1 Young male prisoners in England and Wales are to be given vitamin supplements. The £14 million project will examine whether improving diet reduces offending. John Stein, the University of Oxford neuroscientist leading the study, says it may be extended to people with ASBOs.
2 The Home Office is planning new powers to allow police to stop and search people in the street with minimal bureaucracy. Government sources say trials of the new scheme have not been received negatively by local communities.
3 Richard Branson’s Virgin Group plans to open dozens of doctors’ surgeries, which will also house dentists and physiotherapists, in the UK. Virgin Healthcare is in advanced talks with the NHS about the one-stop clinics.
4 The productivity of the health service has fallen by 2 per cent a year on average. The Office for National Statistics said that without improvements in quality of care the fall would have been steeper.
5 Ministers are planning big cuts to British weapons projects. The Ministry of Defence has denied that combat training for new recruits in Afghanistan is to be halved.
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6 Thousands of sex abuse victims could now claim compensation. A landmark ruling from Britain’s highest court decided that a woman who suffered an attempted rape in 1988 should be able to claim against her attacker, who won £7 million on the lottery while in prison.
7 Plans to close secondary schools are being drawn up because of a drop in pupil numbers. Nearly one in ten secondaries has more than 25 per cent surplus places, official figures show. A shift in the school-age population means that there are 792,000 empty seats in classrooms.
8 Older and disabled people are being let down by care services. The Commission for Social Care Inspection found that a growing number of elderly and disabled people are denied help with washing, dressing and eating as local authorities ration social care. Seven out of ten councils restrict help to very serious cases.
9 One fifth of NHS trusts has turned away from homeopathy in the past two years. The move to cancel or reduce funding for the alternative therapy comes after the scientific basis for the treatment was challenged by a leading scientist.
10 Liverpool City Council is the worst financially managed of any local authority in England. It came bottom of the league according to the Audit Commission together with Southend and the Isles of Scilly. A councillor blamed the city being granted European City of Culture status for people “taking their eye off the ball”.
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11 Decommissioning the UK’s nuclear power plants may cost £73 billion. The estimate has increased by almost third over the past five years and may rise further, reported the National Audit Office.
12 The Government’s prison strategy lacks coherent direction, the Chief Inspector for Prisons said. Labour’s policies have led to a large rise in prison population, yet emergency measures to combat overcrowding are likely to be expensive and ineffective, she added.
13 The Government’s online system for filing tax returns crashed hours before the deadline. HM Revenue and Customs was forced to give people an extra 24 hours to submit self-assessments, after the system failed for almost six hours.
14 One in twelve victims of gun-related murder last year was a child. Five of the 59 people shot dead in 2006-07 were aged under 16, compared with none in the previous year, Home Office figures revealed.