Government
- Scottish Labour has used its Holyrood election manifesto launch to put education at the heart of its plans for the next parliament. Party leader Jack McConnell told a press conference that education would have "first call" on all extra spending by the Scottish Executive. He insisted other departments would have to "cut their cloth" accordingly. Mr McConnell also included a pledge to expand the availability of modern language lessons for children.
- Shorter NHS waiting times, cheaper rail travel for pensioners and 6,500 affordable new homes are promised by Labour for the Welsh assembly election. They were among 11 key pledges made by the party as it launched its manifesto. Labour said NHS waiting times would be cut to a maximum of 26 weeks by the end of 2009 if it is in power after 3 May. The party also pledged 25,000 apprenticeships, and extra support for childcare under what it called a "mobile mammas" scheme. Labour has been in government since the assembly was founded in 1999.
- Web giants like YouTube are being urged to get tough with the cyber-bullies that use their sites to make pupils' and teachers' lives a misery. Alan Johnson, the education secretary sayed web publishers should have a "moral obligation" to cut offensive videos of people being attacked, harassed or ridiculed. Bullying is causing many teachers to leave the profession, he told a teachers' conference in Belfast. Advice to tackle such anti-social behaviour in school has been published.
- A Home Office review of the way child sex offenders are handled in the community has decided against a Megan's Law for the UK. The US law, named after Megan Kanka, 7, who was murdered by a convicted sex offender, gives parents access to names and addresses of known paedophiles. The Home Office now wants individuals to be able to request information about people they may be concerned about. But it does not want the details of offenders to be made widely available. A report of the government's year-long child sex offender review, headed by Home Office minister Gerry Sutcliffe, is expected to be published next month at the earliest.
- Whitehall and the Treasury should relax their grip on the way London is governed, Ken Livingstone has said. In an interview with the Times, the capital's mayor said that he should be given more power over local taxes. And he backed moves to replace council tax with a local income tax, saying the City's high-earners could afford to pay "a few more quid". Livingstone also hailed the capital's continuing economic growth and its ability to challenge New York as a global financial centre.