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Others were left wondering what could have been done to prevent such a disaster – and why crucial new flood defences were not completed last summerThey began the search at midday, just as the new rains came. Teams of RAF personnel were ordered to search flood-hit Cockermouth and check its streets for signs of life. The men knocked loudly on the doors of homes whose ground floors had hours earlier been under water and shouted for replies at empty buildings.Early reports indicated that some residents were still stranded at the Old Mill homes just outside the town, but that a police boat team had managed to feed them the night before. The military personnel were told to expect anything, even bodies, and that people found trapped in their homes were likely to be suffering from shock and hypothermia.For the residents of the west Cumbrian town, hopes that they might be allowed to return home yesterday quickly faded as police prevented them entering potentially unsafe houses. The collapse of four local bridges – one killing a police officer – following the heaviest rainfall ever recorded in 24 hours last Thursday had led to deep concern over the structural safety of scores of Cockermouth's terraced granite homes.Frantic attempts to secure a temporary place to live for the hundreds affected will begin this week. Yesterday, families were already discussing moving into local holiday lets, hotels and even caravan parks.Ken Sugden, who waded from his home on Waterloo Street on Thursday night as the flood waters from the Derwent and Cocker began to rise, said: "The big thing now is where everyone is going to stay. There is going to be a hell of a scramble. Are there enough beds locally?"As the rains intensified yesterday afternoon, the search of the town's houses went on, starting at the west end and moving east. Meanwhile, officials from the Environment Agency started checking Cockermouth's flood defences, aware that debris such as tree trunks carried downstream during the flooding would have damaged even the most robust of them.Although most locals accept that the storm was of such a magnitude that little could have been done to prevent the damage, scrutiny will now focus on planned improvements to the town's flood defence.A key set of flood defence improvements in the centre of Cockermouth were crucially delayed over the summer, leaving the town vulnerable, the Observer can disclose.The improvements were part of a package agreed after the great storms of 2005 flooded the town and nearby Carlisle. Although two phases have been completed – around Waterloo Street, which was inundated during the recent floods, and a culvert around Bitterbeck – a third component of the strategy called the Gote was not started. According to documents from a Cockermouth town council meeting, the work was scheduled for last summer.An Environment Agency spokesman could not give a start date for work to the Gote, but doubted it would have been sufficient to cope with a "once-in-a-1,000-years" event, as last week's flooding has been described. Most residents, drinking tea in Cockermouth's makeshift soup kitchen, were phlegmatic about the unfinished flood defence scheme."I doubt the Gote would have made much difference, and it's a tricky drainage system because it runs underground and then bends up," said Keith Fitton, 59. He and his wife Liz simply wanted their dogs back – the animals had been stranded for almost 30 hours on the top floor of their home in Waterloo Street. Ironically, he hoped that Molly, a Portuguese mountain dog, and Smudge, a border collie Labrador cross, had something to drink.Fitton said he remembered lying in bed, waiting for the end. With only one good arm – his other was paralysed in a motorcycle accident – he was helpless as the water rose up his staircase. "There were nine stairs left, then seven, then five. The noise, the gusts of the wind and the torrent of the water. It was like Armageddon," he said.Eventually, at 8am on Friday, an RAF winchman came through his skylight and hoisted him to safety.Around the corner, National Trust officials were staring balefully at the imposing building on Main Street beyond the police cordon. There, looming over the thoroughfare, stood William's Wordsworth's birthplace.Jeremy Barton, project manager for Wordsworth House, listed what had gone missing. "The wrought iron gates at the front have completely gone, they've been lifted away and dumped well into the Irish Sea by now. The front garden wall has also gone."The National Trust shop next door had suffered even greater damage. Barton said staff – many of whom would lose their own homes in the sudden flood – fought waist deep in freezing water as they tried to shift stock from the basement and ground floor. But Barton admitted he was trying hard not to be too downbeat – after all, the river that had created so much chaos was the same funnel of water that Wordsworth so adored. "Wordsworth loved that river," said Barton. It was that building – a water line visible around its lower midriff yesterday – from which Wordsworth, born in 1770, had watched the Derwent as a boy and which he wrote about in The Prelude.Beside the police cordon, a purple canoe lay stranded on the road. Throughout the town, scarlet lifeboats were parked up on dry roads as the flood waters sank by two inches an hour until, not long after 9am, Main Street appeared in its entirety for the first time since the floods arrived. A town in ruins emerged. Shops had been smashed completely. Mills Newsagents had its front window missing and its contents had been scooped out by the torrent. Greggs bakery seemed fine, as did Boots. The front of the Marmaris restaurant was, like most of the others, smudged with the stain of dirty floodwater. Across the way, a car was parked across the road, its front bumpers ripped off. Geese waddled down the town's major artery for the first time in anyone's memory. On the side streets, returning business owners began assessing the damage. Inside turf accountants Chas Kendall, the floor was littered with sodden newspapers and rolled-up rolls of carpet. Outside, a battered tree trunk lay across the pavement.The talk across town was of insurance; if you had it the floods were awful, if not, the damage was total. "My life's stopped," said one shopkeeper who did not want to be named. But as the rains grew stronger while the search continued, talk concentrated on getting anyone who was trapped out before the rivers rose again. Resident Alan Smith said: "The thing with the Cocker is it can fall as quickly as it can rise."RAF warrant officer Dave Taylor said: "If people are still out there, chances are they would be suffering from hypothermia." Local radio stations carried reassuring messages from the Environment Agency that the "worst is over", as panic began rising and the rains rolled in. Phone-in programmes swopped eulogies to Bill Barker, the police officer who was directing motorists away from Northside bridge in nearby Workington when it collapsed and he disappeared into the swollen waters of the Derwent.Elsewhere, mountain rescue officers more used to tramping the fells – smothered in thick grey cloud throughout yesterday – were down in the town helping the search. Most locals stood by and watched, exchanging tales of luck.Former military officer Daniel Bancroft, 29, an imposing figure, described how he pushed boatloads of people through the streets while tiptoeing in water up to his neck. Yesterday, he could not find his van, which had been parked near to the Derwent. But he had saved his grandmother. "Her place was flooded and I just picked her up and carried her towards higher land."Sugden, meanwhile, circulated news around Cockermouth's soup kitchen that a nine-month-old baby belonging to Chris and Rachel Freer was doing fine after being rescued by lifeboats.Later, as night approached, Chris appeared, beaming as he described how the family had been trapped upstairs at their home in Waterloo Street for 24 hours. "We managed to get some tinned food out and the camping stove, but then you hear Radio Cumbria and the level is due to rise another metre and it starts getting pretty scary. We were starting to think that maybe even upstairs is not going to be enough."Thankfully, he said, his son Ben had slept through most of the commotion and seemed unscathed. "He even managed to sleep through the sound of the rescue helicopters."For now, such tales lift the spirits of the people of Cockermouth, but many appreciate that their nightmare has just begun.FloodingWeatherMark Townsendguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds (Sun, 22 Nov 2009 00:05:44 GMT) Poll boost for PM as economy grows Chance of hung parliament as Conservative lead falls to 6%Labour's hopes of avoiding a general election rout at the hands of David Cameron's Tories will be boosted today as a new poll shows a sharp fall in the Conservatives' lead, raising the possibility of a hung parliament.The Ipsos MORI survey for the Observer, which will cause alarm in Tory ranks and boost Labour's hope of performing a "great escape", puts the Conservatives on 37%, only six points ahead of Labour on 31%. The Liberal Democrats are on 17%.It is the narrowest gap between the two main parties in any poll since last December and demonstrates that, rather than powering towards a landslide victory, Cameron's party is struggling to capture the number of floating voters it needs to win a decisive mandate.The poll, which also shows economic optimism at its highest level since 1997, suggests that Labour may be benefiting from a return of a "feelgood" factor as the country heads out of recession.About 46% of the public now believe the economy will perform better over the next year, compared with 23% who think it will deteriorate and 28% who say it will stay the same. If the voting intentions are replicated at the next election, probably in May or June, the Conservatives will hold the most seats but fall 35 short of an overall majority in the Commons.It would be the first general election to have delivered a hung parliament since 1974. If Labour was to cut the Tory lead to five points or fewer, pollsters say it would be likely to have more seats than the Tories.Labour, which only six months ago was 20 points behind in several polls, pledged to make stewardship of the economy the central issue in its battle for a fourth term in office. Douglas Alexander, the party's general election co-ordinator, said: "The economy will be the defining issue at the election," with the choice being one between "economic recovery with Labour and putting the recovery at risk with the Tories".Sir Robert Worcester, the founder of MORI, said: "This poll will jolt the electorate into the reality of British politics in the run-up to the election. Whether or not there has been a blip among the electorate caused by short-term events such as Labour's surprise win in Glasgow North East, it will not be easy for the Tories to gain the 117 seats they need for an overall majority, never mind the 140 they require for a working majority."Meanwhile, Gordon Brown's personal rating remains in the doldrums. Only 34% of people are satisfied with his performance, against 59% who are dissatisfied. David Cameron had approval ratings of 48%, with 35% against.With the main parties set to fight an election on the economy, Brown will seek to strike an upbeat note in a speech to the CBI tomorrow. Economists and politicians will then await Wednesday's update from the Office for National Statistics, which will confirm whether the country's economy did contract by 0.4% in the third quarter.There are also signs that retailers can look forward to a much better Christmas than last year. John Lewis, the department store chain, said the Christmas frenzy had already begun, with sales for the first part of last week 15% up on last year. David Barford, its director of selling operations, said: "This is really encouraging. Branches are noticing a definite Christmas feeling."The most recent unemployment figures, which showed the smallest rise since spring 2008, also provide grounds for optimism. The number of Britons out of work rose by 30,000 less than expected to 2.46 million in the three months to September, the lowest increase since May last year.There are also signs of life in the property market. The Nationwide index has posted monthly gains in seven out of the past eight months, and mortgage approvals are on the rise. However, economists remain concerned about the dire state of the public finances – presenting whichever party wins the election with a mountain to climb.Ipsos MORI interviewed a representative sample of 1,006 across Britain by telephone on 13-15 November. Data was weighted to match the profile of the adult population.General electionLabourConservativesOpinion pollsGordon BrownDavid CameronToby HelmZoe Woodguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds (Sun, 22 Nov 2009 00:05:58 GMT) Williams faces pope over conversion call Archbishop protests at Catholic church's shock invitation to Anglicans during visit to RomeThe archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, took the highly unusual step yesterday of protesting personally to the pope about his shock announcement last month of special arrangements for the mass conversion to Catholicism of disillusioned, traditionalist Anglicans.A spokeswoman for Lambeth Palace said after their meeting: "Obviously the archbishop expressed concern at the [decree announcing the special arrangements] and the way it happened. The pope listened in a friendly spirit."A statement issued by the Vatican described their discussions as "cordial" and, without referring specifically to the pope's initiative, said they had "focused on recent events affecting relations between the Catholic church and the Anglican communion".But the Church of England's version would indicate that this was the most strained encounter between a pontiff and primate since the two churches initiated direct, high-level contacts in the 1960s.Their meeting was brief – only 20 minutes. And, in a break with custom, no arrangements were made for a restricted group of correspondents to witness the opening and closing phases of the talks.A 10-line statement issued afterwards was not, as had been expected, a joint one. Vatican sources were keen to play down the significance of the archbishop's visit. They stressed he had been invited not by the pope but by a Vatican university. One described it as "a private meeting, only slightly more formal than a courtesy visit".Nevertheless, the statement included an important endorsement of continued talks on unity. It said the primate and Pope Benedict had reiterated their "shared will to continue and to consolidate the ecumenical relationship between Catholics and Anglicans". And it noted that the commission entrusted with preparing a third round of talks between the two churches was due to meet soon.In an interview with Vatican Radio afterwards, Williams said: "I wanted to express some of the concerns about the way in which the announcement of the [decree] had been handled and received, because clearly many Anglicans, myself included, felt that it put us in an awkward position for a time – not the content so much as some of the messages that were given out. So I needed to share with the pope some of those concerns, and I think those were expressed and heard in a very friendly spirit."He added that he did not believe there had been a "dawn raid" on the Anglican communion and implied that his concern had been with the Vatican's apparent lack of consultation.Benedict gave his guest a present that will stir comment among Anglicans, and perhaps raise some hackles. The primate was handed what a Vatican source said was a "very beautiful bishop's cross". A sign of fraternal respect – or something more loaded? That and other questions remained unanswered at the end of a visit that a source close to the arrangements said was fixed by Lambeth Palace six weeks ago, at about the time the archbishop learnt of the pope's initiative.The biggest unanswered question is how exactly Catholics and Anglicans propose to move towards unity after years of progressive mutual alienation. While the leadership of the Anglican church has embraced women's ordination and, in the US, gay priests, the Vatican under Benedict has become increasingly proud of its conservatism on these and other issues.In a lecture last Thursday evening at the pontifical Gregorian university, Williams made an impassioned plea for the Catholic side to recognise they had made giant steps towards reconciling their theological positions. All that stood between them were "second order" questions of ecclesiastical organisation, he claimed. But it is hard to believe Benedict's Vatican will see things in that light, any more than traditionalist Anglicans do.This has been one of the archbishop's most delicate and testing encounters. On Friday he held talks with Vatican officials in which, according to a source in Rome, he repeated his disappointment at the way he had been kept in the dark about the pope's initiative until a late stage.On Friday, Vincent Nichols, the Catholic archbishop of Westminster, again tried to soothe Anglican sensibilities by stressing that a dislike of women priests was not grounds for conversion.Rowan WilliamsPope Benedict XVIAnglicanismReligionChristianityCatholicismJohn Hooperguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds (Sun, 22 Nov 2009 00:05:45 GMT) Teens risk kidney failure in drug craze Ketamine causes irreversible damage, fear GPsKetamine, a powerful tranquilliser used on horses, is being taken in growing number by young people in the UK, causing crippling health problems.Some addicts have needed to have their bladders removed and must now wear catheters. Other users have suffered serious kidney problems, breathing difficulties, addiction, bouts of unconsciousness and trouble with urinating. The drug also involves a heightened risk of heart attack.Some users also end up with cocaine-style damage to the inside of their nose, because the drug is often snorted in powder form, though it can also be injected, taken as a pill or swallowed as a liquid. Experts say ketamine is increasing in popularity partly because it is cheaper than cocaine and, as the purity of cocaine falls, gives a more reliable high. It usually sells for about half the price of cocaine, at about £20 per gram, but can be obtained for as little as £5 a gram. "The quality of heroin and cocaine is so poor that people are turning to ketamine, which is cheap and available," said Dr Chris Ford, a GP and the clinical lead for substance misuse management in general practice in the London borough of Brent.Dr Angela Cottrell, a urologist attached to the Bristol Urological Institute at the city's Southmead Hospital, has studied the health problems caused by ketamine. She saw her first patient with severe bladder problems in mid-2007 and has seen a growing number of cases since. "About one-third of ketamine users develop severe problems with the drug. There's something about the way that it's metabolised that is causing these problems," said Cottrell."One of the most alarming things is that the long-term effects on the body are not known. We don't know if things get better over time or whether people will develop kidney failure in the long-term." The damage to vital organs may be irreversible, Cottrell warned.Ketamine is both a stimulant and an hallucinogenic. In 2007, Professor David Nutt, recently sacked as the chairman of the government's drugs advisory panel, published research in The Lancet which ranked ketamine as the sixth most harmful substance out of 20 studied. It came behind heroin, cocaine, barbituates, street methadone and alcohol, but ahead of cannabis and ecstasy, in 11th and 18th places.The drug is known as K, Special K and, because of the youth of many users, "kiddie smack". The Addaction specialist drugs service in Lincoln sees about 200 children under 18 every year. In 2007, none said they used ketamine. Between June and November 2008, one teenager said it was their main drug and six said it was their secondary choice, usually behind alcohol or cannabis. But in the same period this year, four 15- to 18-year-olds said it was their preferred way of getting high, and 15 as their next most favourite.Elliot Elam, of Addaction, said: "It's not an epidemic, but it is an emerging trend. There's a new generation for whom ketamine use is acceptable." According to the British Crime Survey, only 1.8% of people in England and Wales have ever used ketamine, but that figure is doubled among 16- to 24-year-olds. It estimated that 113,000 people used it at least once in 2007-08. Research published last week in the journal Addiction blamed the drug for memory loss and mild delusions. A "normal" dose of ketamine is 60mg to 100mg, but some users are taking 5g or 10g a day. Twenty-three people are believed to have died between 1993 and 2006 after walking into traffic and risking other dangers after losing their sense of reality.DrugsHealthDiane TaylorDenis Campbellguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds (Sun, 22 Nov 2009 00:07:11 GMT) Children hurt by focus on exam grades Labour's drive to increase the number of pupils gaining C grades at GCSE is distorting education and forcing teachers to neglect their highest and lowest achievers, the schools select committee is expected to conclude this month.After a year-long inquiry into school accountability and inspections, MPs are ready to accuse the government of creating a system that discourages and undermines teachers. Staff, they will argue, feel under pressure to focus their attention on pupils who could achieve a C grade and improve a school's league table standing at the expense of other pupils who might otherwise be able to gain an A or A*.The report is also likely to conclude that Ofsted inspectors are insufficiently trained.The findings will follow a similarly damning publication by Teach First, an organisation that places top graduates into tough inner-city schools. Lessons from the Front, which involved 500 of the charity's teachers, concludes: "The current system is not fit for measuring accountability nor for informing parental choice, and is detrimental to teaching and learning. The system focuses schools on getting results, rather than on helping individual pupils to achieve their potential."The report, which has been shared exclusively with the Observer, blames league tables and the fact that a school's reputation depends on the proportion of pupils who achieve A* to C GCSE results. It includes a quote from a teacher that it is representative of the mood among its graduates: "No matter what we do, we can never win. It's dispiriting to see ourselves lying low on the tables and know that we're there despite massive efforts by everyone in the school, every day, of every week, of every month, of every year. I have a kid who got two Ds in her science – for her that was an unbelievable achievement, but as far as the league tables are concerned, she just didn't count."Elizabeth Thonemann, editor of the publication, said the government move towards using school report cards was a "step in the right direction", but one that did not solve the problem.Both studies found evidence of teachers focusing on a small group of children who could swing the league table position. "That is bad for everybody," added Thonemann. "It is bad for children who are capable of achieving top grades because in terms of how it impacts on a school's reputation, it makes more sense to get kids up to C than get those at B up to an A*. It is bad for the children who feel their achievements are never going to be valued and bad for those at the borderline because the focus of their education is so much on this narrow figure."Commenting on the Teach First findings, Barry Sheerman, chairman of the select committee for schools, said it chimed with evidence he had heard: "I think they are probably right. We have built a culture that uses a whole series of negative measures and not enough positive ones." He argued that Ofsted relied far too heavily on statistics. "People in schools feel aggrieved. They may have worked their socks off, they may have got some wonderful contextual add-value in many ways, they may have actively been producing little citizens and then what happens? They find that all that really matters is how many GCSEs have they got and at what level."Vernon Coaker, the schools' minister, said that the government was moving away from the "relentless focus on performance tables". "However, we believe a single overall grade is important to show a clear definitive view of a school's effectiveness among all stakeholders," he said.SchoolsGCSEsEducation policyAnushka Asthanaguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds (Sun, 22 Nov 2009 00:05:26 GMT) Divorce counselling on the NHS Extended 'talking therapies' programme aims to tackle anxiety, mental illness and depressionThe government is to announce that divorcing couples will be offered counselling on the National Health Service for the first time in an effort to tackle growing rates of depression.The move will be unveiled by health secretary Andy Burnham this week. From April, couples' counselling programmes will be launched across England in an extension of the Improving Access to Psychological Therapies (IAPT) programme of "talking therapies", which has targets to tackle "sick-note Britain".Troubled relationships are thought to be among the key factors affecting rates of mental health and anxiety. Research consistently suggests that men in particular who are in successful relationships are more protected from depression and anxiety than those who are single, divorced or separated."Trouble at home can lead to depression and anxiety. Sometimes even children can be caught up in the fallout," said Burnham. "When couples hit a rocky patch, a bit of help and support can stop it spiralling out of control. Professional support can help people rebuild relationships or separate amicably."The plan is part of the wider flagship IAPT strategy to train an army of therapists to help get the country off expensive antidepressants. There is a target for the £186m programme to get 25,000 people suffering from anxiety and depression off sick pay and benefits by 2010 and treat some 900,000 people in total.But, as the Observer reported last month, there are concerns about whether these aims can be met after the IAPT expert reference group, which oversees the implementation of the programme, was told in September that so far only 400 out of the 3,600 therapists needed to run it are fully trained.The programme's supporters believe it offers an important alternative to the tens of millions of antidepressants prescribed by doctors in the UK every year, at a cost of some £12bn. Around a million people are off work and claiming benefits because of mental-health problems."Six million people in the UK suffer from depression and anxiety. By 2011, 900,000 people with mental illness and depression will be able to access therapy. Whoever needs specialist couples' therapy as part of that will be able to get it," said a spokesman for the Department of Health. "A relatively small step can prevent more tragic consequences such as severe mental illness, depression, or long-term unemployment. The cost of this additional therapy is minimal, as it uses existing resources more flexibly."This extension of the range of therapies available will be achieved by providing additional training to existing therapists and ensuring that they work in a more joined-up way with the new therapists. As a result, the additional cost of this development will be marginal."It comes after the head of counselling service Relate called for Labour to become more comfortable with talking about relationships. At a meeting last month, Claire Tyler said a wish not to stigmatise single parents had meant the centre left of politics "until fairly recently has been pretty uncomfortable talking about relationships". But she added: "We recognise that quite a lot has been done in the last 12 months to recognise this and rectify that."Some 80% of couples who turn to Relate for relationship counselling say that it helped them.Mental healthDepression in adultsNHSDivorceAndy BurnhamDenis CampbellTracy McVeighguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds (Sun, 22 Nov 2009 00:05:17 GMT) My journey home Robert Yates returns to the streets of Liverpool, where he grew up, to report on a story of deprivation and hopeIn a parade of shops on County Road in Walton, north Liverpool, a couple of signs compete for attention. "Slip! Trip!" offers the first, in the window of Walton Accident Claims – the jaunty exclamation marks explained perhaps by the possibility that there's some money at least in injury. A couple of doors along, at Pilgrim Travel Specialists ("Official agent of the Liverpool Archdiocesan pilgrimage"), a poster advertises deals on flights to Fatima, Knock and Lourdes.I wander in for a chat, and leave – courtesy of the amiable gentleman keeping shop –  with a printed prayer. "Lord, enlighten me on my path," I read, and my irreligious soul wonders if many booking their trip to Fatima are enlightened enough to pop next door for more worldly conversation at the accident specialists.Consolation of one sort or another might be the order of the day in these parts, you might figure, if you had just spent some time studying the different indices of deprivation, the governmental way of measuring national misery. Deprivation, according to these calculations, has seven dimensions: income; employment; health, deprivation and disability; education, skills and training; barriers to housing and services; crime; and living environment.However, problems – like privileges – are apt to cling to one another. Areas tend not to score well on, say, average income, and do badly on health, or vice versa; while if a place finds itself at the bottom of a table on housing, the likelihood is that its educational score will be equally poor. These are all-or-nothing tables.So, if life chances in Britain are still all too determined by an accident of birth, and you wanted to get on, where would you least want to be born? View the information through the prism of Westminster constituencies – the places where we'll be voting within a few months – and there'd be a few contenders for this grim crown. A seat in inner Birmingham, perhaps, or one in Manchester, a couple in inner London; and while Scotland has its own indices of deprivation, Glasgow East's comparable figures would win it a shout. And then there's Walton.Walton has a certain advantage, at least for me: I grew up there. The first 18 years of my life – I left for university in the mid-80s – were largely played out within its boundaries. My old school stands just across the way from Pilgrim Travel and Walton Accident Claims; my old home is down the road; my parents, and much of my extended family, still live in these parts. When, as happens most weeks, a new survey lands on my desk highlighting some social ill or other – we must be the most scrutinised nation on earth – a thought crosses my mind: I bet my old patch gets a mention.   The latest "starring" role for Walton came just two weeks ago. It stands at the very top of "Welfare Britain", a table ranking Westminster seats according to their number of benefit claimants. Walton has a total of 28.9% of adults on out-of-work benefits (made up of 15.5% on incapacity benefits, 4.6% on lone parent benefits and 8.8% on Jobseeker's Allowance) .The nature of this table – or at least the way it was pounced upon by some newspapers and politicians – fits with the temper of the times. No longer just a series of dispassionate numbers, the table points to much more charged territory – we're talking character, responsibility, morality. In the wake of the economic crash, we've been in the mood for self-scrutiny; it's as if a veil has been removed after the years of apparent boom, and we're now seeing parts of our country afresh.  Something has gone wrong, runs the chatter; something is broken, and that something tends to be located in places like Walton. My interest was not just in finding out what, if anything, was broken. There are other questions to ask. What's changed in a place like Walton over the past several decades? Let's be honest, we're hardly starting from scratch here. Parts of Liverpool and Glasgow have been heading tables of social problems for decades. Are these places better or worse than they were 30, 20, 10 years ago – or, more to the point, 12 years ago, when Labour took power? For a key Conservative charge in the forthcoming election campaign will be that Labour has done nothing, or worse than nothing, for these places, its heartlands. They don't come much more heartlands than Walton. In the 2005 general election the local MP, Peter Kilfoyle, secured the third biggest majority in the country. His share of the vote was 72.8%; the Conservatives polled 5.9%. As a child, I don't remember ever seeing a Tory candidate canvassing in the streets. Though that, in part, might be because my later teenage years coincided with Walton's role in one of the most colourful – to put it at its most neutral – episodes in recent political history.The area was the base of the Militant Tendency, the entryist sect within the Labour party which effectively took control of Liverpool council in the early 1980s.  I went to a few local "Militant youth" meetings but got sniffed out as a class traitor in the making: I was beginning to fancy myself as a reader of tricksy novels, while the Militant-prescribed texts extended only to Robert Tressell's Ragged Trousered Philanthropists and more or less anything by Marx.  "There'll definitely be a more visible Conservative presence this time," says Tony Caldeira, a local businessman (he runs the Caldeira "cushion empire") and chair of the City of Liverpool Conservatives. "People are saying 'Thank goodness you're back.' But it's not going to happen overnight."  I warn Peter Kilfoyle of the Conservatives' march – or hesitant steps – into his territory. It's not a threat that appears to overly concern him. "What would they know about anything? I mean really..." Kilfoyle has spent some time inside the ministerial tent (he was a junior minister in Blair's first term), but appears most at home as a "friendly critic" of the leadership. In response, however, to Tory accusations of Labour neglect of the heartlands, he shows no ambivalence in choosing his enemy."When they were in power, the Tories just ignored the Waltons of the world. The problems of housing, of unemployment, of education were just put in the 'too hard' file and ignored."  By 1997, after 18 years of Conservative government, already difficult problems had become "ever more complex to deal with", he argues.This will be in line with the government's defence of its record over the next several months. In its account of the past 30 years or so, Labour's job has been about trying to mend what had been terribly neglected. If, at times, their efforts have resulted in what seem like bodge jobs, it's a mark, the government will argue, of how bad things had got by 1997.What's more, Kilfoyle points to successes with the very young (especially via Sure Start), in improving schools, and some regeneration of housing ("Though you'll see there are ways to go in some areas").The apportioning of blame or success over the past 30 years has to be seen, Kilfoyle concedes, "against a backdrop of 100 years or more. The role of the Waltons has been to provide a huge pool of unskilled labour. Finding ways ahead, once that labour was no longer needed, was never going to be easy..."Despite the flight from many of our large cities and towns in the latter half of the 20th century (Liverpool's population has declined by more than 250,000 over the past 40 years, to 450,000), the country's population bases are still, it could be argued, overly shaped by the economic imperatives of earlier centuries. Towns grew during the industrial revolution because they were in the right spot – perhaps close to sources of coal or close to the sea.If populations were purely determined by availability of work, the shift away from the country's Waltons might have been even greater. Not that such upheaval was desirable, or indeed practical – at least, that has been the consensus view of British governments of all stripes, who have made it their business to persuade industry to develop in the "wrong" parts of the country. In the 1980s and 90s the Tories encouraged private enterprise into deprived areas, while Labour has tried a whole host of ways to provoke urban renewal, led by the New Deal for Communities.The right-leaning think-tank Policy Exchange has argued that the prospects for those living in areas that have received significant levels of assistance have "not been transformed in the past decade". This has nothing to do, notes one of the reports (Success And The City) with populations' intrinsic intelligence or ability (in case there were any doubts on that score!) Instead, it backs the "locational" theory of success and failure: "The key difference is that the people of Swindon live in Swindon, and the people of Warrington live in Warrington."Much fun was had with one Policy Exchange report, Cities Unlimited, published in August 2008. The top line – which ran in news bulletins, and provoked many a teasing column – was that those living in the depressed north should move south, a sort of mass migration to London, Cambridge and Oxford, with southern cities expanding to accommodate them.However, to ask if public investment in depressed parts of Britain has been worth it seems only sensible. Which is not to say that once asked, one might conclude, along with Policy Exchange, that it is akin to throwing good money after bad.Another view might be to see such investments as decent attempts to resist or at least modify history. And, since it does not appear entirely viable for Liverpool and Glasgow et al to up sticks, what else is there to do?As part of the Tories' advance guard into the inner cities, Chris Grayling, Shadow Home Secretary, has also acquired a second title as the Shadow Minister for Merseyside. "Because his mother once met someone who knew someone from the Wirral," quips Kilfoyle.In Liverpudlian political circles, mocking Grayling, who makes a monthly visit to the city, has become something of a local sport. It's true that he needs to work on his inner Scouseness –  after a tour of Toxteth, he managed to suggest that Manchester United's Gary Neville, quite open in his dislike of Liverpudlians, would be a "good role model" for local youths.But what does it matter, I say to Kilfoyle, that Grayling is an outsider to the city, that he doesn't spend his weekends fretting over Everton or Liverpool scores?"It matters because he, they [the Tories] don't have a clue about places like this. We're talking about different reference points, different societies..."But are we? Kilfoyle's riff on Grayling leads him to a central question, the central question, when analysing the Waltons of the country. Are they just different in degree – poorer, not so well-educated, not so well-housed, and under-employed? Or are they different in kind, places apart, where different values apply?A group of women, long-term unemployed, in their 20s and 30s, are talking me through the pros and cons of taking a minimum-wage job. Listening to one, her approach resembles that of a business planner analysing options. She has come close to accepting a couple of jobs, but if she worked full-time, with the loss of housing benefit, and the additional cost of childcare, she would be £30 a week worse off. So she sticks on benefits, she says. This is offered with no apology – and perhaps none is due. Positions reversed, would I act any differently? I can certainly understand the calculation. She doesn't strike me as lazy, just working to financial incentives. Still, I suppose I expect some sort of shrug, some recognition of drawing on the collective purse. There was a passage in David Cameron's speech to the Tory conference this autumn which spoke to this scenario. "In Gordon Brown's Britain, if you're a single mother with two kids, earning £150 a week, the withdrawal of benefits and the additional taxes mean that for every extra pound you earn, you keep just 4p." In fairness, these are situations which the government's welfare reform is endeavouring – tardily perhaps – to sort out.Another of the women tells me about a recent night out, and the extortionate levels now being charged in the local clubs. So it cost her £6 to get in, £4 for a drink, £1 for a smoking band – "£11 straight away." I'm not expecting people on benefits to lock themselves up, to not socialise until they are back on PAYE. But what hits home is the matter-of-fact manner in which the anecdote is relayed. Its point is not the need for an occasional blowout, but the cost of the drinks. Had I expected some comforting platitude, some polite phrases that recognised the debt to others' taxes? One does not have to be a sociologist to recognise how "benefits culture" develops. Children grow up, not seeing much in the way of economic activity. Their parents have been unemployed, grandparents, too. It's what they know. When it comes to their turn to sign on, they deal with it, as if it's natural. Unemployment running through generations is now one of the routine markers of deprivation. But it's only when you're in a place like Walton, where this link from grandparent to parent to child is all too visible, that you realise just how quickly the generations can pass by. "We're now up to about fifth-generation unemployment," says Frank Prendergast of the Breckfield and North Everton Community Centre, a smart, nimble organisation (generating most of its own funds) whose remit is to get involved in more or less anything which might improve the area. "There are many families where the role models – the parent disappearing from bed and coming home in the evening – are often just not there."Walking away from my meeting with the women, and back through the main shopping drag of County Road, heading towards Anfield, I thought of how often I'd read reports from the poorer parts of our cities, and shaken my head at the routine descriptions.Against a backdrop of discount supermarkets and shabby housing, locals – often fat locals or prematurely aged locals or struggling-with-drink locals – would shuffle along streets strewn with used needles. I'd decide that the reporter had pressed the "broken society" magic key on his keyboard. But I was beginning to think that I'd best use the magic key myself.Nothing in the constituency is as deflating as the sight of the "V-streets" (Venice, Vienna...) that press against the Kop End of Anfield, Liverpool FC's ground. A Walton boast is that it's the only Westminster seat to accommodate two Premiership football teams; and if outsiders visit Walton the overwhelming odds are that they're on their way to either Anfield or Goodison Park, home of Everton. Most of the terraced houses of the "V-Streets" are empty, their windows boarded with metallic sheets, bearing the City of Liverpool crest. Much of the area – the most deprived part of this most deprived constituency – is being knocked down, a process which won't be complete for several years. Every so often, a satellite dish announces there's a house still occupied, and in one glorious instance of a bid to cling on to some dignity, the owner has customised the front door with a little mock Tudor.I don't remember the constituency ever looking this grim, this forbidding. Nor do I remember drugs being dealt by day on County Road; though what else might I want to buy? Returning to the main thoroughfare, I note plenty of places to eat, if you want your food fast and fried; several bars of the vertical drinking sort (the tiny number of seats allowing bodies to pack in tight of a weekend or on match days), a couple of pawn shops, several "pound" shops and several more of those personal injuries specialists, a real growth area since my day.  There are shops and small businesses just like these on my local high street, in Islington, north London. But, there, the discount supermarkets stand close to a designer furniture shop where just a handful of items can account for an average annual salary. And yes, there are pound shops and "all-day breakfast" cafés, but a few doors away there's a master butcher, plus a fishmonger and the auction house where my wife and myself engage in our bourgeois rights to buy a piece of antique furniture.This high street mix – typical in many parts of inner London – results from the wealthy and the poor living cheek by jowl. By contrast, one of the key defining features of a heartlands territory like Walton is that it is socially uniform. The professional classes don't live here. Shopping is, of course, the least of it. The lack of social mix will have more profound consequences elsewhere – in the local schools, for instance. The liberal dream of school as a place where children from homes of very different means and different expectations might get to know each other at least remains a possibility in mixed inner London.When I was at school, I can't remember any friends whose parents were not unskilled workers. (Among those who worked, that is.) The teachers and doctors accounted almost exclusively for the professionals in the area (and they would tend to live elsewhere).The picture remains the same or is possibly now even more polarised. The estimable Joseph Rowntree Foundation has outlined how increasingly over the past three decades, in Britain – inner London apart – the rich and poor have clustered into ghettos. In crude terms, this means a place such as Walton has lost ever more of the small numbers who might be defined – in terms of the key markers such as income and health – as average Britons.This isolation of the heartlands strikes me as key. There are people every bit as poor as the struggling Walton resident only a skip away from the Georgian townhouses of the Islington street where my family and I live. But they will be exposed every day to other lives. They might be poor, but they see, says Professor Richard Webber, expert in classifying social groups, "evidence of the rich, and the very act of seeing might offer a ladder of opportunity." The Walton child, by contrast, doesn't "meet other lives, doesn't see middle-class 'specimens'," says Webber. I suppose I now qualify as a specimen. Feeling a bit bleak, I pop into a bar for a drink. Trying to make sense of my thoughts, certain words – "harsh, brutal" – keep popping into my mind. Everything feels harsher now, more brutal. Many more shops have heavy security protection with counters replaced by grilles; warning signs, not welcome notices, decorate the doors. Liverpool as a whole has, of course, recently regained a place in the sun – including its year as European City of Culture in 2008. Nobody I speak to in Walton is displeased that the city is now a destination for weekend breaks, that its fine architecture and arts are gaining a wider audience. But for some locals, there's a sense that the centre can sometimes seem to work against its neighbouring areas; that the centre can absorb available resources. Many mention the flight of the police from the area."Town is a great place to be, very safe, and there are police on every corner. But try and find one on County Road when the gangs are up to no good at night," says Peter Kilfoyle. Grand designs for our old cities are bound, at times, to harm the less elegant quarters.At my parents' place, later, my dad wants to temper my observations. A retired building worker, and sage in this as in most things, he doesn't disagree with my view of the increased harshness of the area's main thoroughfares. But perhaps I'm trying too hard, he suggests. If I were not "on research" – but at home for Christmas, say – we wouldn't go for a drink on County Road. Instead, we might head for the warmth and good humour of the local working men's club – where for years, in his spare time, my dad kept the books, after teaching himself accounting.His lesson is a good one. Sometimes you find what you are looking for. If you've got a camera, or notepad, it's not difficult to find "broken society" vignettes – kids throwing stones, or more likely aimlessly kicking a can. But there will also be other kids, less visible, trying to find some peace to do their homework.  Those are Walton lives, too.It's also good to hear my dad's enthusiasm about some of the changes of the past few years – he raves about the "brilliant" Sure Start nursery my niece has just graduated from, detailing the care and the expertise of the staff.  The following day, I determine to seek out good things. To Tory claims that not enough has been done in such deprived areas, the regular Labour response  is: look to the infrastructure. And it's true that, starting from the Pilgrim Travel Centre (the prayer still sitting in my pocket), I could head in several directions and find examples of substantial investment. Turn left, walk a couple of hundred yards, and I'm outside the Breeze Hill Neighbourhood Health Centre, a £6m product of a public-private partnership involving, among others, Liverpool Primary Care Trust and healthcare firm Assura. Inside, in addition to a suite of primary care services, there are two GP surgeries, and the appearance of a clean, efficient machine that means business. Equally radiant with its newness and expensive looks is the nearby Alsop Community Sports Centre. The centre – which opened in the summer of 2007, a joint venture between the city council and the Big Lottery Fund – is built on the site of the old Queens Drive baths, which had been standing (barely standing towards the end of their run) for over 100 years. I spent hours of my summer holidays inside, horsing around its Edwardian columns, divebombing from its shabby genteel balcony. But for all its decadent charm, a visit in the 70s and 80s never left you in any doubt that you had missed the pool at its best. By contrast, the local children get to enjoy their new centre box-fresh. The first time I visited, 18 months ago, it wasn't the facilities, impressive as they were – 25m pool, well-appointed gym, cricket nets, sport hall – which left a mark, but the very idea of state-of-the art gear in Walton. You can get used to making do.During school hours, the sports centre is used exclusively by the pupils of my old school, Alsop High, the largest comprehensive in Liverpool. The school itself has also had a costly makeover, including new technology rooms, and a new music, art and drama building.It is in schools, generally, that investment is most visible. Venture a mile towards the city centre and you fetch up at North Liverpool Academy, whose futuristic exterior appears to have landed in the middle of Everton from a brighter, happier place. These major developments on the Walton landscape – especially of the educational sort – fit into a national picture. Capital funding available for investment in education went from £683m in 1996-67 to £5.1bn by 2005-06.  In an area such as this, the buildings –  above and beyond their practical virtues –  are meant to work as statements. They are designed to reassert the basics of the welfare state in the poorest parts of the country – here, too, you can have the best.It's New Jerusalem again, but this time brought to you via more complex, more modern financial arrangements. (About half of the funding on schools structure has been Private Finance Initiative funded, through different schemes, including Building Schools For The Future.) In a speech in 2004, the then prime minister Tony Blair promised that investment in schools would "see the entire secondary school building stock upgraded and refurbished in the greatest school renewal programme in British history"."We're getting there, it's starting to look good," says Alsop's very impressive headmaster, Phil Jamieson, signalling the new developments and more to come. (Some of the children are still taught in Portakabins.) The latest Ofsted report described the school as "outstanding", in an inner-city area "with many social disadvantages". The proportion of students eligible for free school meals is three times the national average; those with learning difficulties more than twice the national average. At Alsop, noted the report, students make "exceptional progress" and there's a "strong trend of improvement".I first saw Alsop again – after heading off for college, post A-levels – when it featured on television. Some of the scenes for the Jimmy McGovern-scripted drama Hearts & Minds (broadcast on Channel 4 in 1995), were shot at the school. The school was fictional but recognisable, and the drama brought into focus fractured recollections, allowing me to convert remembered, lived messiness into a subject for debate. In short, the drama asked – or at least this is how I chose to take it – how far schools, in hard-pressed areas, could, or should, be a haven from their environment. How much should they be a shelter from social problems, a place for learning, pure and simple, where potential could flourish? Back at the real Alsop, in 2009, and across much of the state sector, the argument has been won by the contextualists – that is, by those who argue that you can only properly assess a school's performance by looking at its "raw material". Formally, this measure is represented by the Context Value Added (CVA) which has accompanied all school attainment tables since 2002 (initially just as Value Added).The job of CVA is to see how well a school improves pupils, taking into account prior attainment, on entry, and other factors outside a school's control – chiefly levels of deprivation. But the CVA can also throw you, confuse you (and, dare one say, offer false comfort?) A little while back, my mother called me to say that my old school was one of the best performing in the country; she'd read as much in the local paper, she said, and sent me the relevant clip. How could this be possible when, even after the huge improvement wrought by Mr Jamieson and his crack team, 33% of its pupils achieved Level 2 Threshold – which equates to five or more GCSEs at grade C or above, including English and maths – against a national average of 49.7%? It's possible via the magic of CVA – which also provides an efficient insight into how divided we've become. Is Britain now such a patchwork quilt of extreme expectations that what in one school might be cause for complaint can be another school's masterly performance?Sometimes it clarifies your thinking to look at the other extreme. Last year I spent some time at Eton. If Alsop and Eton have little else in common, there was at least a shared uniformity of social background in their pupils. And the more time I spent with the boys and the "products" of very different schools – both my brothers-in-law are Old Etonians – the clearer it seemed that to blame one sort of school for failure is as difficult as praising another for success.By and large, pupils end up at Eton because their families are doing well for themselves; by and large, they then go on themselves to have good school careers and good careers full stop. To attempt to determine how much of this is down to the school and how much down to the pupils' background is a tricky task. Their parents are well placed in the professions, in politics, in finance. The boys do not need to do much research to see how things work; they walk along the corridor at home or at school, or telephone a member of the family.So even if a pupil performs well at a school such as Alsop, there are the hidden ladders to success not caught in league tables. One of the country's leading employers, Terry Leahy, chief executive of Tesco (who has served on government committees to advise on education), told me of his brutal phrase for this practical knowledge exhibited by some children, and not by others. It was, he said, "a knowing how to win". It came with a package of attributes, he added, including "confidence, poise, an ability to project". And when he saw people, in interview and elsewhere, with these attributes, he could usually predict their background – "from the middle classes and beyond".Mr Jamieson asked me for my impressions, seeing the old school again. How had it changed? Portakabins aside, there was much less of a sense of make-do. You could see the pupils taking pleasure in the quality of the music equipment or the new gym. Games lessons during my last years at school entailed jumping on a bus for a 10-minute ride to the pitch – changing into our gear on the bus – before running around for what was left of the hour, and changing back into our uniform on the bus. (A shower could wait.) The children at Alsop seemed happier, more civilised than they – than we –  were in my day. I would bet that, on average, the school was more successful (I left school before 1988, when the league tables were introduced, so comparisons are difficult). But, at the top end, was there a limit on ambition? Should not a school like Alsop – the largest in Liverpool, one of our great cities – be producing a host of regular candidates for Oxbridge, say? There hadn't been any in recent years, said Mr Jamieson. On a previous trip, as we walked around the school, we came to a board listing recent school leavers who had gone on to university – mostly local, I noted, quite a few to the "new" universities. The handful of us who went to university when I was at the school would never have dreamed of staying at home, I said; leaving was part of the adventure. Economic reasons, Jamieson figured, a reluctance to incur too much debt – you had a grant, he reminded me. In 1994, only 12.8% of students lived at home; now the numbers have risen to more than 20%, and the majority of those are from the lower socio-economic backgrounds and attend the new universities. The prospect of higher education has become routine in Walton. Good news. But have the pupils' stories become less special, less transformative? → ← At Alsop, in my day, the numbers in the sixth form were tiny; there must have been about 15 of us, from a fifth-form of about 250. But the handful of us who then went on to university mostly went to elite institutions. An effect of the small numbers, perhaps.But there was also something else going on, something more general, something less specific to my school. Maybe we benefited from the vestiges of a healthy elitism, courtesy of the last generation of teachers who had spent their early years in grammar schools (Alsop became comprehensive in the 60s, but some veteran teachers, shaped by the grammar schools, were still around in my day). With pupils they could tease into developing an interest, they did so with a passion, and wanted to see them thrive at the highest level. (A warm, late night during the summer holidays – I must have been about 15 – I came home to find my mother exalting one of my teachers, a lovely, clever man, then in his 60s, who had paid a visit, in his time away from school, solely to offer kind, encouraging words.) These teachers made no apologies for preferring Oxbridge to the local polytechnic (as it was then).Returning to earth, from my musings, is it possible, I asked Jamieson, that "value added", and the ethos that informs it, limits ambition? He thought not, and cited the example of an exceptional Alsop pupil who had just secured 13 GCSEs, made up entirely of As and A stars. It motivated and encouraged both teachers and pupils – it showed them how far they had come. Received wisdom has it that league tables are mostly studied by the pushy and anxious middle class. This might well be so. But talking to Walton parents, I was surprised how frequently they mentioned "value added". One mother offered a "we're doing well despite how deprived we are" appraisal of school performance, which sort of spooked me – it spooked me even more when I heard a 13-year old, from another Walton school, utter similar lines.As a child, do you know that you are deprived if you're not continually reminded of it? Perhaps you do – you watch television, note other lives and compare, contrast. But in the recent past, these disadvantages were not so formalised, not so much a solid part of the landscape as they are now – certainly not for school children. I can't remember ever having conversations with my schoolmates about how "disadvantaged" we were. Alsop forges links with welfare bodies in the area, with groups dealing with delinquency, with drugs. Also, within the school are six full-time Pastoral Support Mentors, who work with pupils in a "non-judgmental way". There's an area within the school where pupils can drop in, informally, I'm told. But staff can also refer a student – if, for instance, the teacher thinks the child has social or family difficulties.Teaching in a school like Alsop is evidently no longer just about the 3Rs. "You can't ignore what's around you," says Jamieson, "social problems become school problems..."Of all the social problems in Walton, the most intractable was housing, Peter Kilfoyle had said. And, as he ran through the issues, most seemed to be the same as those I had grown up with. Too many people were still living in sub-standard conditions. But how to make good without disrupting solid communities? How to fund new homes if councils have little money? And – more of a new challenge, this – how to revive a diminishing appetite for social housing?  When did social housing begin to lose its force as a repository of hope, of a better future, and become an option of last resort? The 1950s? The 60s? It was still cause for celebration in our family as late as the early 80s, when my parents, after years of trying, managed to secure a social house. I remember clearly the sense of hope my family felt, watching from the door of our soon-to-be demolished house as a new low-rise estate took shape a couple of hundreds yards away. The house had long been overripe for demolition – it was a "classic" two-up, two down terrace, outside lavatory – though my parents never stopped endeavouring to modernise it. But securing priority on the council list then, as now, was not always a straightforward affair. After one visit to the housing department, my mother laughed as she recounted to my father, my sister and myself (then already teenagers) that the housing officer had told her if she were to have another baby, a council flat from the existing stock might be ours. (Another baby would mean more "points" in the Need League Table.)Eventually, however, new stock was approved by the local authorities and, new baby no longer necessary, we were assigned one of the new homes. Our family, it seemed, had been deemed deserving – that both my parents worked, and paid the rent on time probably helped. My sister and myself – well past the age when we felt comfortable undressing in front of each other – would have our own rooms for the first time. There would be a small garden instead of a backyard; we'd have a bathroom for the first time. But many of our neighbours were moved elsewhere – to older housing provision, to "difficult" estates. By then we were already anomalies, in our new social house. We were anomalies because the heat was already elsewhere. The "property- owning democracy", to borrow Anthony Eden's phrase, put into practice by Margaret Thatcher, was on the march. The Housing Act that came into force in October 1980 gave the then more than 5 million tenants of council houses or flats the right to buy their home – at a discount of up to 50 per cent. By 1982, 400,000 had exercised this right and, by 2003, more than 1.5m council homes had been sold. The act provoked a train of events with two distinct outcomes. A majority of Britons now had, and retain (and why not?) the taste for owning their own home. But those estates, where the right to buy did not seem an attractive or plausible option – especially in the north, and especially in areas of high unemployment – became increasingly removed from mainstream society. We've now learned to call these "sink estates" (not surprisingly, the phrase has its origins in the 1980s): grim enclosures of poverty and crime, and often, as in Anfield, not in monolithic tower blocks but in strung-out streets.Talking to the few remaining residents of the "V-Streets" and its surroundings, I'm reminded how in these designated areas of deprivation, one sometimes felt that new housing had become a cure-all. The prevailing view was often that if an estate were knocked down an area could start again. As if everything – all the social ills – could be sorted with a re-build.  "Come back in 10 years' time and this will be paradise," one of the last residents standing tells me, only half in jest."It's not where you come from but where you're going to," proclaimed David Cameron, soon after becoming leader of the Conservative Party, articulating the key belief of our time, the secular faith before which we all bow down. But what happens when where you come from determines where you're going to, ever more the case when inequality increases, as it has done over the past decade? What happens, it seems, is that we get confused. We confuse issues of practicality (sorting out welfare reform, for instance, eradicating benefit traps), with morality, damning too many as lazy, cynical, lacking in character (character was one thing that did not seem to be wanting in Walton)."I'm getting ready for a bath of morality," says one nursery teacher in Walton. She tells me she fears that this bath will be accompanied by reduced funding – though the Conservatives have claimed that Sure Start is safe with them. "And all the progress we're making with kids in the area, getting them early when we can be of influence, might well be lost."What else are she and her colleagues trying to do, she asks, but nurture "self-reliance"? Observing the older children, her graduates, beginning to make their way through schools in the area, she feels there has been some success – "self-reliance spreading out, like some benign virus into Walton!" she laughs. So, no, in her mind, at least, Walton is not broken. Not yet. "We're pretty stretched, though..."★ChildrenRegenerationLiverpoolguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds (Sun, 22 Nov 2009 00:10:11 GMT) Teenage girls face sexual violence threat Teenage perpetrators of domestic violence are to be targeted by the government in a hard-hitting awareness campaign that reflects concern about physical abuse meted out by the young.The move, part of the government's Violence Against Women and Girls strategy, highlights fears that if people under 20 commit domestic violence, it will become the norm for them in later life.Research by the NSPCC reveals that a third of teenage girls in a relationship suffer an unwanted sexual act. A quarter of girls also suffer physical violence, such as being slapped, punched or beaten by their boyfriend.The campaign, which will start in the new year, is aimed at both sexes and aims to challenge what the home office claims are "pervasive attitudes among teens"."Violence against women and girls shatters lives and has a lasting impact across generations," said the home secretary, Alan Johnson. "It is vital that we challenge the troubling and persistent attitudes among some teenagers that violence in relationships is ever justified. Catching them in their first relationships before these views become entrenched should help to prevent violence."The campaign, which will be supported in schools and carried on television, aims to ensure that girls understand they do not have to tolerate any form of violence or controlling behaviour. It will help young people understand what constitutes abusive behaviour in a relationship by covering a range of messages from physical violence through to being pressured to have sex.The campaign will be unveiled on Wednesday, International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women, and will be included alongside a range of measures involving the police, councils, the NHS and government. It comes as new research suggests that three quarters of police forces are insufficiently trained to tackle domestic abuse.Freedom of information (FOI) requests made to England and Wales's 43 police forces have revealed substantial inconsistencies in how domestic violence victims are treated. Forces were asked about budgets, training, staffing and operational structures. Their responses revealed substantial regional differences.The FOI requests found at least 10 different ways in which police forces classified a domestic abuse incident. In almost one force in 10, incidents are not logged as domestic abuse unless the offence is a violent crime. Only 25% of forces providing specialist domestic abuse training.More than four-fifths of the forces questioned work with independent domestic violence advisers and domestic abuse co-ordinators, who are widely recognised as the most valuable members of a domestic abuse unit. But in some cases there was only one of these serving regions with populations of 500,000. Even in the best-staffed force, there was just one adviser or co-ordinator per 45,000 members of the public.Last week, the Association of Chief Police Officers proposed a domestic violence register to track the estimated 25,000 men in England and Wales who move from one relationship to another, serially abusing their partners.But Liquidlogic, which builds computer systems for the police, said the FOI results suggested the register should not be the priority. "A complete overhaul is needed if we are to achieve truly effective response and support for domestic abuse victims and their children," said Denise Harrison, one of the firm's directors.Domestic violencePoliceAlan JohnsonJamie DowardAmelia Hillguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds (Sun, 22 Nov 2009 00:07:04 GMT) 'Useless stay-at-home men' a myth Working women who claim partners don't pull their weight do so to feel more feminine and in charge in the homeIf there is one thing on which many working mothers agree, it is that their partners do not pull their weight on the domestic front.But research to be published this week reveals that men are being unfairly accused and working women are advancing the myth of the "useless man" so they can feel more feminine. "Working women who provide the majority of the household's income to the family continue to articulate themselves as the ones who 'see' household messes and needs as a way to retain claims to an element of a traditional feminine identity," said Dr Rebecca Meisenbach, whose research paper, The Female Breadwinner, will be published this week in the journal Sex Roles.But Meisenbach said the trend of the female high achiever and the male slacker is a tall story that women tell each other to compensate for the fact that most career-orientated women feel an "overwhelming sense of guilt" over their role and less of a mother and a wife."These women are struggling with the intersections of their status as the breadwinner and other gendered societal expectations," she said. "By highlighting stories of how men have to be told or asked to do specific chores in the home, these female breadwinners are making sure they still fit gender boundaries of a wife as someone who manages the home and children."By directing the housework done by their husbands, they maintain a sense of control over the traditionally feminine sphere of the home," she added. "This path of expressing control of and responsibility for both home and paid work may be essential for working mothers to manage competing discourses of ideal worker and intensive mothering."Meisenbach questioned 15,000 female breadwinners on how they felt about their positions in the private domestic sphere and the public work sphere. She said that her theory was strengthened by the fact that the only women who did not express a strong sense of responsibility for the home were those who did not have children under 18."Women seemed simultaneously to be expressing control and a lack of control over housework," she said. "Working mothers face a number of gendered identity tensions, such as the contrast between pressures to live up to 'intensive mothering' norms and 'ideal worker' norms simultaneously." Although female breadwinners are increasingly common in industrialised societies and challenge traditional western gender norms, little research has focused on them.Maria Shriver, the wife of Arnold Schwarzenegger, the governor of California, has launched one of the few research papers into the issue. Last year she was in charge of the release of A Woman's Nation, which she described as the first national project to "paint the portrait of the modern American woman" since her uncle, John F. Kennedy, gave the former first lady Eleanor Roosevelt the same task in the 1960s."For the first time in our nation's history, women now represent half of all workers and are becoming the primary breadwinners in more families than ever before," Shriver said, calling it a "seismic shift" in the economic and cultural landscape of America.The only British report to look explicitly at the issue was published in 2007 by the Future Foundation. The report found only 14% of UK homes had a female breadwinner, but the same study predicted that this number would double by 2030. The issue, however, is one that society is struggling with. Although gender expectations for family roles are nothing like as rigid as they once were, an Ipsos MORI poll conducted for the Observer last year found that 30% of all people – and 32% of young people – agreed with the statement: "The role of women in society is to be good mothers and wives"."Housework represents an interesting juxtaposition of control," said Meisenbach. "On one level, women described retaining control over housework – they talked about their partners contributing to domestic chores but almost always in response to being asked or told to do the task by the wife."They all gendered their partners' behaviour with comments like 'He's a man, they don't see that there is a mess'. And 'My husband's a guy. He picks and chooses what chores he does'. But by gendering his behaviour, they were also gendering their own as women and mothers, instead of breadwinners."Despite the anxiety that female breadwinners described, Meisenbach also found that most actively relished the control and power that their position gave them at home. "I didn't find female breadwinners deferred their power to their husbands at all," she said. "Over 60% said they enjoyed the control they experienced, explicitly noting how they were happily different from the '1950s housewife' or even from female friends within the traditional gender norms.RelationshipsDivorceAmelia Hillguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds (Sun, 22 Nov 2009 00:06:28 GMT) FBI searches for McCann detective A British security consultant who was paid £300,000 to assist efforts by Kate and Gerry McCann to find their daughter Madeleine is being sought by the FBI over an alleged £1.3m fraud.A £500,000 contract given to Kevin Halligen's private detective agency, Oakley International, to help with the search for the missing child was terminated last year after a major benefactor of the McCanns expressed concerns about the quality of the firm's work.However, Halligen is now wanted by the FBI following an indictment issued by US authorities in connection with allegations that he defrauded a London law firm of money that was supposed to be used to lobby for the release of two executives from the Dutch company Trafigura, arrested in the Ivory Coast.He is accused of using the money to buy a mansion in Great Falls, Virginia, that sources close to the McCanns believe may also have been funded by money intended to be spent on efforts to find Madeleine.Halligen, an Irishman living in the UK who presented himself in private security industry circles as a former intelligence operative, owes £100,000 to others who carried out work on the Madeleine case, the Sunday Times reported.The McCanns' spokesman, Clarence Mitchell, said: "Oakley International was contracted to help with the search for Madeleine. Due diligence was carried out at every stage and payment was only made for work properly carried out. It was only towards the end of the six-month contract that question marks were raised about delivery in some areas and the contract was terminated."The McCanns did not contact the police about Halligen, who visited their home, but his behaviour aroused suspicions at an early stage among the couple and their advisers.Oakley International secured the contract from the Find Madeleine Fund to monitor the phone hotline, sift through CCTV footage of possible sightings and carry out investigative work.However, it was terminated after the British double-glazing millionaire Brian Kennedy, who has underwritten the fund's work, raised concerns. Documents reportedly show that Halligen's company was withdrawing large amounts of money for personal use.Madeleine McCannFBIUnited StatesBen Quinnguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds (Sun, 22 Nov 2009 00:17:57 GMT) Churches must lift ban on gay staff, orders Brussels EU decides British government was wrong to allow exemptions under equality lawThe government is being forced by the European commission to rip up controversial exemptions that allow church bodies to refuse to employ homosexual staff.It has emerged that the commission wrote to the government last week raising concerns that the UK had incorrectly implemented an EU directive prohibiting discrimination on the grounds of a person's sexual orientation.The ruling follows a complaint from the National Secular Society, which argued that the opt-outs went further than was permitted under the directive and had created "illegal discrimination against homosexuals".The commission agreed. A "reasoned opinion" by its lawyers informs the government that its "exceptions to the principle of non-discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation for religious employers are broader than that permitted by the directive".The highly unusual move means that the government now has no choice but to redraft anti-discrimination laws, which is likely to prompt a furore among church groups.In anticipation of a possible backlash from the commission, the government has already inserted new clauses into its equality bill. But even if the bill is jettisoned, future governments will be bound by the commission's ruling.Under the new proposals being drafted by the government, religious organisations will be able to refuse to employ homosexuals only if their job involves actively promoting or practising a religion. A blanket refusal to employ any homosexuals would no longer be possible."This ruling is a significant victory for gay equality and a serious setback for religious employers who have been granted exemptions from anti-discrimination law," said human rights campaigner Peter Tatchell. "It is a big embarrassment for the British government, which has consistently sought to appease religious homophobes by granting them opt-outs from key equality laws. The European commission has ruled these opt-outs are excessive."The employment directive outlawing discrimination in the workplace was finalised by the European commission in 2000 and became law in the UK in early 2003, following a public consultation exercise. At the time there were accusations that the government had "caved in" to religious groups that mounted a fierce lobbying campaign to be exempted from the new laws.Under the terms of the exemption, religious groups were allowed to refuse a position to a homosexual employee "so as to avoid conflicting with the strongly held religious convictions of a significant number of the religion's followers"."In other words, if a significant number of followers of an organised religion didn't like it, there was no protection for a gay employee," said Keith Porteous-Wood, executive director of the National Secular Society. "Now the government must demonstrate its commitment to equality, rather than continuing to jump to the church's tune."The EU's equal opportunities commissioner, Vladimir Špidla, said: "We call on the UK government to make the necessary changes to its anti-discrimination legislation as soon as possible so as to fully comply with the EU rules."But religious groups expressed alarm at the move. The Christian charity, Care, said: "If evangelical churches cannot be sure that they can employ practising evangelicals with respect to sexual ethics, how will they be able to continue?"ReligionGay rightsEqualityLawEuropean commissionJamie Dowardguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds (Sun, 22 Nov 2009 00:16:08 GMT) Food waste and sewage to provide green gas Biogas sourced from food waste and sewage is to piped into British homes under a new 'green gas' tariffRotting leftovers, wilted salad and even sewage are to provide a new source of "green gas" to heat our homes.From today, British householders will be able to register for Ecotricity's new tariff to buy green gas – commonly known as biogas – as a way of reducing their carbon footprint and cutting landfill waste. It will be a first for carbon-conscious consumers who have previously only been able to buy "green electricity" from suppliers.Britain discards about 18 million tonnes of food waste a year, which Ecotricity said could generate enough biogas to heat 700,000 homes. The Conservative Party believes 50% of the UK's natural gas supply could be replaced by biogas .Dale Vince, the company's founder, said: "We're the real British Gas now. We're kickstarting the market to move Britain from brown to green gas." He said natural gas sourced from countries such as Russia was expected to run out in 15-20 years.Householders who sign up to Ecotricity's deal will be supplied from January, although initially their gas will come from conventional "brown" natural gas – a percentage of biogas will only be injected into the national grid later in the year. The company, which currently has about 30,000 electricity customers, said it wanted to eventually source 50% of its gas tariff from biogas and would match British Gas on dual-fuel pricing. Vince said he planned to invest about £50m to build two "green gas mills" to make the biogas, but would also look at buying in biogas from other sources, including suppliers in Holland.Audrey Gallacher, energy expert for the government watchdog Consumer Focus, said she welcomed the idea, but warned that confusion could arise over what the green tariff will initially provide: "Green gas tariffs could be good news for customers who want to buy environmentally friendly energy. However, it must be made clear to any customer signing up that they are investing in creating a demand and supply of energy-efficient fuel for the future."Biogas is generated in anaerobic digesters, where organic material is fed into tanks where microbes break down the material without oxygen and release methane and carbon dioxide, the main elements of biogas. The biogas can then be used to make electricity or, as Ecotricity plans, processed and injected into the pipes of the national gas network.The raw material for digesters can come from a variety of sources, including food waste, sewage and farm waste, although Vince ruled out the latter. "We'd probably avoid agriculture waste because we don't want to support factory farming, and a properly run organic farm won't produce excess slurry," he said.The National Grid said there was no technical reason why Ecotricity's plan wouldn't work and added that it supported using renewable gas to hit carbon-cutting targets. Extra momentum for UK biogas should arrive in 2011, when the government is due to introduce a renewable heat incentive, giving financial assistance to generators of heat from renewable sources, from householders using ground-source heat pumps to companies such as Ecotricity.EnergyGasCarbon footprintsAdam Vaughanguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds (Sun, 22 Nov 2009 00:06:39 GMT) Primary schools need to make children 'media savvy' New skills could be included in literacy lessonsPrimary school children should be taught to understand the "language" of advertisers and spin doctors to stop them becoming too susceptible to sophisticated campaigns, it has been claimed.Steve Fuller, a professor of sociology at Warwick University, believes that "media literacy" should be taught to children from the age of five beside maths and English. "It should have the same significance as reading, writing and numeracy skills – a fundamental skill that all people need to be considered fully functioning adults," he said.Fuller, who is leading a major academic programme into why people copy behaviour, argued that lessons could help young people – and adults – be less gullible by understanding how advertising works and how to criticise it. They would also be less susceptible to subliminal messages."To a certain extent, kids already have this skill and they build it up through trial and error but I think it should be taught in a systematic way," said Fuller, who pointed out that such messages could influence the political direction of the country.The notion of the spin doctor, he said, had blurred the lines between advertising, PR and political campaigning. "If people are susceptible to certain types of messages then it can be easy to play on that."Cary Bazalgette, chair of the Media Education Association and former head of education at the British Film Institute, said that the necessary skills should be covered in literacy lessons. When children start school they have often watched films such as Shrek or Toy Story that are much more complex than the books they are exposed to, she said. "We have a public discourse saying television is bad for kids. It is a literacy that we just ignore. Yet children understand the language of moving image media," she added.But Tim Bell, one of the best known figures in the communications industry, said that teaching children how to be critical in this way was a waste of time. Lord Bell added: "What we need are people who are educated and have open minds."Primary schoolsSchoolsAnushka Asthanaguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds (Sun, 22 Nov 2009 00:06:16 GMT) Taxpayers in £481m police pension top-up The taxpayer is having to bail out the police pension fund with almost half a billion pounds a year, it has emerged. The shortfall has raised fresh questions about the long term viability of public sector pensions – and the public's appetite for funding them. Figures released by the government in answer to parliamentary questions show the police pension funding gap has more than doubled in two years. They show that last year the Home Office paid a special grant of £481m to fill a yawning gap in pension scheme funding, up from £201m in 2006-07.The shortfall is all the more concerning given that the government introduced new measures to overhaul the police pension fund three years ago. Despite the changes, the fund now requires massive financial support from the taxpayer.According to the Lib Dem Treasury spokesman, Lord Oakeshott, under the old pension scheme, a constable who retires after 30 years' service on a final salary of almost £36,000 can expect to draw an annual pension of just under £24,000. Oakeshott estimates that this would cost just over £1m to fund. "We pay twice for police pensions," Oakeshott said. "First through council tax and then as income taxpayers, too."Rob Garnham, chair of the Association of Police Authorities, which will discuss the issue of police pensions at its annual conference this week, acknowledged that the Home Office top-ups "recognise the scale of the problem, one that applies across the wider public sector".The policing minister, David Hanson, said an entitlement to a police pension was "a key element of the remuneration of police officers"."The government recognises the need to ensure that the costs of public sector pensions are controlled and has put measures in place to tackle factors such as the costs of increasing longevity. Increased payments, reflecting actuarial advice, were introduced … as the result of a decision of the Administrative Court at judicial review."PoliceCivil serviceTax and spendingPensionsLiberal DemocratsJamie Dowardguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds (Sun, 22 Nov 2009 00:06:00 GMT) Dementia is not the end of life | Hugh Whittall Too many carers are isolated in their struggle to help people with dementia lead better lives. It's time we gave them a handI've been seeing dementia everywhere recently. Terry Pratchett has it. Half of my friends' parents have it. Every time someone forgets a name they put it down to creeping dementia. It sometimes seems that half of the medical research community is working on it. They are not, of course (far from it), but we are forever reading about what might cause, hinder or cure dementia. In fact, the prospect of prevention or cure is still a very long way off, and in the meantime half a million people in the UK are acting as informal carers to the 700,000 people who have the illness, most of them living in their own homes. Those numbers will more than double in the next 40 years.So what? Well, those people, 1.2 million and rising, are struggling with really tough decisions every day – struggling to help people with dementia lead better, fulfilling lives. And they can lead better lives. It is surprising how much people with even quite advanced dementia can do, and can understand – if they are treated as valued individuals; if they are approached at the right time and in the right way; and if they and their carers are given sympathetic support. People can often make their own decisions, or at least share in decision-making. The idea of people as autonomous individuals has become something of a mantra in recent years, but in fact most of us make decisions within a social or family context. We do this when we have all our faculties, and there is no reason why we shouldn't continue to do so as our capacity diminishes.This links with another important theme when looking at the ethics of dementia – that of solidarity. The half a million people caring for those with dementia do so for many reasons, including love, loyalty or a sense of duty. They demonstrate a real sense of solidarity within the family, and as a society we have a corresponding responsibility towards them. This means giving support and recognising the needs and interests of both the person with dementia and their carers, whose lives are often bound together, albeit in difficult and stressful conditions. They deal daily with agonising ethical problems, such as whether to keep their husband/wife/mother/father safe, or to allow them freedom – can Dad still go fishing? Does he have to be accompanied to the bathroom? Can Mum still be allowed in the kitchen? Should she be made to give up work? There are structured ways of approaching these ethical questions, even if they don't have clear cut answers, but people currently feel totally isolated, and are afraid that they are getting it wrong. Training for professionals and support for carers through formal and informal means are achievable, and could improve lives immeasurably.We have, over the last couple of decades, taken great strides. Wheelchair access means that more people with disabilities get to use public spaces and buildings. Hearing loops are available at public counters. We have normalised many areas of illness, disability and difference. But how are we treating people with dementia? How often do we see people taking their relatives with dementia to the cinema or theatre? Or even to shops, cafes or restaurants. Football matches? Religious services? Parties, gigs, festivals? Why not? Actually the law requires providers of services to enable people with dementia to use their services. The Equality and Human Rights Commission should publicise and enforce this. That would potentially change the lives of people with dementia, and their carers, very much for the better.Many such changes can be made, and at relatively little cost, in fulfilling our social responsibilities towards the growing number of people who are, frankly, carrying an unbearable burden. Health departments, social services departments and professional societies all need urgently to look at what they can do to bring about these changes. In our report, Dementia: ethical issues, the Nuffield Council on Bioethics sets out an ethical framework to underpin a number of recommendations that will hopefully move us in this direction, driving changes in the way we approach decision-making, health and social care and research in relation to dementia. But real change will come only when we start to see people with dementia for what they really are – just people.HealthHealth & wellbeingHealth policyEqualityDementiaLong-term careSocial careHugh Whittallguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds (Fri, 02 Oct 2009 10:30:00 GMT) The Queen's speech - a brief explainer The Queen's speech - a brief interactive explainerPaddy AllenMichael White (Tue, 17 Nov 2009 14:05:00 GMT) Make your money work for a good cause too Invest & Give, the investment fund that gives part of your fee to the Prince's Trust, is just one of many financial products appealing to our charitable instincts, says Heather ConnonDo you want your money to work for you and for your favourite charities this Christmas? There are a number of ways to do this, from buying presents through specialist credit cards to giving your children and grandchildren investments that benefit charity – but you need to look closely at the terms, as not all of them are as generous as they initially look.One of the newest is Invest & Give, www.investandgive.co.uk, an investment fund launched in the summer to support the Prince's Trust, one of the leading charities for supporting British youth. This is backed by 12 of the best-known names in investment management – including Artemis, Invesco Perpetual, F&C and Ignis. They are offering their services at a substantial discount and 0.6% of the 2.25% annual fee on the fund will be donated to the Prince's Trust. That means that, as your savings grow, so does the amount of the donation.Invest & Give is the first investment product to qualify for gift aid, which means that for every £1 of fees donated, the trust can reclaim a further 28p. The fund aims to be giving £1m a year to the trust by the end of 2012, which means the amount invested will have to grow from the current £1m to £130m – a task that may become easier if it is sold via the popular fund platforms. Many are currently reluctant to sell it because the structure requires them to cash in units annually to fund the donation.The fund is being run to provide what it promises will be a "competitive return" for investors, as well as the charitable donation. It is a multimanager fund, with a balanced mandate, which means it will invest across a range of funds and assets, from property to commodities. So it should be less volatile.The manager, John Husselbee of North Investment Partners, has a strong track record in this type of investment – over the past five years, his City Financial MultiManager Income Fund has grown by 31.7%, compared with 19.4% for the average fund in the sector. Many of his funds are now closed to new investors.The Prince's Trust highlights research showing that multimanager funds do substantially better than those run by a single investment manager: over six years, the margin is as high as 6%.Olympic sailor Ben Ainslie is one of the investors. He says he was attracted both by the "fact that fund managers are getting together to do something for a worthy cause" and because he is "hugely in favour of anything which supports the Prince's Trust".However, Ben Yearsley at the independent financial adviser Hargreaves Lansdown asks whether investors might not be better with a conventional fund and giving part of the proceeds to charity. "The point about this fund is investors don't have to do anything to make their donation." He adds that Husselbee is a respected manager and that, while the 2.25% annual charge looks high, it is in line with other fund of funds.Invest & Give is unusual in being an investment product: most other charitable schemes involve spending. Credit cards are one of the most common, with organisations such as the NSPCC, WWF and the RSPCA all having "white-labelled" versions that donate a proportion of your spending to charity. But the amount the charities get is generally small – typically between 0.25 and 0.4%.There is still time to get charity or cashback cards in time for Christmas shopping –see moneyfacts.co.uk for offers. Charity Bank has a savings account that donates interest to your chosen charity or to the Charities Aid Foundation. Triodos Bank has a similar account.You can also donate while you surf, search or spend online. Sites such as froggybank.co.uk, giveortake.com, and ushopucare.co.uk give you cashback on every online purchase, which is donated to charity, while the search engine everyclick.com donates a fee to the charity of your choice for every web search you do.Charitable givingInvestment fundsCredit cardsInvestmentsPrince CharlesHeather Connonguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds (Sun, 22 Nov 2009 00:07:31 GMT) O2 is world's most popular music venue The O2 Arena, formerly the much-maligned Millennium Dome, is now officially the world's most popular music venue, having sold almost four times as many tickets as New York's Madison Square Garden in the last month.The milestone comes soon after the venue branched out into sport. This week, more than 270,000 people will watch the world's top eight tennis players at the ATP World Tour Finals at the venue in Greenwich, south-east London. Two days after Rafael Nadal, Roger Federer and Andy Murray leave the building, Eddie Izzard will take to the stage. "We are the world's most popular music venue and attract the world's biggest stars. That tends to grab the headlines, but quietly we have been working away at making sure we get a healthy sports calendar," said Alex Hill, senior executive director of O2's owner, AEG Europe. Next year is likely to bring boxer David Haye's first defence of his recent WBA world heavyweight title, and darts will also come to the O2 for the first time in February. The O2 has also been mentioned as a potential venue for the new World Series of Boxing, mooted as a Champions League-style event that can bridge the gap between amateur and professional boxing. At the London Olympics in 2012, hundreds of thousands of ticket holders will watch sports ranging from volleyball to swimming.The original exhibition opened on 1 January 2000 and ran for a year.Rajeev Syalguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds (Sun, 22 Nov 2009 00:07:06 GMT) Artists cast as saviours of British cinema After the success of Steve McQueen and Sam Taylor-Wood, the UK Film Council aims to fund debuts by a new crop of artists turned film-makersFirst came Turner prize-winner Steve McQueen's gritty film Hunger, about the IRA prisoner Bobby Sands. Full of soul-searching and menace, it was the toast of the Cannes film festival last year. Next came the success this autumn of Nowhere Boy, artist Sam Taylor-Wood's uplifting biopic of the young John Lennon.Now, following these unexpected triumphs, a queue of former young British artists, or YBAs, has formed, waiting to entertain the nation's cinema audiences. Among the aspiring directors are the controversial artists Jake and Dinos Chapman and the Turner prize-winner Gillian Wearing.This week, in recognition of this line-up of potential talent, the homegrown cinema industry has announced that it is to start banking on the trend. The UK Film Council is to promote more work from first-time feature film directors who are already established names in London art galleries."This is a really important area now, and I think it is where we are going to see a lot of the most interesting new films coming from," said Tim Bevan, chairman of the Film Council and the producer behind the hit films Notting Hill and Four Weddings and a Funeral. "We are working with several artists who are making their first full-length features."This month the Film Council unveiled its new slimline structure, but it has safeguarded a £15m fund aimed at helping this sort of aspiring film-maker. Wearing, who won the Turner prize in 1997, is already on the council's books. The artist has co-written the script for her debut feature, Self-Made, with the playwright Leo Butler. Funded jointly with Arts Council England, it will follow 12 people who uncover new sides of their personalities during an acting workshop.Artist Clio Barnard is working on a documentary funded by the council. It centres on the Buttershaw Estate in south Bradford and is due to be finished next year. The estate is the setting for much of playwright Andrea Dunbar's work and for Alan Clarke's 1987 film adaptation, Rita, Sue and Bob Too! Barnard's film will chronicle the past 30 years and the effects of poverty and media images on people who live there.The Chapmans, known for disturbing works featuring dismembered corpses and Nazi insignia, are well advanced on their debut feature, being made in collaboration with Channel 4. Described variously as a comedy and a horror film, it is believed to be set in the art world and to have a heavy satirical edge.Previous generations of leading British film-makers, such as Ridley Scott and Alan Parker, made the switch to feature films from the world of advertising. During the 1990s the YBAs' interest in new media and in moving images created a similar path for them into the world of mainstream cinema.The birth of the new trend was marked at the moment in May 2008 when Taylor-Wood and McQueen bumped into each other on the red carpet at the Cannes film festival in the south of France. McQueen was about to receive the prestigious Caméra d'Or award from Dennis Hopper for Hunger while Taylor-Wood was in line for a Palme d'Or for best short film for her teenage romance Love You More, scripted by Patrick Marber and based on a Julie Myerson story.Some suggest it is the collapse of the art market that has prompted some leading artists to make the transition to cinema. Whatever the reason, it is a popular move. Three years ago the Scottish artist Douglas Gordon charmed critics at Cannes with his football film Zidane, A 21st Century Portrait. Tracey Emin and the Turner prize winners Damien Hirst and Wolfgang Tillmans have all also made short films.The Film Council's chief executive, John Woodward, said the new Film Production Fund, designed to champion the highest quality talent, is the best way of balancing out an increasingly nervous marketplace. Woodward and his chairman, Bevan, both believe that funding new and second-time film-makers, some from other creative areas, is the best way to stop the British film industry becoming risk-averse.Steve McQueen's Hunger is due to be screened by Channel 4 on 15 December. Sam Taylor-Wood's Nowhere Boy is released in cinemas on Boxing Day.Steve McQueenTim BevanVanessa Thorpeguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds (Sun, 22 Nov 2009 00:06:58 GMT) Clergymen and dentists marry for keeps True love may be the key to a long and happy marriage – but being a dentist or an agricultural engineer helps, too, according to new research.A paper that correlates occupations with divorce and separation rates, to be published this week in the Journal of Police and Criminal Psychology, reveals that dancers and choreographers, bartenders, massage therapists and telephone operators are most likely to split up.Those looking for a life of fidelity and loyalty, however, should marry agricultural engineers, optometrists, dentists, members of the clergy and podiatrists.Dr Michael Aamodt, an industrial psychologist and professor of Industrial and Organisational Psychology at Radford University in Virginia, has invented a formula to work out the likelihood of success for a marriage, based on the percentage of people in 449 occupations who had been in a marital relationship, but were no longer with their spouses."To compute the divorce rate for each occupation, we used the following formula: (separated + divorced) divided by (total population - never married)."This formula yielded the percentage of people in each occupation that had been in a marital relationship, but were no longer with their spouse," he said.Using census information, Aamodt rated professions and trades according to their likelihood of achieving a successful marriage. "I looked at the divorce rate for each given occupation after controlling for gender, race, age and income characteristics," said Aamodt. "By controlling for demographic variables that might be related to divorce rates, we also obtained race, gender, age and income information for each occupation."Aamodt initially also rated each occupation according to three sources of occupational stress: shift work, overtime and weekend work. But, he said, none of the variables made a significant difference.His study found that chefs and mathematicians shared a 20% chance of getting divorced or separated. Journalists and urban planners had a 17.54% chance, while librarians, dietitians and fitness instructors had a 16.89% chance.Travel agents, writers and police shared a 15-16% chance of divorce, slightly above firefighters and teachers. At 12.48% chance of divorce, judges and magistrates were slightly less likely to succeed than vets and funeral directors.Despite their long hours, or perhaps because of them, chief executives had only a 9.81% chance of experiencing marriage breakdown, slightly above pharmacists, dentists and farmers.MarriageDentistsAmelia Hillguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds (Sun, 22 Nov 2009 00:06:54 GMT) Claimants await judgment over bank charges for unauthorised overdrafts Supreme court will rule on Wednesday whether account-holders charged for going into the red can seek compensationMore than one million banking customers will come a step closer this week to learning whether they will be able to claim back charges they paid for unauthorised overdrafts.On Wednesday, the supreme court will hand down the appeal ruling on a case between the Office of Fair Trading and seven banks and one building society to determine whether the fees charged for unauthorised borrowing can be tested under the Unfair Terms in Consumer Contracts Regulations 1999.Hundreds of thousands of bank-account customers successfully claimed back charges until July 2007, when the case went to court. The Financial Services Authority then announced a moratorium, and 1.2 million people have had their claims put on hold until the conclusion of the case.But consumer groups have complained that this has allowed some banks to continue levying high charges while customers are unable to get their money back. Despite the moratorium, the Financial Ombudsman Service is still able to review claims that involve financial hardship; since 2007, it has assessed 10,000 such cases and judged that about half should be dealt with immediately.Earlier this year Gordon Brown urged banks and regulators to resolve the case as soon as possible, suggesting a negotiated solution would be in the best interest of consumers. Any agreement on future fees and charges is likely to be close to the £12 maximum default charge that the OFT imposed on credit card firms three years ago.A source in the banking industry said the banks were expecting the ruling to go in the OFT's favour. Most have already altered the charging structure on their current accounts.If the OFT wins, it is expected to rule that overdraft charges dating back to 2001, and possibly even earlier, are unfair and ask the banks to repay them. This could result in a series of court cases lasting another two years. However, the banker believed that if the ruling went in favour of the OFT, claimants could probably expect a swift return of their money. He said the fact that some of the banks involved with the case were part-owned by the taxpayer would influence a decision in favour of claimants.Bank chargesBankingJill Insleyguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds (Sun, 22 Nov 2009 00:06:53 GMT) Recession-hit couples turn to 'shift-parenting' to stay afloat Mothers and fathers take it in turns to go to work as a way of avoiding the expense of childcareThe recession is changing family life, according to a major report. More people are taking second jobs, and others are turning to "shift-parenting", where one parent works in the day and the other at night to avoid childcare costs.The study, which has so far involved 1,000 families, also found that many parents were facing partial unemployment by being forced to reduce their hours when they would prefer to work full time. A positive side-effect, it added, was that more and more fathers were spending time at home with their children.The findings, which have emerged in the initial report of an 18-month inquiry by the charity 4Children, come in the week that commentators spoke of the "Mumsnet election", arguing that family life would be the top priority for all three main political parties in the general election, with votes won or lost at the school gate.Anne Longfield, the chief executive of 4Children, said the findings showed that families were being resilient in the midst of a recession."Clearly, there has been a move in a lot of families to review their caring responsibilities," she said. "Sometimes that is born of necessity and sometimes it is a choice. But it is good to see more willingness and interest from dads in taking on that caring role – we wouldn't have seen that 10 or 20 years ago."The advantage of shift-parenting, Longfield said, was that both parents could spend time with their children. But she admitted it had a serious downside, as couples struggled to find time to spend with each other.One married couple from south-east London admitted that working in a shift pattern to avoid childcare costs had proved more difficult than they expected. Luthfa Rahman, 24, works as an administrator from 9am until 4pm, while her husband, Minhaj, works as a waiter from 4.30pm until midnight."We have a son, Zayyam, who is one, and we certainly can't afford childcare," said Luthfa. "I leave at 8am and come back at four. I meet Minhaj at the train station, take Zayyam and Minhaj goes straight to work. Then I go home and see him at midnight, by which time I am pretty much in bed – and then I'm off again. I didn't realise how difficult it would be. It is more testing on the relationship than anything else, but it is good for Zayyam, as he gets to see both his parents."Today's findings have led 4Children to make a number of recommendations, including a more flexible model of childcare that would operate on a "pay-as-you-go" basis and be more in line with modern working patterns. It also called for more "high-quality part-time work" that is well-paid.Julia Margo, director of research at the thinktank Demos, said what had changed was that phenomena such as shift-parenting had spread from lower-income families into the middle classes. "Previously, the middle classes had quite a cushy deal – a relatively free choice about how to balance work and home life – but they have been hit really hard by this recession," she said. "They did use childcare, but that has been turned on its head because if you look at the statistics it is that middle-income group, and male workers in particular, that have been affected. The pattern of shift-parenting, stay-at-home dads – all the things highlighted in this study – are now things that middle-income groups are doing as well."Parents and parentingChildcareRecessionAnushka Asthanaguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds (Sun, 22 Nov 2009 00:06:51 GMT) Superdiets? They're just a fairytale, says top doctor Medical evidence doesn't support claims that faddish eating regimes make you healthierSome swear by chewing 32 times to aid digestion; others stick to raw vegetables and fruit; many opt for high-protein diets in the form of fish, chicken and beef; a few proclaim the powers of grapefruit juice.Whichever diet you follow, there is a good chance that it will be challenged tomorrow, when one of the country's leading doctors exposes the "myths and fairytales" surrounding some of the world's best-known food fads.Professor Chris Hawkey, president of the British Society of Gastroenterology (BSG), will list more than a dozen famous diets when he addresses Gastro 2009, a major conference for doctors. They include "rawism", the grapefruit diet and the alkaline diet.The chewing movement emerged in the 19th century with the claim that chewing each mouthful 32 times helped digestion. "Gladstone was apparently very eccentrically in favour of this diet," said Hawkey of the British prime minister who died in 1898. "The idea is that salivary enzymes start digestion." However, like many other diets, it was based more on "theory than evidence", according to Hawkey.As for the Hollywood grapefruit diet, which is based on the belief that the fruit contains an enzyme that breaks down fat and which Kylie Minogue is reported to have used, Hawkey argued that the chemical is unlikely to even make it through the gut and into the body where it is meant to do its work."Food has been shrouded in myths and fairytales since time immemorial," he said, arguing that some people become "quasi-religious" about what they eat. "But what's important is to recognise that, despite the popularity of fad diets, we are losing a grip on the fight with obesity."His comments come as a survey by the BSG shows that one in five Londoners would turn to weight-loss pills to slim down. As for the Atkins Nutritional Approach, the famous diet that is low in carbohydrates and high in protein, one in five women would try it, but only 2% believe it is healthy. For Hawkey, the diet is one of the few that carries at least a small amount of evidence."It is not terribly healthy in the sense that you are going to have a lot of fat, but if you lose weight then it is a good thing," he said. "The theory is that it resets the metabolic rate and there is some science to back that up."He argues that there is no harm in any diet that retains some nutritional balance and makes an individual lose weight.Among the more balanced diets he will mention is one promoted by the nutritionist Esther Blum, who advocates eating full-fat foods in moderation to help metabolise cholesterol and to improve sex drive. Its famous fans include Sarah Jessica Parker and Teri Hatcher."I'm all for informed scientists and practitioners actually debunking some of the mythology around diets," said Andrew Hill, professor of medical psychology at Leeds University. "People are looking for quick-fix repairs, but in fact they are very rare, particularly in relation to being overweight," Hill said."The idea that some new discovery or new way of combining food will give you an instant fix to your weight or health problem is nearly always misinformed. Health isn't immediately reparable; weight isn't immediately modifiable."HealthFoodFood & drinkHealth & wellbeingAnushka AsthanaRowan Walkerguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds (Sun, 22 Nov 2009 00:06:47 GMT) InterCity dreaming is more than just nostalgia The east coast line's fortunes have been revived since it passed from National Express to state ownership, raising hopes of a return to network integration last seen in the days of British RailLord Adonis, the transport secretary, has big plans for Britain's largest rail franchise. Asked by the Observer last week if he was considering changes to the government-owned East Coast service, he said: "I want to see these trains full and I want to see a fares strategy that encourages people to get on trains. Watch this space."According to accounts filed this month by the east coast franchise's former owner National Express, the Department for Transport (DfT) will start its overhaul from a financial position that is stronger than the headlines over the past year would suggest. The London-to-Edinburgh route made an operating loss of £23.6m last year, but that was due to £50.9m of exceptional costs related to the looming demise of the contract. Strip out the one-off costs and cancel the franchise payments of £60.1m that were made to the DfT last year, and the franchise made an operating profit of about £90m.According to projections seen by the Observer, the east coast franchise would have made a profit of about £31.5m this year if it had escaped the yoke of the DfT's payment schedule. An act that appeared to be crisis management – renationalising a flagship of rail privatisation – also looks like a shrewd business deal."The east coast line is essentially profitable. But that has been obscured by previous operators' promises of unrealistic premium payments, based on over-optimistic growth projections," says Douglas McNeill, analyst at Astaire Securities.National Express pledged payments of £1.4bn over seven and a half years and its failed predecessor, GNER, gave up less than two years into an agreement to pay the DfT £1.3bn over a decade. East Coast is working to a much less demanding payment schedule.The brighter outlook for East Coast could help revive the notion of linking it with the west coast route operated by Virgin Trains, and ultimately adding on the CrossCountry, Great Western and East Midlands lines to re-create the integrated InterCity network that operated under British Rail (BR) until privatisation in the mid-1990s.According to one industry source, the idea of joining up the east and west coast routes makes financial sense, with the new London-to-Manchester-and-Glasgow franchise expected to pay a premium when the contract is renewed in 2012."If they were to pay their full share of maintenance costs, the expectation over the next few years is that the west coast and east coast would become fully profitable and financially self-sustaining franchises," says the source.Virgin Trains, co-owned by Stagecoach and Sir Richard Branson's Virgin empire, made a profit of £56m last year but will be bolstered by taxpayer support to the tune of £50m in 2009 because it will undershoot sales targets as a result of the recession. It is also underpinned by a DfT subsidy of about £240m that, until last year, was paid to Virgin and was then passed on to Network Rail, the company that owns and maintains the UK rail system, in the form of track usage fees. Now that fee is paid directly to Network Rail by the DfT, helping the west coast route edge closer to becoming a premium-paying franchise.However, the logic behind combining the east and west coast routes, possibly under government ownership, does not need to be driven by the finances. Roger Ford, industry and technology editor of Modern Railways magazine, has called for the reintroduction of the InterCity network on behalf of a group that is often sidelined in debates over the industry: passengers. Ford says that an InterCity operator with one website, a simplified fares structure and a unifying brand would galvanise an industry that has "lost sight of the passenger"."It seems such an obvious thing to do," he says. "One of the problems facing the railway is that it is terribly fragmented with different operators. It is very difficult making a long-distance journey these days. There are so many different tickets and websites. What the railway has lost is an integrated national network that holds it together. InterCity is the face of the railway that everybody sees."But Tony Collins, chief executive of Virgin Trains, does not see the benefits of combining the east and west coast, let alone folding in CrossCountry, which runs from Penzance to Aberdeen, the London-to-Swansea Great Western line, and the London-to-Sheffield East Midlands route.In the dying days of BR in 1994, InterCity reported an operating profit of £97.9m. But Collins argues annual passenger growth of 20% on the west coast was unheard of during those years, although defenders of BR would say it did not benefit from the £9bn line upgrade that has allowed Virgin to ramp up services."The term 'InterCity' as a catch-all is out of date," says Collins. "Our route is now a complex mix of 'long commute', leisure and business travel, which each have different needs, and we are succeeding in the face of greater competition than ever before. Our routes all need astute marketing and management, which wouldn't come under a multi-legged monolith. One size doesn't fit all."Given the opportunity to back the rebirth of InterCity, Lord Adonis declines. Speaking at a seminar on low-carbon travel hosted by the Campaign for Better Transport, he indicates that the patchwork of individual franchises will stay, albeit challenged by a revived East Coast."We do of course have inter-city franchises at the moment," he says. "I want them [the east and west coast] to be exemplary franchises and Virgin is seeing a huge increase in traffic."For now, a government-owned London-to-Edinburgh franchise is the closest Britain will get to an InterCity revival.Network Rail profitsNetwork Rail is expected to report post-tax profits of about £100m this week, but the owner of Britain's tracks, signals and stations relies heavily on the taxpayer for its impressive returns.The rail industry expects the east coast and west coast franchises to become profitable without government subsidy, while paying their share of maintenance costs, during the next decade. But Network Rail must shoulder the burden of maintaining and upgrading parts of the network that cannot be sustained by the fare-payer.The Office of Rail Regulation, which monitors Network Rail's finances, acknowledges there would have to be a smaller rail system if subsidies of around £5bn per year were cut.Most of Network Rail's income of £6.1bn this year will be covered by a government grant of £4bn. This funds the day-to-day work of track repairs and keeping stations tidy. Big improvements, such as platform lengthening and rebuilding King's Cross station in London, are funded by a £22bn debt underwritten by the government.The rest of Network Rail's income is provided by train operators, who pay for every carriage that runs on its tracks on a per-kilometre basis. Those fees – £1.8bn this year – are also subsidised. According to the Rail Industry Monitor, train operators received a subsidy of about £1.5bn in 2007, accounting for a fifth of their earnings.Network Rail will celebrate the numbers, but its performance reflects tighter cost management rather than genuine commercial success.Travel & leisureNational ExpressVirgin RailTransport policyPrivatisationDan Milmoguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds (Sun, 22 Nov 2009 00:06:44 GMT) Security 'cover-up' at nuclear plants Ministers refuse to release details of five incidents last yearThe government is refusing to provide details on five separate security breaches at Britain's nuclear power stations last year.The breaches have prompted accusations that ministers are suppressing damaging information at a time when they are attempting to sell the idea of more nuclear power stations. Earlier this month, 10 new sites in England and Wales were approved.The energy secretary, Ed Miliband, told MPs that nuclear was a "proven and reliable" energy source. But the latest annual report from the Office for Civil Nuclear Security (OCNS) has prompted questions about the measures being taken to protect the country's ageing plants. The report states that nuclear operators must disclose "events and occurrences which may be of interest from a security point of view". It notes: "Five reports were made which warranted further investigation and subsequent follow-up action."According to government guidelines, such incidents include "any unauthorised incursion on to the premises", "any incident occurring on the premises involving an explosive or incendiary device", "any damage to any building or equipment on the premises which might affect the security of the premises", "any theft or attempted theft of any nuclear material" and "any theft or attempted theft, or any loss or unauthorised disclosure, of sensitive nuclear information".The incidents are a cause for concern due to the heightened security threat, with al-Qaida terrorists thought to be targeting nuclear plants around the world. There are also claims that al-Qaida has attempted to procure radioactive materials abroad. Last year, western intelligence services, including MI5 and MI6, successfully blocked 16 attempts to smuggle plutonium or uranium, according to reports. In all cases the materials were believed to be destined for terrorist groups.Earlier this month an independent MP, Dai Davies, tabled parliamentary questions demanding that the government detail the nature of the five security breaches. But the energy minister, David Kidney, cited "national security reasons" in declining the request. Kidney said providing any more details would be in breach of government guidelines that "prevent the disclosure of sensitive nuclear information that could assist a person or group planning theft, blackmail, sabotage and other malevolent or illegal acts".Dr David Lowry, a nuclear policy consultant who specialises in security issues, attacked the refusal to provide further details. "Three years ago, the OCNS's annual report recorded eight breaches in information security, and at that time the nuclear security regulator was prepared to reveal that these included 'the theft of laptops from parked vehicles' and 'inappropriate transmission of restricted information over the internet'," Lowry said."Now we have the minister responsible for nuclear security refusing to disclose any of the five reportable security incidents. Does this indicate they are much more important than hitherto, or does it reflect an acute atomic insecurity by ministers because they are trying to sell the claimed benefits of new nuclear plants to a sceptical public?"Nuclear powerUK security and terrorismEd MilibandJamie Dowardguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds (Sun, 22 Nov 2009 00:06:37 GMT) Methadone 'makes addicts of prisoners' Thinktank says inmates are swapping one addiction for anotherBritain's prison system churns out thousands of prisoners addicted to methadone, according to a thinktank with close links to the Tories.The Centre for Policy Studies claims that many inmates on the heroin substitute have little chance of being weaned off. The CPS obtained figures from the government showing a 57% increase in the number of prisoners on methadone "maintenance" programmes, up from 12,518 in 2007 to 19,632 last year. Last year, 45,135 prisoners were placed on detoxification programmes which mostly involved them being placed on methadone. Of 140,000 prisoners passing through the jail system last year, more than 60,000 would have received methadone or another substitute, buprenorphine.The rise is in part due to the roll-out of the Integrated Drug Treatment System (IDTS), part of the government's strategy to break the link between crime and addiction. But it has led to concerns that prisoners are swapping one addictive drug (heroin) for another (methadone) with little chance of getting clean. Kathy Gyngell, policy analyst with the CPS and author of The Phoney War on Drugs, said: "The government is creating a huge… social problem because nobody is putting money into alternative programmes."Gyngell said alternative psychological-based treatments were needed. In contrast to the thousands of prisoners on methadone, Gyngell pointed out that only 850 had been placed on a 12-step detoxification programme that involves talking therapies and has been shown to work.A Department of Health report noted: "The home affairs select committee recommended that methadone maintenance should be available across the prison estate. There has been considerable unease around this practice within the Prison Service."Many drugs experts argue, however, that methadone plays a key role in tackling addiction. "It would be a mistake to rule methadone out of recovery altogether," said a spokesman for the drugs charity Addaction. A Ministry of Justice spokesman said the increase in methadone prescriptions was a result of the government's commitment to tackling drug dependence among prisoners. Prisons and probationDrugsJamie Dowardguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds (Sun, 22 Nov 2009 00:06:25 GMT) The philosophy of dodgy sales and stolen data Tightening the law on stolen data could ensnare journalists as well as crimes such as the T-Mobile scandalSo what is "the public interest"? Philosophical tangles don't come much knottier in a world where this defence of journalism's essential freedom is always under siege. Remember last week's T-Mobile scandal, where staff illicitly sold customer details to rival mobile operators. Is stopping such scams in the public interest?Enter (at the Society of Editors conference) a reassuring Christopher Graham, ex-BBC News managing editor turned national Information Commissioner. Telephone tapping in News of the World mode? Done with since the Press Complaints Commission acted in 2007, Graham thinks. The problem now is crooks peddling stolen data for profits so fat they make the old Data Protection Act fines seem puny. He wants prison sentences of up to two years thrown in.Journalists' hackles rise at this. There's an exception for "legitimate and responsible" reporting on offer from the Ministry of Justice, a new defence under Section 55 of believing that "obtaining, disclosing or procuring" protected data was necessary in the public interest. But how many half-finished investigations would warm a cold judge's heart?And Joe Public might ask the question the other way round. Why should he be harassed by salesmen using protected data when papers espousing the public interest could help him by choking off this dodgy trade? There: is that tangled enough?Media lawData protectionInformation commissionerT-MobilePeter Prestonguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds (Sun, 22 Nov 2009 00:06:14 GMT) Nurseries: Is a fiver a minute enough to stop parents exploiting them? Nurseries are imposing fines of up to £300 an hour on people who don't pick up their children on time, says Sam Dunn, but many parents think that's a good ideaStruggling parents are being hit with fines of up to £300 an hour for late collection of their children from nurseries. Designed to stop parents from exploiting private nurseries as a free "waiting room" for their youngsters when running late, the fees can strike a blow to families on a budget already grappling with expensive childcare.The charges, which vary wildly nationwide, from zero to as much as £5 per minute or £50 for each 15 minutes of tardiness (see table below), are also on the rise, anecdotal evidence suggests.At Phoenix House Montessori nursery school in Stamford Hill, north London, fees have recently rocketed from £1 a minute to an eye-popping £5 a minute – a 400% rise."I nearly had a nervous breakdown on a bus a couple of weeks ago when I got stuck in traffic after an accident, and thought I was going to be really late," says Cash reader and mum Laura Boston. "They put them up to a fiver a minute because people were repeatedly turning up late."Although the fines are intended to punish repeat offenders, parents who are caught up in a delay not of their own making – anything from a cancelled train to an overrun meeting or a traffic snarl-up – can end up paying heavily for the extra time.The National Day Nurseries Association, a charity and industry body, says providing care after hours carries considerable expense.At least two staff are needed to comply with child protection and health and safety rules, it says, on top of the extra costs of overtime pay and keeping a building open late."In order for us to maintain our mandatory staffing ratios, laid down by [regulator] Ofsted, two additional staff have to be kept on duty, and therefore late collection does cause us to incur additional costs in the evening," says Andy Morris, managing director of Asquith Day Nurseries, one of the UK's largest private nursery chains.Siobhan Freegard, who runs the Netmums online community for parents, suggests that nurseries impose high fees less as a way to boost profits than to stop the nursery system being abused."The nurseries that do it are not money-grabbing, it's to prevent habitually late parents from taking advantage," Freegard says."Many of the site's mums say that they feel such fees are fair, because many people get irritated when it's often the same people who are always late picking up – if they make an effort to be there on time, why shouldn't the others?"To gauge acceptance or otherwise of such fees, Cash asked the online parent community Mumsnet.com to find out from its users if high late collection fees rankled with families.A subsequent robust exchange of views underlined how many parents approve of exorbitant fees as a tool to prevent poor time-keepers but also protect nurseries."They are a necessary evil to stop the minority of parents who take advantage and don't bother to ensure they collect on time," said contributor Cargirl.However, added Norkybutnice, "Our [nursery] charges £50 per child per 15 minutes! It's made me sure to never pick him up late, so it's fair enough, I think."Making late arrivals pay is acceptable, added Titfertat, as "if nurseries stayed open longer, all parents would have to bear the cost. I for one would not want that and I'm sure most wouldn't."Private nursery fees are unregulated since most are privately run businesses, and simply rely on terms and conditions laid out clearly within a contract with each parent. Many parents are billed monthly and any late collection fees are simply stuck onto the bill.Carrie Longton, cofounder of the Mumsnet website, says: "After all the other fees paid for childcare, it can seem harsh to be charged such sums on top. The costs can actually make you reassess what type of childcare you want."While the cost of a nanny is prohibitive for most families, childminders tend to cost slightly less than nurseries and often offer greater flexibility.However, many parents prefer the structure and social side to nurseries despite the costs.According to the national childcare charity Daycare Trust's annual survey of childcare costs, the cost of a typical nursery place for a child under two is now £8,684 in England, £8,216 in Scotland and £7,592 in Wales.A typical full-time nursery place for a child under two is now £167 per week compared with average earnings of £479 per week, says the Daycare Trust. Annual costs have edged up by 5%, much more than inflation.The survey found the heftiest childcare costs were in London and the south-east, where typical costs ranged from £173 to £226 a week.While nursery fees must always be charged, some suggest that a more effective way to get parents to pick up their children on time might be removing late collection fees altogether.International studies – most recently by the Behavioural Sciences Program at Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico, US, and also identified in the 2005 bestseller Freakonomics by Steven D Levitt and Stephen J Dubner – imply that charging actually switches off individuals' moral behaviour.By removing a personal sense of obligation to be punctual for the nursery teachers, the tardiness is simply something to buy off. Remove the charges and put the emphasis on personal morality instead, the studies show, and parental lateness fades away.However, such a theory might not work in the UK.At Parklands Day Nursery in Cheshire, a dramatic hike in penalties from just a couple of pounds for lateness to £21 per quarter-hour saw late pick-ups plunge dramatically."Our low charges saw lots of parents turn up late and it didn't stop them," a spokesman for the nursery said, "so we raised it to £21 for 15 minutes, and it works – it needs to be there."The cost of being late■ Phoenix House Montessori nursery school, London: £5 per minute■ Parklands day nursery, Nantwich, Cheshire: £21 per £15 minutes■ Kingsclere Nurseries (part of Complete Childcare), Berkshire/Oxfordshire: £20 per quarter hour■ University of Edinburgh day nursery: £15 per half hour, or part thereof■ Holland Park pre-prep school and day nursery, London: after 6.30pm, it's £5 for 15mins; for repeat offenders, £25 for 15 mins■ Patacake day nursery, Cambridge: £10 for every 15 minutes■ Noah's Ark pre-school, Weston-super-mare: £5 for every 15 minutes■ Mama Bear's Day Nursery, Bristol: No charge for occasional late collection of children for up to 15 minutes after the agreed time. Repeated late collection is £10 per 15 minutes or part thereof■ What do think of nursery late collection fees? Should nurseries be able to charge what they like? Have you ever been hit by them? Let us know your views at cash@observer.co.uk or by writing to us at Cash, The Observer, Kings Place, 90 York Way, London N1 9GU or join the debate at guardian.co.uk/moneyChildcareFamily financesParents and parentingSam Dunnguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds (Sun, 22 Nov 2009 00:06:06 GMT) Michael Palin's hand of friendship gives asylum seekers a human face Former Python star has shown us the world beyond our shores but after forging a bond with a 26-year-old Somali refugee he hopes to open our eyes to problems much closer to homeThey make for an odd couple. One is an epoch-defining comedian, not to mention a popular explorer and best-selling author who is fast approaching heritage-listed status. The other is a near-anonymous Somali refugee who fled his war-ravaged country and arrived in Britain knowing no one and barely able to speak English.And yet since they were first introduced, Michael Palin and Musa Ibrahim have formed a friendship that spans continents, cultures and generations. It is a friendship that might have remained in the shadows, of quiet satisfaction to the two men alone. But they hope that, by talking about how they met and how their understanding of each other has grown, they will challenge the way society sees its least known but most controversial member: the asylum seeker.Last week Palin, 66, interviewed 26-year-old Ibrahim in front of an audience comprised of leading luminaries from the Royal Geographical Society. Palin assumed the role of a Phileas Fogg for the 21st century, reporting back not from his exotic experiences abroad but from the hinterland of Britain's inner cities, the council estates where many asylum seekers are to be found. The way Palin sees it, the conversation was merely an extension of his travel series, another form of ethnography that fascinates the British psyche. "Once you reduce things to an individual story, it's something we can all respond to," Palin said. "That's what I felt was important about talking to Musa, to carry on what I have done on my travels, to find an individual and talk to them about anything."Anything? Yes, says Palin, who, drawing on his experiences of making friends when circumnavigating the globe, believes it is the small talk that is important when trying to connect with others. "You don't ask people about the immigration policies of the UK or their country's agricultural policy," he said. "Instead you talk to them about the meal they're eating or their family and from that you get the sense of another human being, someone we can all relate to."It was this idea of forging common bonds between strangers that saw the two men meet. As an asylum seeker, Ibrahim was prevented from working. But, with time on his hands, he volunteered to help at a Refugee Action awareness project in Bristol, visiting community groups and schools, to share his experiences of the asylum system. The charity hooked him up with Palin, a supporter, during its Simple Acts campaign which inspires individuals to use small, everyday actions to help change society's perceptions of refugees. The refugee taught the Python to say a few words in Somali and Swahili. Palin was, according to his teacher, a good learner. "I used to like him because of the travel programmes," Ibrahim said. "He's a funny, outspoken guy and I felt very comfortable talking to him."Palin says he gained an insight from the experience. "It was interesting to hear Musa talk about the differences in saying hello to people," Palin recalls. "In England some people he said hello to would say 'hello' back and then move on; in some cases people looked at him askance and moved on, which is very sad. But in an African country, Musa said, people will say hello and ask 'how is your father, how is your daughter-in law, how is your donkey?' I've seen that when travelling; it's an important ritual and to suddenly find that ritual cut off must add to the feeling of alienation he felt when he first came here."It is, Ibrahim concedes, difficult for many indigenous people to understand this sense of alienation that confronts the asylum seeker or indeed the motivations and deprivations that drive them to enter a foreign country seeking refuge.In Ibrahim's case, his family paid an agent to get him out of a refugee camp in Kenya. But once in the UK he was on his own. Life was grim. His support was withdrawn while he was awaiting his appeal and he lived on vouchers. With no money, little emotional support and stuck in legal limbo, simple things like forging relationships and making conversation with others became huge challenges. The practice of moving asylum seekers around the country does not help them build lasting relationships."I was moved around by the Home Office a lot," Ibrahim said. "I used to live in London, then I was passed to Birmingham and then to Bristol. It's terribly difficult, because the only people I came to know were my fellow asylum seekers."Palin was startled to learn about the process refugees have to go through to apply for asylum. "There was this Pythonic situation where he was sent to Cardiff one night and told to report to the Home Office the next day, except the interview was in Croydon," Palin said. "So he comes back to London and all of his allowance has been spent on a train ticket and he doesn't know anything about Croydon. But then a Somali guy saw him on the platform and saw that he was in trouble and helped him."Palin argues it is these small acts of kindness that can make a real difference. "You learn so much about prejudice from individual cases and you realise that individually we are not hostile to each other, it's systems that get in the way."Last December, Ibrahim was granted asylum after the government accepted that he was a Somalian. He is about to move into a council flat in Bristol where there is a large Somali community with whom he can connect. For a man who fled his native country aged seven it is the opening of a new chapter."He came here because he probably would have died, as his father did, in the wars," Palin said. "The camp he was in in Kenya was overcrowded and pretty horrible. The Somalis were disliked by the Kenyans, who thought they were bringing more trouble into Kenya. He got away from that and he comes to the UK, a place he doesn't really know anything about and gets into a situation where he just feels lost and gets very depressed."It is a familiar narrative, but Ibrahim's story is unusual because it contains hope. Through his volunteer work, he gained a sense of self-esteem. "It was the only way I could get experience," Ibrahim said. "Volunteering opened my eyes, it really helped me."Palin argues Ibrahim's story "could happen to anybody in any country". As a human interest story it is apolitical and exists outside the debate over the UK's asylum policies. As Palin puts it, Ibrahim's story "transcends whether you are Somali or not – we can all relate to it".But many people do not want to relate. Fear of others has become a leitmotif for our times. Politicians are vying to outdo each when it comes to sounding tough on immigration. Polls show almost half of white working-class people feel abandoned and many believe migrants are getting favourable treatment. What little is known about asylum seekers and their native countries is often based around stereotypes. As Ibrahim observes wryly: "I want people to know there is more to Somalia than looting and piracy."Esme Peach, an awareness co-ordinator with Refugee Action, said: "People have these views of asylum seekers and when you speak to them they have never met one. That experience of meeting another human, of having things in common, whether it's a love of Coronation Street or Arsenal, breaks down barriers."Immigration and asylumRefugeesSomaliaJamie Dowardguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds (Sun, 22 Nov 2009 00:05:59 GMT) Free care? Try telling that to our neglected elderly The way we treat people with dementia suggests we're a long way from being the caring country we claim to beEven after last week's storms, a praetorian handful of leaves still gamely cling to the lower branches of the oak in our garden. And in churches on Sunday the lists of the sick and the dying and the recently deceased will be announced and our prayers will be sought for them all. At this time of year, if you listen closely you will find that someone's old, frail Kathleen or Vincent who has held on stubbornly to the book of the sick these last few weeks has now been entered in the book of the dead. Occasionally, you may spare a thought for them and who they were and what they might have been. Sometimes, you wonder if they were alone when they died and was there dignity. Was theirs a noble death? For shouldn't nobility have the chance to attend at all of our deaths in the remembrances of a life well led and a love, perhaps, that endured to the end?Nobility, dignity, love, affection: words that are disappearing quickly from the lexicon of those whom we elect to provide for the needs of our vulnerable old people in their final agonies.Last week, Edinburgh city council put a price on the care of its old and infirm people who require help in their own homes. Having imposed this price, Edinburgh city obviously thought it was too much and so has re-tendered the existing contract. In this way, they will seek to cut costs by awarding the deal to an agency that will source its supplies in Christmas car-boot sales and pay its staff that week's minimum wage. For the elderly, who will have been secure in a good relationship with their current carers, based on trust and perhaps even compassion, there will be uncertainty and fear. The company which wins the tender will have done so only after it cuts its costs dramatically. Inevitably, our vulnerable, for whom this home help is essential to their quality of life, will be factored out of these equations.Scotland has had free personal care for the elderly since 2002, a policy that has been celebrated as the epitome of a modern nation that cares for its elderly. Yet dozens of local authorities continue to charge for services meant to be free, citing budget constraints. The truth of the matter, though, is that there is no such thing as "free" care. What Edinburgh city council has failed to grasp is that the elderly and their families will have paid their taxes and national insurance contributions for decades. Their care is not a gift bestowed by a bountiful and munificent nation. Most of these old people will not have taken advantage of state unemployment or sickness benefits. They will have paid royally, and in advance, and are entitled to end their days in some style.Instead, they face the prospect of being herded into death's antechamber at the end of a cattle prod to be fed gruel from a transport cafe. Last month, the Care Commission and Mental Welfare Commission issued a joint report on the quality of care for people with dementia living in care homes in Scotland. It is grim reading.These bodies visited 30 of the country's homes where almost half of our 70,000 dementia sufferers reside. When you digest the report's main findings, you realise that a post-apocalyptic landscape awaits those many of our loved ones who one day will slip silently beyond the curtain of dementia. Never will we have been in a more vulnerable state and never has our government been less willing to treat us properly.The report found that most staff had little knowledge of healthcare needs and that only one-third of care home managers had any training in care for the demented. More than half of care-home residents never left the home and supervisors were untrained. Although more than half of the care homes had gardens, these were very rarely used.Only very few residents had freedom to come and go, with the vast majority enduring life behind locked doors and there was rarely any justification for this. Inappropriate use of medication was widespread and GPs were routinely prescribing medication without having seen the person. There was little financial responsibility and little desire to use a person's own money properly.The report's authors were too polite to say this, but what emerged was a landscape where the care homes were often being run for the convenience of the staff and not of the residents. What added to the vulnerability of residents is that staff were ignorant of the legal safeguards that should be in place for dementia sufferers.Everywhere in Scotland, some of the most basic human rights of our sick and elderly are being crushed. Every day, the law governing people who lack capacity is being broken. What is this democratic and caring government doing about it?In Holyrood, there are still too many politicians who ought to know better inclined to support Margo MacDonald's sinister End of Life Choices Bill. If this ever makes it on to the statute books, then the lives of our dementia sufferers will have become even more fragile. Already, they lack the tools to complain, to ask for help or to express disapproval. We now know that their medication is treated in a cavalier fashion and that many of the staff tasked with caring for them don't know how to.Scotland is supposed to be a good place to be old and vulnerable, but it is not, especially if you are in a state of mental decline. There are significant and influential sections of our political elite who have already deemed that people such as these are costing us too much. Despite so-called free care for the elderly, we are in danger of becoming a cruel and ungrateful nation.Older peopleDementiaScotlandKevin McKennaguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds (Sun, 22 Nov 2009 00:05:57 GMT) © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009
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