1. Companies bidding for public sector contracts will be asked about their attitudes to race under government pilot schemes to boost ethnic minority employment rates. Companies will have to provide breakdowns of their workforces, which will be compared with the proportion of ethnic minorities in their labour catchment area. One body, the Olympic Delivery Authority, will give bonuses to contractors that employ more black and Asian workers.
2. Speed limits across the country are to be reduced in an attempt to cut the death rates on rural roads in particular. The Government has asked local authorities to consider cutting the 60mph limit on country A roads, which tend to have the highest crash rates, and reducing the 30mph limit in some urban areas to 20mph.
3. Britain’s most senior Asian police officer said that racism had sabotaged his chances of becoming a chief constable. Tarique Ghaffur, an assistant commissioner at Scotland Yard, told the National Black Police Association that police leaders failed to understand ethnic communities and that the misuse of tough anti-terrorist measures risked criminalising minority communities and left young Muslims vulnerable to exploitation by extremists.
4. Four civil servants have been sacked, and five more disciplined, after an investigation into claims that staff at the Rural Payments Agency in Newcastle had leapt naked from filing cabinets, had sex in lavatories, taken drugs, brawled and held breakdancing competitions at work. The inquiry found no evidence, but said that inappropriate behaviour, including smearing walls with human excrement, had taken place.
5. Charities’ dependence on state funding is a risk to the voluntary sector’s independence as government spending on charities outstrips donations from the general public for the first time, according to a report by the Centre for Policy Studies.
6. The British are ready to recycle, but only if they’re paid to do so, according to a government survey which cost taxpayers £3.1 million to conduct. The Environment Minister, Ben Bradshaw, said that those who did not recycle were contributing to global warming and forcing up their neighbours’ tax bills
7. The controversy over dumbing-down of standards in higher education has been defused in Scotland, where the proportion of school-leavers passing their Highers this year fell from 71.2 per cent to 70.8 per cent.
8. Patients are being denied fair access to medicines and treatments because of wide variations in NHS spending, according to an independent report from the King’s Fund. The findings that some trusts spend nearly four times more than others on treatments for cancer and mental health have led to allegations of a postcode lottery.
9. Enlightened government policies that protect the green belt have led to nearly three quarters of new homes being built on reclaimed brownfield sites, up from 57 per cent ten years ago. The Campaign for the Protection of Rural England said that local authorities were standing up to developers and forcing them to regenerate urban spaces.
10. Judges will be able to dismiss lawyers in lengthy terrorist and fraud trials under government proposals to curb the mounting costs of some cases. Lawyers could be ordered to stop representing their clients if judges doubted their ability to cope with large volumes of work.
11. Ministers have failed to reach their goal of getting 85 per cent of primary school pupils to reach the required standard in maths and English. This year’s test results will show that the figures are at least 5 per cent short, leaving 120,000 youngsters below the required standard in English and 138,000 in maths.
12. The NHS makes more than 40,000 medication errors a year. Figures from the National Patient Safety Agency suggest that most mistakes lead to no ill-effects, but 2,000 cause moderate to severe harm to patients.
13. Counter-terrorist agencies foiled an alleged plot to detonate bombs on a number of US-bound aircraft. More than 20 terrorist suspects were arrested and hundreds of flights in and out of the UK were cancelled or delayed as security measures were tightened.