papers should be inside and whether there has been an attempt to open the bag before the exam starts. In addition, the board's name is written in microtext (invisible to the naked eye but detectable through a special magnifying device) around individual papers, to deter photocopying of the paper - and its sale on the open market. A paper can fetch £200 the day before an exam, officials said. The crackdown follows the discovery of a theft of an A-level maths paper last summer. The board said there had been 70 reported breaches of security during last summer's GCSE, AS and A-level papers. http://education.independent.co.uk/news/article2530771.ece
- Hospitals built under Private Finance Initiatives (PFI) are so costly to run that they risk a permanent deficit, according to an economic analysis produced by the NHS in London. But they cannot be closed because the debts incurred would still have to be repaid, and a hospital that treats no patients generates no income. The analysis, aimed at stemming a £65 million deficit in southeast London, concludes that savings can be made only by closures at older hospitals that have not yet been rebuilt under a PFI. Two PFI hospitals in the area are technically bankrupt, with no realistic prospect of repaying their deficits - Bromley Hospitals NHS Trust, and Queen Elizabeth Hospital, Woolwich. But neither can be closed without making things worse, so cuts are more likely to fall on Queen Mary's, Sidcup, which is also heavily indebted but which made a small surplus in 2006-07. http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/health/article1774372.ece
- Seven firms of solicitors began a challenge in the High Court yesterday to the abolition of a discretionary scheme to compensate victims of miscarriages of justice. The decision brought to an end wrongly more than a century of ex gratia payments to people who are wrongly convicted and suffer injustice at the hands of police and state, the court was told. The seven firms, along with three individual claimants, accused the Government of acting "unfairly and unlawfully". Rabinder Singh, QC, for the solicitors, said that the nonstatutory scheme was abolished in April last year without warning by Charles Clarke, who was then Home Secretary. The Home Office had operated the scheme in recent years alongside a separate statutory scheme set up under the 1988 Criminal Justice Act to meet international law obligations. http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/law/article1774580.ece
- A motorist accused of driving at 37mph in a 30mph zone has had the case against him dropped after the prosecution decided it wasn't worth the trouble. Michael Ives, 68, a self-employed, semi-retired plumbing and heating engineer, had received a speeding notice in the post alleging that he had been driving his Ford Mondeo at 7mph above the limit. Most people would have looked at the evidence with resignation: two photographs accompanied the notice, one clocking his car 260 yards (239m) from the camera, the other at 54 yards (50m). But Mr Ives had never had points on his licence and wasn't about to start now. Determined to fight the case, he investigated, using the Freedom of Information Act to find out at what distance mobile speed cameras are guaranteed to be accurate. The manufacturer replied with some interesting information: the tripod-mounted laser mobile cameras were accurate only up to to 109 yards (100m). Armed with this knowledge, Mr Ives pleaded not guilty at Norwich Magistrates' Court to speeding, arguing that the camera reading may have been inaccurate. In response, the prosecution considered the number of experts it would have to call - and the cost of bringing them to court - and announced that it was dropping the case. http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/crime/article1774639.ece