1st May 2009
Home Secretary Jacqui Smith has abandoned plans for a single, government-run database to monitor electronic communications. Announcing a consultation on surveillance and internet monitoring on April 27, Smith said: ‘We need to ensure that we keep up with the technology being used by those who would seek to do us harm.’ Police and other crime-fighting agencies must have the tools they need to do their job, she said. But she added: ‘There are absolutely no plans for a single central store. We recognise that there is a delicate balance between privacy and security.’ The government still wants details of all internet contacts to be available to security services and is to ask communications firms to help collect and organise the information.
Auditor general for Wales Jeremy Colman has called for greater efforts from hospitals and the ambulance service to improve how long it takes for accident and emergency patients to be admitted to wards. A Wales Audit Office report published on April 23 said handover times were not routinely measured and performance was thus hard to assess. Long handover times could mean ambulances queuing outside hospitals and patients left waiting on trolleys, it added. Colman said: ‘Excessive handover times at emergency departments affect capacity within the unscheduled care system because ambulance crews are consequently unavailable.’
The Commission for Rural Communities has welcomed many of the measures announced in last week’s Budget. But it urged ministers to ensure that new funds for businesses and vulnerable groups were accessible in England’s rural communities. ‘The announcement of additional funding for house construction, especially affordable and energy-efficient developments, is very welcome,’ said CRC chief executive Gill Payne, ‘Several housing associations have struggled to finance and complete affordable housing schemes in rural communities in recent months but, despite marked falls in rural house prices, affording a home remains out of reach for too many rural residents.’
Councils and housing associations should have a statutory duty to tackle ‘broken neighbourhoods’ as part of a major reform of social housing, a report from Right-leaning think-tank Localis has urged. Setting out priorities for the next government in the report, two Conservative thinkers called for tenants to be given more incentives to buy shares in their homes, with the proceeds being used to improve run-down estates. In Principles for social housing reform, published on April 21, Stephen Greenhalgh and John Moss dismissed Labour’s decent homes programme as no more than ‘upgrading the deckchairs on the Titanic’. Greenhalgh is leader of Tory-controlled Hammersmith & Fulham council and Moss, a chartered surveyor, was a Conservative candidate at the 2005 general election. The report also said the ‘Berlin Wall’ of different tenures and rent levels, which exists between the private and social rented sectors, should be torn down.
A £220m fund is to be made available by the Department of Health to encourage NHS innovation, health minister Lord Darzi announced on April 27. England’s ten strategic health authorities would each receive £2m this year, and £5m in each of the following four years, to support frontline NHS staff in developing innovative ideas, he said. ‘NHS staff have told me that accessing the funds to make ideas become reality can be a struggle and, as a result, many great ideas never get realised,’ he added. ‘We can be better at putting those good ideas into action and these funds will help do exactly that.’
