How best to protect workers employed by gangmasters, five years after Morecambe Bay.

On 5 February 2004, 23 Chinese cockle pickers drowned in rising tides in Morecambe Bay because of the negligence of their gangmaster.

Five years on from the Morecambe Bay tragedy Oxfam has published a paper revealing that UK workers employed by ‘gangmasters’ still face unacceptable levels of exploitation and abuse.

Oxfam 

Oxfam Briefing Paper – Summary    Oxfam Briefing Paper

Going under    2004 Morecambe Bay cockling disaster

Migrant workers face new slavery    Modern day ‘slavery

Construction boss for East London Line said to have made £300,000 by underpaying his men ...

Between April 2008 and March this year, workers on the tube's East London Line extension project were paid as little as a third of the amount Paul Singh was charging for their work, allowing him to amass a profit of more than £300,000. "Singh was getting £155 per man per day for his 15-strong team while paying them around the minimum wage [£5.73 per hour] which allowed him to make around £6,000 per week for himself," said Transport for London spokesman Guy Pitt.

Singh was contracted to provide the staff by Woulfe and Son, a firm sub-contracted by Balfour Beatty/Carillion, the consortium which won the £363m contract to build the first phase of the project. Woulfe and Son has worked on numerous public projects, including the Channel Tunnel rail link ...

Workers the Observer has spoken to on the East London Line site claim Singh's staff were paid as little as £50 per day, which, if true, would have taken their earnings below the national minimum wage. Transport for London says it does not know if the minimum wage rules were breached.

Woulfe and Son failed to alert either Transport for London or Balfour Beatty/Carillion about the gangmaster's activities, which only came to light after the Observer learnt about Singh's operation from other workers on the East London Line site last month.

Construction workers are not protected by the Gangmasters Licensing Authority, set up in 2005. The authority can only investigate gangmasters operating in the agriculture, forestry, horticulture, shellfish-gathering, food and drink processing and packaging sectors.

Alan Ritchie, general secretary of the construction union Ucatt, said the licensing authority's remit needed to be widened and that Singh's activities were part of a wider problem in the construction industry ...

"What the Observer has uncovered is a model we see a lot – complex chains of sub-contractors, agencies and gangmasters involving major levels of exploitation. Until the Gangmasters Act is extended to the construction industry, similar cases will occur. By licensing gangmasters and employment agencies, only companies which meet minimum standards will be able to supply labour, and if they are then found to be abusing workers they can be rapidly stripped of their licences." ...

Observer 06 September 2009

The administrators have been called into Bomfords hard on the heels of investigating officers from the new Gangmasters Licensing Authority. The GLA inspected its sites in Worcestershire in March.

The company, which has a turnover of £150m a year and employs more than 2,000 people at the height of the season - the majority migrants who pick and pack its vegetables - was recruiting its temporary staff through seven agencies.

Each of those agencies was found to be breaking the law and had its licence revoked. Some of the Poles employed by one of the agencies were in such fear that the GLA revoked its gangmaster's licence on the spot.

It had been common knowledge for years in the industry that Bomfords offered gangmasters hourly rates for workers that made it all but certain that those gangmasters would be breaking the law.

The minimum hourly wage increased to £5.35 last October. At that rate, a gangmaster who satisfies the law on minimum wage, national insurance and holiday and sick pay would charge at the very least £6.27 per worker an hour.

The industry's Association of Labour Providers (ALP) reported that Bomfords was paying some gangmasters just £6.10 per hour this year. Last year it paid even less, with rates around £5.50 in December, the ALP says. If you factor in a gangmaster's administration and overhead costs, the minimum rate is near £7.

That's before any profit.

The ALP first drew the Inland Revenue's attention to Bomfords' rates and how far adrift they were from these indicative rates in April 2005. In the same month it also warned Tesco, it says. It adds that companies paying consistently below the indicative rate are knowingly or recklessly conniving in illegality.

Tesco says it has no record of a specific warning from the ALP. ... After the GLA inspection, Bomfords employed more workers directly and had to pay significantly higher rates. A few months later, it is bust. It is said to owe growers, including farmers in Africa, about £18m.

For any company with tight finances, an extra wage bill would have a significant impact on cashflow that could tip it over. Bomfords had substantial debt. It had made two expensive acquisitions of rival supermarket suppliers.

Like others facing the buying power of a handful of dominant retailers who have relentlessly kept down the prices they pay to suppliers, it was consolidating to try to strengthen its position. It was building a giant new packhouse where it could meet all the supermarket specifications, which involved vast capital investment - a project whose costs spiralled out of control.

And then suddenly the wage bill went up. Soon the economics of supplying the supermarkets stopped working for it.

One of the reasons it was able to supply vegetables more cheaply than others, and the supermarkets in turn were able to sell them more cheaply, was that it didn't pay as much for its labour as others.

In other words, the business model of cheap fresh food which the big supermarkets have used to establish their dominance has depended on illegality.

The response of the supermarkets to the GLA's findings was the usual, to express shock and promise to investigate.

Yet as members of the Ethical Trading Initiative they make a commitment to audit their supply chains for conditions of labour.

Anyone who bothered to look at Bomfords' rates would have seen that it was highly likely there was illegality along the line.

How could Tesco, Bomfords' major customer, not have known about the problem?

... the ugly questions raised by Bomfords' demise will not go away.

In its history we can see a supermarket system laid bare: a system capable on the one hand of checking that every last asparagus tip conforms to an exact size and shape, and tracking when, where and by whom it was packed; yet on the other, unable to spot that every gangmaster sending workers to a major supplier is breaking the law.

The Guardian 17 July 2007

Spot checks have revealed the illegal and harsh world of east European workers packing vegetables for the country’s biggest supermarket chains.

Inspectors from the Government’s new agricultural labour agency found serious breaches of employment laws when they visited three packing plants in the West Midlands.

None of scores of migrant workers had contracts of employment and most were not paid the national minimum wage. Many had been working for more than 10 hours a day and had not been given proper breaks or holiday pay.

Some alleged they had been intimidated by their employer, or gangmaster.

The Gangmasters Licensing Agency (GLA), which was set up after the Morecambe Bay cockle-picking tragedy, revoked the licences of all seven gangmasters supplying the workers. They had been working at Bomfords, one of the country’s largest vegetable suppliers whose clients include Tesco and Sainsbury.

Supermarkets said they were “shocked” by the allegations and would be investigating the cases as a matter of urgency. ...

Atherston Recorder 16 May 2007

Seven labour providers' licenses revoked

Gangmaster raids expose illegal working conditions

Arson feared as four firefighters lost in blaze

Bodies of firemen found in warehouse wreckage

Sprinklers - Cash ran out

Warwickshire's 'worst nightmare'

Gordon Brown set to end early jail release scheme

Gordon Brown is set to announce the end of the controversial early release scheme for prisoners before the general election in an attempt to blunt an expected Tory assault on the government's law and order policies.

The Observer can reveal that urgent discussions are under way between No 10, the Ministry of Justice and the Home Office in preparation for an announcement within weeks ...

Juliet Lyon, director of the Prison Reform Trust, said it had made it difficult to plan sentences and prepare prisoners for release.

"But, in the scramble to end it, will government be able to capitalise on the success of its intensive community penalties, or is it being forced back on pouring public money down the drain of needless prison building?" she asked. "Until a government of any stripe is prepared to integrate its social and justice policies, and invest accordingly, prisons will lurch from crisis to crisis and one politically expedient idea to the next." ...

Guardian  14 Feb 2010    Election 2010

The end of innocence: Inside Britain's child prisons

No child is born evil. But they are creatures of their parents and of circumstance. Children who commit violent crimes almost always share a similar background.

Their parents are poorly educated, unemployed and often suffer from depression or other mental health problems; many are drug abusers or on the fringes of criminality. They often have large families but are also divorced or separated.

An authoritative survey of the mental health of young offenders published in the British Journal of Psychiatry in 2006 studied 301 young criminals aged 10 to 18 years.

It found that 74 per cent had a family structure which had broken down, with only 36 per cent of their biological parents still married or cohabiting.

More than a third of them had been in care – with many moved frequently from one home or foster home to another. One in three had a borderline learning disability, and one in five had an IQ below 70.

“It’s very rare for a child involved with homicide or torture to come from a background with none of these risk factors,” says Dr Eileen Vizard, a child and adolescent psychiatrist who runs the National Clinical Assessment and Treatment Service for the NSPCC, and who gave evidence at the Bulger trial.

These risk factors expose such children to a range of damaging experiences. They may witness repeated domestic violence or sexual abuse from an early age. They may be exposed to adults having sex in front of them and may routinely view slasher films or pornography left lying around the house.

“They are brought up with no boundaries, or inappropriate ones,” says Pam Hibbert, who was until recently assistant director of policy at the children’s charity Barnados and before that was a manager at Red Bank secure unit, where Mary Bell and Jon Venables served their sentences. “Children develop empathy from the way they are treated, not just fed and sheltered, but cuddled and stimulated. But the mothers themselves are often so needy.” ...

The irony is that the longer violent children are detained in secure units the greater the chance they have from benefiting long–term from the place.

“It’s an irony,” laughs Roy Walker, “but it wouldn’t be very good if we were spending £200,000 a year on these kids and they didn’t improve”.

The bitterest irony for him is when he sees kids crying on the day their sentence is up. “I’ve often seen them in tears because they do not want to go home”.

It is a graphic reminder of our society’s failure in its duty to break the inter-generational cycle of inadequacy, abuse and depravation which nurtured such children in the first place.

Independent  21 Jan 2010

Tears as torture brother hears of 'toxic' homelife

Brothers stopped attack on boys because their 'arms were aching'

Edlington report finds multiple failings by numerous agencies

Conditions inside a unit of a youth jail are so filthy and "squalid" that it should be immediately demolished, according to the chief inspector of prisons.

Anne Owers says in her inspection report on Portland young offenders' institution, published today, that the old building that houses the 72 prisoners in Rodney unit is insanitary, unfit for use and should be promptly closed.

The report on the remote Dorset jail says it holds 580 young adults aged 18 to 21, mostly in old and forbidding buildings ...

Rodney unit, which has three floors, and cells on four landings on the two upper levels, has no in-cell sanitation.

Some toilets and sinks in the communal areas are dirty and access at night is controlled by a computer system that allows up to four visits a night for a maximum of 10 minutes, the inspectors say.

Only one prisoner is allowed out at a time.

A prisoner who returns late to his cell is denied further access that night by the computer ...

Guardian  18 November 2009

In a highly critical report published today Dame Anne Owers said that her inspection of Cookham Wood prison in Kent this year found a seriously unsafe and poorly controlled environment with tense relations between staff and young people.

Bullying was rife and the use of force by staff to restrain teenage inmates was more frequent than elsewhere in the juvenile prison system ...

Guardian  05 August 2009

Young inmates 'fear for safety'

Britain's private prisons are performing worse than those run by the state, according to data obtained under the Freedom of Information Act.

The findings, based on the overall performances of 132 prisons in England and Wales, appear to undermine claims by ministers that the greater use of private jails is raising standards for the accommodation of more than 83,000 prisoners held across both sectors.

Separate figures, also released under the right-to-know law, show that nearly twice as many prisoner complaints are upheld in private prisons as they are in state-run institutions ...

Juliet Lyon, the director of the Prison Reform Trust, said: "There are some good private prisons but there are also some very poorly performing ones. The evidence doesn't suggest that it [use of private prisons] has driven up standards by providing good models. If you look across the prison estate at the public sector there is a high degree of resentment and rivalry between the two sectors and, until recently, little sharing of good practice and information, which is really disappointing."

She added: "It's been an interesting experiment. The end result is that 11 per cent of our prison population are now held in private hands. But one of the issues it has introduced is a kind of market drive to increase the prison population, to grow that business and that's something that really does concern us." ...

A Prison Service spokesperson said: " ... The introduction of privately managed prisons has helped to generate significant overall improvements in value for money and performance, including in the public sector, which has been energised by the more competitive environment."

The Independent 29 June 2009

Larger Inmate Population Is Boon to Private Prisons

Prisons to be ranked in new league tables

Private eye on prisons

Private Prisons and Judiciary Corrupt

Privatising Punishment

The true price of private prisons

This revolting trade in human lives

Virtual Private Prisons

The government has failed to tackle the causes of crime, as it pledged to do when it came into power, says a world expert on crime reduction.

Professor Irwin Waller said UK spending and policy had focused on enforcement - police, courts and prisons - and neglected crime prevention measures.

A report for Policy Exchange think tank estimated crime would cost the UK £78bn this year - equal to £3,000 per home ...

Former Prime Minister Tony Blair came into power in 1997 having promised to be "tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime".

But Professor Waller's report claims little progress will be made until there is a plan for tackling the root causes of crime.

Preventing one offender in 10 from ending up in custody would save millions, he argues.

The government's desire for central control is blamed for the "widespread failure" of its crime reduction strategy launched in 2002.

The report also criticises ministers for missing meetings of the National Crime Reduction Board ...

BBC NEWS 11 May 2009

Politics, economy and crime

Policy Exchange

Centre for Crime and Justice Studies

Thousands of people with mental health problems are ending up in jail rather than receiving treatment, the Prison Reform Trust has said.

Offering mental health and social care instead of custody would relieve pressure on prisons and could cut reoffending rates, the trust argues.

It says figures show one in 10 inmates has a "serious mental health issue".

The government said it had made it clear that offenders with severe mental illness should be treated not punished.

The trust report adds that 90% of inmates have at least one diagnosed mental health disorder.

Its report is based on information from 57 Independent Monitoring Boards - citizen groups which regularly visit prisons in England and Wales ...

BBC NEWS 04 February 2009

Mentally ill inmates support call

Prison Reform Trust

Doubly punished

Jail healthcare 'not good enough'

Rise in use of secure hospitals

Responding to the publication of the Inspectorate’s annual report Juliet Lyon, director of the Prison Reform Trust said:

Anne Owers’s annual report describes a prison system living on borrowed time.

Before it’s too late Jack Straw needs to abandon his ‘make do and mend’ prison policy and instead break the vicious cycle of a rising prison population, ineffective rehabilitation in overcrowded prisons and sky high reoffending.

In fairness to victims and the taxpayer, we should be helping people break free from addictions, diverting the mentally ill into proper healthcare and making sure that petty offenders do community service to pay back for the harm they have done, not building super-sized prisons

The Inspectorate’s research on the relative ineffectiveness of large prisons reinforces what everyone is telling the government – giant US style prisons are a gigantic mistake.

It is absolutely senseless to earmark £2.3bn – the cost of the bailout to the motor industry – on building prisons everyone, apart from the government, accepts won’t work and can only ever be a temporary solution if the root causes of the rising prison population continue to be ignored.

Prison Reform Trust 04 February 2009

Prison Reform Trust

Prisons unable to cope

The risk of violence and disturbances in jails in England and Wales is a "growing concern", the Chief Inspector of Prisons has warned.

In her annual report, Dame Anne Owers said the system was still under "sustained and chronic" pressure.

She said the tension was often caused by inmates on longer sentences who may feel they have "little to lose" ...

Juliet Lyon, director of the Prison Reform Trust, said Justice Secretary Jack Straw needed to "break the vicious cycle of a rising prison population, ineffective rehabilitation in overcrowded prisons and sky high re-offending".

She added: "We should be helping people break free from addictions, diverting the mentally ill into proper healthcare and making sure that petty offenders do community service to pay back for the harm they have done, not building super-sized prisons.

She said plans to spend £2.3bn on building giant US-style prisons "can only ever be a temporary solution if the root causes of the rising prison population continue to be ignored" ...

BBC NEWS 29 January 2009

Inmates to be locked up longer to cut costs

Prisoners are to be locked in their cells every Friday afternoon because of a government cash squeeze.

Inmates will spend more time in their cells – rather than exercising, working or taking classes – than at any time for almost 40 years.

The Prison Governors' Association (PGA) said it had been forced to order the closedown because of a Treasury demand for a 3 per cent cut in costs.

Paul Tidball, the PGA chairman, said: "This is our best way to meet that saving next year. Prisoners will be spending more time locked up than they were in 1969 from April next year."

Juliet Lyon, the chief executive of the Prison Reform Trust, told MPs that the cost of building three super-prisons was likely to be double the £1.2bn bill announced recently by Jack Straw, the Justice Secretary.

The Independent 13 December 2007

Women's prisons have become our social dustbins. They are now seen as a stopgap, cut-price provider of drug detox, mental health assessment and treatment - a refuge for those failed by public services. Twelve years ago, there were some 1,800 women in jail. Today there are 4,300.

In the wake of six women's deaths at Styal prison, the government asked Baroness Jean Corston in 2005 to undertake "a review of women with particular vulnerabilities in the criminal justice system". Her recommendations are published today.

The extent of those "particular vulnerabilities" are laid out starkly in the report: more than half of women prisoners have suffered violence at home. One in three have experienced sexual abuse. A quarter have been in local authority care. Two-thirds have a neurotic disorder, such as depression or anxiety. Women prisoners have a much higher rate of severe mental illness such as schizophrenia: 14% compared with less than 1% in the general population. Over a third of women who are imprisoned will already have attempted suicide. ...

An alternative model [to prison] exists already. Across the UK there are a handful of support and supervision centres designed to respond to women offenders in the community. Unlike prison, which tends to diminish responsibility and increase dependence, they succeed in enabling vulnerable women to take responsibility for their lives.

Based on the visits to centres in Glasgow, Halifax and Worcester, public seminars, meetings with coroners and sentencers, and research evidence, Corston concluded that there first needs to be "a strong, consistent message from the top of government ... that prison is not the right place for women offenders who pose no risk to the public". ...

Guardian 14 March 2007

New Labour's new 3,023 offences demonstrate just how deeply they have been seduced by the politics of penal populism. This astonishing number of new crimes reflects the desire of a government to legislate first and think later - if they think at all ...

New criminal offences can symbolise many things - from the changing sensibilities of our culture, to the need to legislate because of technological or economic developments. But first and foremost they reveal a paradox that lays bare the Government's strength and weakness. The strength to push legislation through parliament and control a political process, but a weakness to actually do anything about that elephant in the sitting room - crime.

...

Under New Labour prison in particular has become a place to disappear that troublesome population which has remained resolutely resistant to Asbos, community curfews, on-the-spot fines, or the blandishment of all the new 'Bobbies on the beat', Community Support Officers, or private security guards who are now increasingly policing public space.

With little community infrastructure to support people with mental health problems, or addictions - often the reason why "crime" is committed in the first place - prison has re-invented itself and become re-legitimised as the functioning alternative to the welfare state of Old Labour.

...

Where will it end - 4,000 new offences? Perhaps 5,000? Would 10,000 new offences make us all feel safer and keen to re-elect New Labour?

Ironically ... it might be that the best way to convince the electorate that "something is being done" is to do nothing at all.

Alternatively, we might elect a government that was keen to look beyond the statute book and deal with those structural factors in our society that impact on crime.

A government that saw its purpose in creating opportunities for employment; ensuring that our children get access to good schools and well-qualified teachers; and that this was all under-pinned by a welfare safety net to provide a bulwark against the extremes of poverty.

If we were to elect a government that got these things right, we would deliver the circumstances in which people could go about their lives peaceably and that would also make others behave without the need for more and more "crimes".

David Wilson is professor of criminology at UCE Birmingham

Independent 16 August 2006

Babies and toddlers between the age of 6 and 30 months who do not receive sensory evidence (sight, sound, touch, smell or taste) that any of their known and trusted attachment figures are present, will have an instinctive feeling that the situation is becoming dangerous. This will induce some level of fear and raise their cortisol levels.

At this age their emergency response to fear is flight-towards an attachment figure, and the longer there is no sensory input from a trusted attachment figure, the greater the level of danger sensed, especially if the surroundings are not very familiar.

When left by their primary attachment figure, most babies and toddlers who have not had the opportunity to develop a secondary attachment to one carer, will initially protest by crying and searching for their attachment figure.

When this does not result in reunion, the instinctive reaction of some babies and younger toddlers is to become a bit subdued or withdrawn, (although others appear to manage better).

This compliant behaviour is usually seen as the toddler settling in and accepting their new surroundings, but their level of cortisol is often elevated which indicates that they’re stressed, and if they then sense danger some may ‘freeze’ or ‘still’. This situation is more common in group settings which lack continuity in personalised care-giving.

Many toddlers’ receive a risk factor at home from insecure attachment, and another risk factor from any sort of childcare where there is not a ‘good enough’ secondary attachment figure.

These two risk factors are becoming normalised within society and are hidden contributors to children’s future social and emotional problems.

A combination of three or more risk factors has a high probability of producing increased levels of behavioural problems and emotional instability.

By reorganising childcare to provide secondary attachment bonds for babies and toddlers we can remove one increasingly common risk factor. Several childminders can work co-operatively in professionally supported and monitored groups or networks; parents could be allowed to use their childcare allowance to pay grandmother or other relative to care for their child, or a parent could choose to use the allowance to stay home themselves.

In a society which encourages both parents to work outside the home while their children are under three, it is attachment focused childcare arrangements that have a crucial role to play in facilitating the healthy emotional development of children.

It is in our power to provide this if we care enough about our children’s wellbeing. It can be done!

Attachment Theory

Ethological Attachment Theory

Attachment Theory in Childcare

Attachment Styles

Family wins £100,000 for detention ordeal

A refugee has won a settlement of £100,000 from the Home Office after it admitted falsely imprisoning her and her children at an immigration detention centre.

Carmen Quiroga, originally from Bolivia, spent 42 days at Oakington detention centre in Cambridgeshire with her son and three daughters, aged between three and 11, in what her solicitor describes as "appalling conditions" that were unsuitable for children, and despite the fact that a judicial review into her asylum plea was continuing for much of that period ...

Quiroga's solicitors had argued that the detention was illegal because it was not used as a last resort, the welfare of the children was not given priority, the use of force in detaining the family was "entirely disproportionate" and the family were held for almost a month even after the judicial review process was launched.

They also alleged that the family had suffered inhuman and degrading treatment in contravention of the European convention on human rights.

Quiroga, 36, remains too traumatised to talk publicly about the circumstances of "appalling violence" that forced her to flee Bolivia in 2002 or about the situation of the children's father, but the family have all since been granted British passports ...

Guardian  29 Jan 2010

Children whose mothers work are less likely to lead healthy lives than those with "stay at home" mothers, a study says.

The Institute of Child Health study of more than 12,500 five-year-olds found those with working mothers less active and more likely to eat unhealthy food.

Other experts said more work was needed to see if the results applied to other age groups.

The study is in the Journal of Epidemiology and Child Health.

About 60% of mothers with children aged up to five are estimated to be in work ...

The same children took part in an earlier study by the Institute of Child Health (ICH) which found that those with working mothers were more likely to be obese or overweight by the age of three.

In the latest study, many of the five-year-olds were engaging in health behaviours likely to promote excess weight gain: 37% were mainly eating crisps and sweets between meals, 41% were consuming sweetened drinks and 61% used the television or a computer at least two hours daily ...

As a lone mum to one daughter, I work full time because I cannot manage financially any other way. I feel like I'm damned if I do and I'm damned if I don't.

I get encouraged to work over 30 hours a week and get a financial incentive for doing this through tax credits, but I feel like I am also heavily criticised for not being a 'proper' mum by not spending enough time with my daughter.

I leave the house at 8am every day, get home at 5.30pm every day, my daughter goes to bed at 7pm. I'd love to know where I'm supposed to shoehorn in some quality time with my girl!

Jane Crabtree, Middlesbrough, UK BBC NEWS  28 September 2009

Top

How do we deal with damaged children?

The boys are what some are beginning to believe is an "unreachable" underclass.

Despite the Labour government's decade-long concentration on the issue in the UK, where 16% of children grow up in poverty, pockets of deprivation have stubbornly refused to be fixed.

The chief executive of Barnardo's, Martin Narey, told the Observer that some broken families simply can't be fixed and we should be taking children from those parents at birth. But as Doncaster's social services department opens a serious case review to look at what went wrong – the eighth such inquiry the local authority has been forced to hold since 2004 – the case has ignited a deeper debate: is foster care the right place for Britain's most damaged youngsters? ...

More than three-quarters of all children taken into care in England and Wales go into foster families; the current thinking, said Andrea Warman, of the British Association for Adoption and Fostering, is that a stable family environment is best for children ...

But Martin Narey makes the point that the shortage of foster carers and the problems within many children's services departments mean that hundreds of children in care find themselves moved around almost constantly.

He talks of one 15-year-old girl he met recently who had had 46 foster family placements. "That is not unusual," he said ...

Observer 06 September 2009

Doncaster council's troubled record

Future to focus on rehabilitation

Doncaster torture boys were well known as violent troublemakers

Repeating the same mistakes

Top

Spend early on children

Governments should invest more money on children in the first six years of their lives to reduce social inequality and help all children, especially the most vulnerable, have happier lives, according to the OECD’s first-ever report on child well-being in its 30 member countries.

Doing Better for Children shows that average public spending by OECD countries up to age six accounts for only a quarter of all child spending. But a better balance of spending between the “Dora the Explorer” years of early childhood and the teenage “Facebook” years would help improve the health, education and well-being of all children in the long term, according to the report.

“The crisis is putting pressure on public budgets across the world. But any short-term savings on spending on children’s education and health would have major long-term costs for society,” said OECD Secretary-General Angel Gurría. “Governments should instead seize this opportunity to get better value from their investment in children. And spending early, when the foundations for a child’s future are laid, is key especially for disadvantaged children and can help them break out of a family cycle of poverty and social exclusion.” ...

OECD  01 September 2009

Doing Better for Children

UK teenage girls 'worst drunks'

Top

Why do we condemn children to such terrible care homes?

Seventy five thousand children are in state care in Britain - some placed with foster families, a few adopted and the rest in homes run by local authorities or charities. Some 53 percent leave school without any qualifications and only 13 per cent as compared with 47 per cent in the general population manage to achieve GCSE grades A to C.

A quarter of the girls end up as teenage mums. Most get caught up in drugs, crime, violence (often directed at their own children) and a disproportionate number end up in prison or dead. Channel 4's focus on the nation's failed youngsters comes at a crucial time when we are still grieving for Baby Peter, only 17 months old, who died after suffering unspeakable violence in his home. Like so many others before him no one protected him from harm, not his mother, not his social workers, not the police, not even the doctors who saw him.

An assumption was made by all those involved that his mother was still the best chance he had. He will not be the last to die in these circumstances but emerging evidence shows that in every local authority across the land experts are now more proactive, taking children out of destructive homes before they come to more harm. New figures show that there has been a 38 per cent increase in such interventions.

But where will they go? And how will this rise in state custody be funded? Most importantly can we be sure these homes will save and nurture damaged children? Or will they just face further dejection and rejection? I fear at present many care institutions are hopeless places, holding warehouses, without the skills or the capacity to raise their game.

Denmark and Germany have exemplary systems called "social pedagogy". A dedicated social worker ensures each child in care learns risk management, is pushed to academic excellence, and gets hugs and reassurance. Crucially, the countries take pride in the care homes ...

The Independent 11 May 2009

Lost in Care

Councils have lost track of 400 children

Top

Call to increase child therapists

Children's mental health services need an extra 1,000 therapists to help them cope with demand, an influential government adviser has warned.

Lord Layard, whose advice prompted a recent £173m investment in adult therapists, said training of child specialists should start in 2010.

Over a three-year period, his proposals would cost £35m, his report said.

Around 10% of children have diagnosable mental health problems, said Lord Layard, who is emeritus professor of economics at the London School of Economics.

But only a quarter of them have seen a mental health professional of any kind in the past year.

This "unsatisfactory" state of affairs has serious long-term consequences, he said in his report.

To address the shortfall, 200 child therapists need to be trained every year for five years, he has calculated.

The additional workforce could be drawn from those who already have experience working with distressed children.

Any additional costs are relatively small compared with the NHS budget for mental health, which was £9.1bn in 2006/07 ...

BBC NEWS 04 May 2009

Child depression drug use soars

Top

The European view of child social care: Less procedure, more affection

"As a social pedagogue, the idea is to try to help someone to live a more successful everyday life. You take the small opportunities in everyday existence and try to translate them into a learning experience. You can't do that by sitting in an office, you do it by sitting alongside someone watching television, or by being in the kitchen with them, cooking together.

Residential homes here seem to be much more based on procedures. There's a great emphasis on ensuring that all the tick boxes are ticked, which often feels as if it is getting in the way of daily decisions that need to be made.

There is more affection between staff and children in German homes - not just because positive encouragement in the form of a hug is thought to be appropriate at a particular moment, but much more enmeshed in everyday life. If people are watching television, they'll sit closer to each other. There is a more risk averse attitude here. In Germany, the professionals feel more trusted. In the UK, members of staff are under the impression that any kind of allegation of inappropriate behaviour - founded or unfounded - will have an impact on their career.

Social pedagogues can do much of what people here would refer to other services and that helps, because the fewer professionals involved with the care of each child, the better. I once counted up 34 individuals involved in the care of a child here. In Germany you'd have a maximum of five."

Guardian 21 April 2009

'We lost the focus on emotional warmth'

Children in care: Experts fly in to help tackle crisis

Top

A substandard care system only reinforces disadvantage

The report of the Commons select committee on Children, Schools and Families suggests that what passes for a system is almost as random as having no safety net for such children at all. Is it any wonder, then, that what in the jargon are termed the "outcomes" are so abysmal.

Almost half of juveniles in prison and one in four of the adult prison population have been in care. Less than 10 per cent of children in care attain five A to C grades at GCSE, compared with 50 per cent across the rest of the population.

Less than half are in any form of education, training or employment at the age of 19, compared with more than 80 per cent of the age group as a whole ...

The Independent 20 April 2009

Care children 'need pushy parent'

Children in care: how Britain is failing its most vulnerable

Care system must be 'radically overhauled'

MPs urge more support for children in care

Social services failing children in care

Top

Majority of children living in poverty have at least one parent in work

A sharp increase in the number of children living in poverty who have at least one parent in work is revealed today, in a study which calls into question government efforts to lift living standards.

When research was last conducted five years ago, the majority of children in poverty had parents who were unemployed. The new study shows the majority of children living in poverty now have at least one parent in work, but they are earning so little they are unable to drag their family above the poverty line.

The study, published by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, runs counter to the government's message that work is the best route out of poverty.

It also predicts that the government will fail to meet its much-trumpeted promise to halve child poverty by next year unless another £4.2bn is spent on the problem.

The report offers the first detailed indication of how far the government is from meeting its target to cut the number of children in poverty from 3.4 million in 1998 to 1.7 million by 2010. It forecasts that there will still be 2.3 million children beneath the poverty line when the deadline expires. ...

The sharp rise in the number of working families in poverty is a reminder that low-paid and casual labour does not usually help in pulling families out of deprivation, said Helen Barnard, policy and research manager at the foundation.

"The idea is that you get a job, and through this job, you will progress upwards and be lifted out of poverty in the long term," she said. "But for a lot of people, the jobs they have been going into have been low-paid, casual and short-term, and often they are back on to benefits very quickly." ...

Poverty in Britain is defined by a relative measure, rather than an absolute one, and any household with children where the parents have an income of less than 60% of British median income is classified as in poverty. The poverty line fluctuates, but for a family with two children, it stands at £283.20 a week, after housing has been paid for. The recession is likely to push those already in poverty into an even more severe position, making it much more expensive for the government to address the problem.

The report, based on research carried out by the Institute of Fiscal Studies and the Institute for Economic and Social Research, concludes that government could still fulfil its 2010 pledge if it pours another £4.2bn into increasing child tax credits, a means-tested form of child benefit available only to those on low incomes. This, equivalent to an increase of £12.50 a week for each child, would be enough to push around 600,000 above the poverty line.

In the longer term, the report says, money needs to be spent not just on increasing benefits, but on ensuring sufficient childcare is in place to allow parents to work, and on training so that parents acquire the right skills to secure stable work, with good long-term prospects. ...

Guardian 18 February 2009

Child poverty 'billions needed'

Progress and Poverty

JRF

IFS

Top

Selfish adults 'damage childhood'

The aggressive pursuit of personal success by adults is now the greatest threat to British children, a major independent report on childhood says.

It calls for a sea-change in social attitudes and policies to counter the damage done to children by society.

Family break-up, unprincipled advertising, too much competition in education and income inequality are mentioned as big contributing factors.

A panel of independent experts carried out the study over three years.

The report, called The Good Childhood Inquiry and commissioned by the Children's Society, concludes that children's lives in Britain have become "more difficult than in the past", adding that "more young people are anxious and troubled".

According to the panel, "excessive individualism" is to blame for many of the problems children face and needs to be replaced by a value system where people seek satisfaction more from helping others rather than pursuing private advantage ...

BBC NEWS 02 February 2009

'Make Childhood Better'

Government green guru Sir Jonathon Porritt calls for two-child limit

Broken Britain needs lessons in love

'Ruined by lack of outdoor play and aggressive advertising'

Female empowerment has caused family break-up

Children's lives 'harder today'

One in four teenagers 'unhappy'

Children 'damaged' by materialism

'Toxic cycle' of family breakdown

Top

Ofsted accused of complacency on child protection

The chairman of a Commons committee has said he has "lost confidence" in the inspectorate Ofsted over its handling of children's services in Haringey, the north London borough where Baby P died.

Barry Sheerman made the statement after questioning Christine Gilbert, the chief inspector of schools, at the children, schools and families committee yesterday.

He accused her of failing to recognise the strength of public opinion over Baby P's death and acting with an "air of complacency" after she presented data showing that three children a week had died from neglect and abuse in the 16 months to August this year, then moments later defended the inspection of the services designed to protect them.

Sheerman ... questioned Gilbert's claims that Haringey had misled inspectors by providing false data after it emerged that all the evidence behind the contested 2007 review had been destroyed three months after the report was published ...

Guardian 11 December 2008

Three children die from abuse every week

Three children a week – the death toll from abuse

Top

'Millions' of UK young in poverty

Millions of children in the UK are living in, or on the brink of, poverty, a report claims.

The Campaign to End Child Poverty says 5.5 million children are in families that are classed as "struggling" - 98% of children in some areas.

The campaign classes households as being in poverty if they are living on under £10 per person per day.

A government spokeswoman said it had lifted 600,000 children out of poverty and was committed to the cause.

The Campaign to End Child Poverty is a coalition of more than 130 organisations including Barnardo's, Unicef and the NSPCC.

According to its research, there are 4,634,000 children in England living in low income families, 297,000 in Wales, 428,000 in Scotland and 198,000 in Northern Ireland.

It says 174 of the 646 parliamentary constituencies in Britain have 50% or more of their child population in, or close to, the poverty line.

The parliamentary constituency with the highest number of children in or close to poverty is Birmingham Ladywood, with 81% (28,420 individuals) ...

BBC NEWS 30 September 2008

Mapping child poverty

Top

Spare a thought for children who have odds stacked against them

A child who is born into a poor family will be at an educational disadvantage before they have even learnt to say the word ‘school’.

At just 22 months, a child from a disadvantaged background begins to fall behind children from more comfortable backgrounds. And then everything which happens in 13 years of education widens rather than bridges that gulf.

So here in the UK, the fifth richest country, we have three million children likely to be locked into a cycle of poverty they can’t escape and will pass down through the generations.

As youngsters across the country celebrate their GCSE success this week, spare a thought for those children who, regardless of ability, had the odds stacked against them. Reflect on the reality that children with measurably higher IQs will fall behind less bright children simply because of the poverty of their upbringing.

By the age of six a less able child from a rich family is likely to have overtaken a more able child born into a poor family. As a teenager the gap between a poor child’s ability and a more wealthy child’s is even wider. By the time GCSEs come around, some of our poorest children, those receiving free school meals, are half as likely to obtain the vital five GCSEs as other children. Children in care, those whose only crime has been to be born to parents who cannot or will not look after them properly, are five times less likely to get those GCSEs.

So, is it any wonder that 44 per cent of young people from the richest fifth of the population go on to university, compared to 10 per cent of those from the fifth of the population living in the poorest households.

It is because of this immoral social injustice that more than 130 organisations, including children’s charities, trade unions and faith groups, will challenge the Government to Keep The Promise it made to end child poverty in the UK through the biggest ever rally of its kind. Trafalgar Square, on Saturday, October 4, will be full of families, young people and children determined to demonstrate that the economic, but most of all the moral case, for reducing this educational lottery is one to which the Government must respond.

This is a once-in-a-generation chance to make a positive change to the lives of millions of children and we are looking for backing from people across the nation.

It’s vital that there is a huge show of the strength of feeling for change; an end to child poverty and a more just society.

Martin Narey Campaign To End Child Poverty chairman and Barnardo’s chief executive

End Child Poverty 20 August 2008

Poverty is UK's hidden child killer

Top

'I've got kids who sleep with knives under their pillows'

Since 1996, Iranian-born Batmanghelidjh has been trying to help the children who are the worst of the worst, those who are on the very edges of society the kind of teenagers who murdered Newlove, the kind who will probably have murdered Mizen and Knox. She is not Supernanny there is no naughty step here. The children Batmanghelidjh helps are the sort that other psychologists sedate.

"We're looking at a new syndrome," Batmanghelidjh says when we meet at Kids Company's headquarters near London Bridge. "It needs to be named. Social and emotional deprivation is creating a new kind of brain.

"The fascinating element in all these childrens' lives is the absence of a functioning parental figure. If you really think about it, if you don't have a parent there is no food in the house, no one washes your clothes or organises socialising for you, you don't get taken to the GP, the dentist or the optician. You live in chaos."

The child who knocks on the door of Kids Company's drop-in centre usually has drug-addicted or alcoholic parents. They may have not eaten properly for days, they may be ill and dirty.

It seems unthinkable to most of us that, in Britain in 2008, a child could starve to death. Yet, on the day after Batmanghelidjh and I meet, it is reported that that is just what happened a fortnight ago in Birmingham to seven year-old Khyra Ishaq.

"The assumption is that if you are seven years old, there is an adult who can refer you to social services. But these children do not have that adult in their lives and they have no access to help.

"Back when I started, there were people saying to me that what I was trying to achieve wasn't possible and that it wouldn't work," Batmanghelidjh says. "They just thought that I was an eccentric who loves kids, and they became very preoccupied with the way I look and dress. They didn't understand the intellectual framework behind Kids Company." ...

Independent 27 May 2008

Kids Company

Prison won't halt this epidemic of stabbing

14 teenagers in five months

Girls now carry knives

Simple steps to tackle the knife crime epidemic

Top

Class divide hits learning by age of three

By the age of three, children from disadvantaged families are already lagging a full year behind their middle-class contemporaries in social and educational development, pioneering research by a London university reveals today.

A "generation Blair" project, tracking the progress of 15,500 boys and girls born between 2000 and 2002, found a divided nation in which a child's start in life was still determined by the class, education, marital status and ethnic background of the parents. ...

In a series of vocabulary tests, the three-year-old sons and daughters of graduate parents were found to be 10 months ahead of those from families with few educational qualifications; they were 12 months ahead in their understanding of colours, letters, numbers, sizes and shapes. ...

The Guardian 11 June 2007

Top

Charity asks new prime minister to honour pledge to end “scandal” of child poverty

Spending less than half of the £9 billion paid in City bonuses last year would halve child poverty in the UK by 2010.

That is the message in a report – It Doesn’t Happen Here – published today (Wednesday, 23 May, 2007) by children’s charity Barnardo’s, which warns that without an investment of £3.8 billion (about one third of the £10.2billion which Britons spent last year on champagne) the Government is going to miss its target to halve child poverty by 2010 and eradicate it by 2020. The report also reveals that the Government is likely to fall short of the target ... by nearly one million (900,000) children.

Barnardos 23 May 2007

Top

Key Links

bullyonline.org

Child mental health

ContactPoint

CPAG

End Child Poverty

Every Child Matters

Sure Start

TheSite.org

Unicef

---

Child carers 'left to cope alone'

Class divide hits learning by age of three

Fears for 'invisible' children

Jailing children a 'national scandal'

Let our children play

Poverty is the root of so many of our problems

Report on the Sexualization of Girls

UK 'demonising' children

---

Top

Record numbers not in education, work or training Language skills 'lag a year behind in poorest' Poor white boys 'not catching up' One in six young people do nothing Early death concern for drop-outs Class blamed for bias against poor whites '£3.65bn cost of lost generation' Vulnerable pupils are 'stars' ... Two-tier school system creates poverty trap At the mercy of crime Meet the Neets The Forgotten Underclass Street Gangs More on the 'Neets'

'Nihilistic violence and malign neglect' There has been much concern and hand-wringing during the New Labour years about the 'aspirational gap' amongst "poor whites", and the 'lost generation', a.k.a. the 'neets'. Once again New Labour has pursued contradictory policies. On the one hand the Lisbon Treaty asks Europe's citizens to prepare for life in the globalised - cough - 'utopia' by learning to manage without the support mechanisms of the social state. The taxes necessary to fund such policies put an intolerable burden on business, so people in The City would have us believe. On the other hand, it's not necessary to actually tell us any of this, we need to be gulled into believing that governments actually care about "poor whites", their schooling and their community. To add cover to the deception, Harriet Harman set up a National Equality Panel, which turned out to be concerned solely with gender equality. Ms Harman told the TUC: "Equality matters more than ever and it is necessary for individuals, a peaceful society and a strong economy." In fact, equality is the very last thing neoliberals want, since it both saps competition and costs in higher taxes. Expect more "nihilistic violence and malign neglect". A life claimed by nihilistic violence This is what happens when only a gang makes you feel you belong Rhys Jones was innocent victim of a gang war A world of boredom and big talk where drug dealing is the only ambition 'Aspiration gap' for white poor Our immigrants' success is not down to Labour

Top

Underclass of pre-school children emerging

More than one in 10 children begin primary school unable to learn and unwilling to build relationships with their peers, a "disengaged generation waiting in the wings", said the thinktank Demos today in a report.

Researchers said that data from the Millennium Cohort Study showed 66,000 children scored "borderline" or "abnormal" in tests designed to reveal behavioural and emotional problems that are intimately linked to under-achievement at school, risk of truanting, and exclusion.

Poverty stands out among a number of factors, Demos said. Having a parent with a low level of education, a mother who is young or parents with a low income all raise the chance of "poorer behavioural and cognitive development".

The difference between children from the poorest and the richest families is stark, with a fifth of those identified as "starting school without the behavioural skills" coming from the poorest section of society, and only 4% coming from the richest.

Stress also plays a part: expectant mothers who experience high anxiety after 32 weeks are twice as likely to have a child with behavioural difficulties by the age of four, than mothers who did not suffer from tension ...

Guardian  25 Feb 2010

Demos

Oliver James

Top

Record numbers not in education, work or training

The number of school-leavers not in education, work or training reached a record year-on-year high at the end of 2009 and ministers look set to miss a key target, official figures reveal today.

Almost 15% of 16- to 24-year-olds in England were "neets" (not in education, employment or training), quarterly statistics from October to December show.

Although the figure fell to 895,000 from 1.07m (17.9%) in the three months before, it was up from 854,000 (14.2%) for the same period in 2008.

There was progress among 16- to 18-year-olds, where the figure fell to its lowest in eight years, but critics said the government was unlikely to hit its target of reducing the proportion of neets in the age group to 7.6% this year – from 9.6% in 2004.

The number of neets aged 16-18 in the last quarter was 177,000 (9.3%). That compares well to 10.4% at the same point the year before, but as the statistics tend to follow a seasonal pattern of lower rates in autumn after a peak in late summer, reflecting the academic year, it is probable the percentage will rise over this year ...

Guardian  25 Feb 2010

Top

Language skills 'lag a year behind in poorest children'

The Sutton Trust study looked at the results of a series of vocabulary tests carried out by 12,500 British children at the age of five.

It found those from the poorest homes were nearly a year behind in their results.

It also looked at the factors common to poorer children that might influence their development.

It found that just under half of those from the poorest fifth of families were born to younger mothers under 25 ...

The Sutton Trust study looked at the results of a series of vocabulary tests carried out by 12,500 British children at the age of five.

It found those from the poorest homes were nearly a year behind in their results ...

... just under half of children from the poorest homes were read to every day at the age of three, compared to 78% of children from the richest fifth of home.

The authors noted that the UK had invested 4.3% of GDP on early years education in 2006.

But they called for a more effective early years strategy that would prevent greater numbers of children from disadvantaged backgrounds "falling behind their more fortunate peers before school has even begun".

Sutton Trust chairman Sir Peter Lampl said the findings were both shocking and encouraging - revealing the stark educational disadvantage experienced by children from poorer homes before they reached school.

But it also showed the potential for good parenting to overcome some of the negative impacts that poverty could have on children's early development ...

BBC NEWS  15 Feb 2010    Inequality    State Theory of Learning

Sutton Trust

Top

Poor white boys 'not catching up'

Efforts to help poor white boys catch up with their peers in the early years of school appear to have stalled.

Official data on assessments at age five show three-quarters of the poorest white boys in England are still not achieving a good level of development ...

The tests cover areas such as communication, language and literacy, problem solving and numeracy as well as personal, social and emotional development ...

Looking at the breakdown of results by area, 39.3% of pupils in the most deprived 10% of areas achieved a good level of development compared with 66.5% in the least deprived 10% of areas.

The difference in achievement between the most and least deprived fell by two percentage points to 27.2 in 2009.

However, this still leaves the most advantaged nearly one and half times more likely to have a good level of development than those from the most disadvantaged areas.

The figures do show some improvements in poor white boys' performance on the previous year when 22.3% achieved the required level in the tests.

But they have not continued the improvement against the national average that occurred in 2007-8 ...

BBC NEWS  28 Jan 2010

State Theory of Learning

Poor white boys do worst in tests

Top

Labour's lost generation: one in six young people do nothing

Record Numbers of 18 to 24-year-olds are not in school, college or work – and the figure is set to rise again over the next three months.

The number of so-called “Neets” (not in education, employment or training) has risen by more than 100,000 in comparison with the same time last year, to 835,000. The number of 16 to 18-year-olds in the same boat has also risen, by 24,000 to 233,000, to nearly 12 per cent of the age group as a whole.

Overall, one in six 16 to 24-year-olds (959,000) are now officially described as Neets, with the figure set to top the million mark in three months’ time as school leavers fail to gain university places. A record 60,000 are expected to be disappointed this year ...

TUC general secretary Brendan Barber added: “We cannot afford to lose another generation of young people to unemployment and underachievement.

“Tackling this crisis won’t come cheap. We need more employers to take on apprentices and the Government must ensure its guarantee ... continues to be well funded, as demand will be high.

“Neets are likely to have low skills and poor experience so the training and work on offer must be meaningful. Otherwise it will just be a stop-gap before further unemployment.” ...

Independent  18 August 2009

Youth drop-out rate hits new high

Top

Early death concern for drop-outs

One in six teenagers out of work or education for a long period could be dead within 10 years, a senior government education advisor says.

Jon Coles, director of schools for England at the Department for Children, Schools and Families quoted anecdotal research from the north of England.

He said he was "profoundly shocked" by the figures and that he hoped they were not replicated across England ... he quoted research which looked back at the so-called 'Neets' (not in education, employment or training) of 10 years ago, and discovered that 15% of those studied had already died ...

BBC NEWS  07 August 2009

England youth drop-out rate rises

Top

Class blamed for bias against poor whites

The white working class are discriminated against because of their accent, style, food, clothes, postcodes and even their names, but not because they are white, according to a Runnymede Trust study published today.

The report, Who Cares about the White Working Class?, disputes the claim that white working class communities have been directly losing out to migrants and minority ethnic groups.

It says that commentators who pretend that white working class disadvantage is ethnic rather than a matter of class do little to address the real and legitimate grievances that poor white people in Britain face ...

"Britain remains blighted by class division, and economic background is still the best predictor of life chances. Class is central to how people see their place in Britain today. Returning to the issue of class inequality and social mobility is therefore long overdue," the report says.

Socially, Britain remains dominated by the same class divisions that have been in place for 40 years with scorn for poor white people and their "perceived" culture not only socially acceptable but also rampant ...

The study says the affliction and resentment of many sections of the white working class is a real cause for concern but it is vital to address its actual cause: "The white working classes are discriminated against on a range of different fronts, including their accent, their style, the food they eat, the clothes they wear, the social spaces they frequent, the postcode of their homes, possibly even their names. But they are not discriminated against because they are white," it concludes.

Rob Berkeley, director of the Runnymede Trust, said: "There is an urgent need to ensure that a re-emergence of class on to the political agenda will not feed divisions, but promote equality for everyone. The way in which the debate has been framed so far hasn't been particularly constructive. The message from this publication is that it's possible to have a progressive debate on race and class in 21st century Britain that can lead to better outcomes for all."

Guardian 22 January 2009

Runnymede Trust

Top

'£3.65bn cost of lost generation'

Dealing with a growing "lost generation" of young people could save the country billions of pounds, a study says.

The research found young people in England were twice as likely as French or German counterparts to be out of education and not in work or training.

It found around one in five could expect to spend their lives on benefit, do badly at school and perhaps drift into crime. ...

The government's answer is to raise the school leaving age to 18:

A Department for Work and Pensions spokesman said the Government had helped 700,000 18- to 24-year-olds back to work and that welfare reform was targeting the "hardest to help" young people in the inner cities.

But he added: "We know that we need to upskill, which is why the Department for Education and Skills has just published a Green Paper to make it compulsory that a young person stays in education or training until they are 18.

"Staying until that age improves life chances, happiness and earning power."

Telegraph.co.uk 10/04/2007

Top

Vulnerable pupils are 'stars' after three years at boarding school

Dramatic evidence that Britain's most vulnerable children succeed when sent to state or private boarding schools is revealed in research published today.

A report charting the academic progress made by 97 children from some of the most deprived homes shows that after three years in boarding schools most were performing better than the average for their age.

More than a third were among the top 25 per cent for their year group, although 70 per cent were diagnosed with severe emotional problems when they started at their schools. The findings of the first detailed research on vulnerable children in boarding schools come after Lord Adonis, the Schools minister, backed a government pilot project aimed at giving poor children a place at boarding school. Now campaigners want the scheme to expand so 2,000 pupils can benefit.

The children in the research project were all placed in private or state boarding schools by the Royal Wanstead Children's Foundation – which aims to support vulnerable children, mainly from one-parent families, in boarding schools.

In addition to 70 per cent with emotional problems, 60 per cent had been exposed to abusive, threatening or violent behaviour in their home or family environment before starting at boarding school. Most were in the care of mothers with serious mental or physical illnesss and 13 per cent were having to act as "carers" to another sibling or parent.

After three years at boarding school, 85 per cent of the 11- to 17-year-olds were performing better than the average for a child of their age. Thirty-five per cent were in the top 25 per cent for their age group. The report, Breaking Through, says the children were "star performers" within three years. ...

The Independent 26 November 2007

Top

Two-tier school system creates poverty trap for disadvantaged

The gap in performance between pupils from rich and poor backgrounds is stark and poses an unacceptable risk to the life chances of disadvantaged children, the chief schools inspector, Christine Gilbert, warned yesterday. ...

Figures in the report showed that children from disadvantaged homes were five times more likely to fail to get five top-grade A* to C passes in their GCSE exams than those from more affluent backgrounds. ...

The report revealed that as many as 200,000 teenagers aged 16 and 17 had been left in limbo – without a job or a full-time education or training place.

It also showed that only 12 per cent of children in care obtained five top-grade GCSE passes – compared with a national average of 59 per cent. Of those eligible for free school meals, only one in three obtained five top-grade passes.

Twice as many 11-year-olds from poor homes also failed to master English and maths in national curriculum tests (61 per cent and 58 per cent) compared with the national average (83 per cent and 79 per cent). ...

The Independent 18 October 2007

Top

At the mercy of crime

Up to 100,000 teenagers have vanished from schools and risk drifting into a life of crime.

A new report reveals how an army of "invisible children" has been dumped on the educational scrapheap by the age of 16.

The youngsters include persistent truants, pupils who have been expelled, victims of bullying and children on witness protection programmes.

Others are ill or are caring for sick parents. It is feared many end up simply roaming the streets and risk becoming involved in crime or illegal child labour.

A report from the right-leaning Bow Group think tank showed how 70,000 pupils who should have taken GCSEs last year failed to turn up.

A further 15,000 children in their GCSE year were missing from school registers altogether. Of these, 6,000 had disappeared within a year of their 14th birthdays.

Experts believe that after taking into account younger children, the number of missing pupils stands at 100,000. ...

thisislondon.co.uk 06 May 2007

Top

Meet the Neets

For those with "severe or multiple barriers to employment" - low levels of literacy and numeracy, behaviour problems, chaotic home lives, lack of motivation, communication problems, drug or alcohol dependency, care leavers, criminal records - the New Deal has become something of a revolving door. They turn up for whatever training or "upskilling" is allotted to them and simply return to benefits after going through the motions.

Some schemes for younger Neets boast individual success stories. For example, Steps to Work, in the West Midlands, funded by the Learning and Skills Council, takes groups of teenagers through 10 work-related certificates, including health and safety, basic literacy, numeracy and information technology. More importantly, it has solid ties with employers and the 18 youngsters in its last group were all accepted on construction apprenticeships with Walsall Housing Group.

A skills programme at Greenwich Theatre in south-east London, where young people spend 12 weeks working in each area of the theatre, from backstage and marketing to front of house, also manages to keep young people turning up in the morning.

Hilary Strong, the theatre director, said most teenagers on the programme had nothing to show for their 11 years of schooling - half of teenagers nationally fail to achieve five good GCSEs - and had left school demoralised.

"An area like this one suffers from very poor academic achievement, lots of Neet young people and teenage pregnancies," she said. "The schools are too big to cope with the disruptive and difficult children and the core curriculum is suffocating and restrictive. The people who I think slip through the net are the unconfident, timid ones. Some of them have been bullied, ignored, forgotten. By the time they're 16, it's almost too late." ...

Telegraph.co.uk 14/04/2007

Top

The Forgotten Underclass

Muslims and blacks get more attention. But poor whites are in a worse state

Apart from election campaigns, when rising support for far-right political parties in areas such as Dagenham causes alarm, the traditional working class is largely overlooked.

When politicians say that some communities are failing to integrate with mainstream society, they mean Muslims from the Indian subcontinent.

When campaigners complain that schools are failing some children, they often cite black boys.

Yet the nation's most troubled group, in both absolute and relative terms, is poor, white and British-born. ...

By tracking tens of thousands of poor children, academics at Bristol University have pinpointed the problem. When poor whites are tested at the age of seven, they fare only slightly worse than poor blacks, and better than poor Pakistani and Bangladeshi children, many of whom are struggling with English.

By 14, whites have overhauled blacks and continue to lead the other two groups.

But at 16, when futures are decided in the national exams, the white children do worst of all.

Poor Indian and Chinese pupils, who have been ahead all along, increase their lead dramatically.

No more jobs for the boys

Clearly something happens to white children between the ages of 14 and 16 that does not happen to others. That something is that they write off the value of education in doing well in life. ...

One reason poor British whites have escaped scrutiny is that they are less associated with serious criminality than other ethnic groups, particularly Afro-Caribbeans.

British blacks are disproportionately young and tend to live in big cities, which are heavily policed. They may be more likely to commit the sort of extravagantly violent crimes that attract stiff sentences.

It is this reason, rather than any racial bias in the criminal-justice system, that explains why they are over-represented in prison compared with whites.

But whites actually commit more crime. ...

The Economist October 28 2006 | Page 33ff

---

Top

Government accused of 'misleading' figures Rough sleeper figure 'misleading'

End to rough sleepers estimate Housing minister Margaret Beckett declared yesterday that “rough sleeping in 21st Century Britain is unacceptable” as she launched a new plan to solve the problem in time for the Olympics. The commitment to end street homelessness in England “for good” could mark a landmark in social policy. But with virtually no new resources and few new ideas, it’s hard to see how it will be achieved ... Many of the headline measures announced yesterday have little substance when set out in the detailed action plan. Where CLG’s announcement promised to increase the options available to single homeless people through “help with deposits”, the action plan revealed that the government will only be “encouraging local authorities” to expand access to rent deposit schemes, with no promise of additional funding ... New Statesman 19 November 2008 Mayor launches agency for rough sleepers Rough Sleeping and Street Homelessness St Mungo's Crisis The Simon Community Shelter

Top

Homeless people: Government accused of 'misleading' figures

Official Government statistics, released by Ian Austin, a minister in the Department for Communities and Local Government, suggest that just 464 people are sleeping rough in England.

However, charities and opposition politicians have attacked the figures as misleading and being "massaged" so that the Government can hit its ambitious target of eliminating all rough sleepers by 2012.

The homeless figures are collected by individual local authorities and then sent into the Department. Critics, however, point out that very few homeless people are caught in the twice-a-year count.

Only homeless people who are actually "bedded down" in their sleeping bags are counted. Those sitting up in their bag, or standing alongside their bedding are not officially counted. Some local authorities have even been accused of not counting those that are lying down but have their eyes open ...

Crisis, the homeless charity, undertakes its own audit of rough sleepers in London on a regular basis which it then feeds to an organisation called Chain, which keeps a database of names, keeping track of those that are sleeping on the streets, have moved on and have returned.

Chain's latest annual figures, running to March 2009, indicated there were 3,472 rough sleepers in the capital alone – an increase of 15 per cent on the year before ...

Telegraph  04 Feb 2010

Crisis

St Mungos

Top

Rough sleeper figure 'misleading'

Some London councils are using tactics to keep the official figure for rough sleepers misleadingly low, BBC News has learned.

The government says there are only 483 rough sleepers across England.

But homeless charities say extra efforts are made to get people off the streets just before they are counted.

Campaigners say these are often temporary measures which disguise the true scale of the problem. Councils deny they are manipulating figures.

Local councils are asked to record the number of people sleeping on their streets on one night of the year, and those are added together for a national total.

Charities Housing Justice and the Simon Community say the system is not working because although independent monitors go out on the night the count is done, there is no scrutiny of activity on the streets in the weeks running up to the count ...

The BBC spoke to someone who has been involved with the street count in Camden who said that outreach workers were switched to night shifts in the month before the count so they could spot rough sleepers and talk to them about moving on.

Police did extra night shifts to help them, and rooms in B&Bs were paid for to get people off the streets on the night of the count ...

If the official figure is misleadingly low, there is less pressure on politicians to provide the support services those people need.

Former rough sleeper Tom, who said he was moved on by police in Westminster on several nights last September, told the BBC: "If the public actually knew the true figures, it just wouldn't be acceptable in a so-called civilised country."

"I would say in London alone you've got 483, easily.

"If you take into consideration Birmingham, Manchester, Newcastle, the big cities - masses of homeless people in this country now.

"The government knows it, we know it - we've just got to prove it." ...

BBC NEWS 20 July 2009

London’s rough sleepers to get individual budgets

Rough sleepers unit 'fiddled the figures'

---

Top

Pathways to Work: Welfare to Workfare

Benefit informers could be given share of cash saved Two-thirds on disability benefits are fit to work Towards Cameron's Small State Benefits plan to 'make work pay' 'Welfare to destitution' 'Six million British adults on benefits' Tory benefit cuts may raise jobless to 4m Inquiry into private firm's cash lure for jobseekers Slumping Economy Tests Aid System Tied to Jobs £64.30 a week Workfare has arrived 'Everyone will be expected to work' Welfare mothers to be forced to work Urge lone parents into jobs A 'whiff of the workhouse' 'Fit' notes Incapacity: 'loss of meaning and respect' A History of the War on the 'Sick Note Culture'

Call to simplify benefits claims The benefits and tax credits system is too complicated and must be simplified, a report by the right-leaning Centre for Policy Studies has said. All claims should be administered by one agency and applicants should only have to fill in one form, it suggested ... The report, entitled Benefit Simplification: How and Why It Must Be Done, said there were more than 50 benefits available through different government departments and agencies. Mr Martin estimated that the total social security bill will reach £186bn by 2010, but insisted that this figure could be lowered if one agency administered all the benefits and tax credits ... BBC NEWS  03 August 2009 'Unsustainable' social security spending Insurers 'could provide welfare' Billions in benefits go unclaimed Wrong benefit payments continue MPs 'dismayed' over tax credits

Top

Benefit informers could be given share of cash saved

As many bloggers point out, there are no similar proposals for a 'crackdown' on tax dodgers.

Proposals to encourage people to inform on benefit cheats are being examined by Labour's manifesto team ...

The idea has been put to Ed Miliband, Labour's manifesto co-ordinator, by Jim Murphy, the Scottish secretary, as a way of making life harder for benefit cheats.

It has also been discussed by Downing Street as it looks at ways to bolster its Respect agenda, designed to persuade sceptics that the state is on the side of hard-working families.

Although some will see the proposals as wildly impractical or socially ­divisive, others say they will encourage white, working-class voters to stay loyal to Labour.

No 10 is said to be attracted to the idea as symbolic of a tough contract on fairness in which Labour offers support for those genuinely in need on the condition that they play by the rules.

In Labour's successful byelection campaigns in Glenrothes and Glasgow North-East, Murphy was struck by how much Labour voters wanted to hear a message that emphasises "firm but fair rules" ...

Guardian  08 Feb 2010

New scheme to clamp down on benefit fraudsters

£800m benefits overpaid in error

Top

Two-thirds on disability benefits are fit to work

The TaxPayers' Alliance appears to be in ignorance of Peter Lilley's 1992 'crackdown'  [PL]

Figures released last week by the Department for Work and Pensions indicate that of the 292,300 tested since October 2008, just 89,600 were unable to have a full-time job.

The rest – 69 per cent – were well enough to get a job and forced to move onto Jobseeker's Allowance ...

This has allowed that DWP to save considerable costs, by moving people from a benefit that brings in £95 a week onto one that pays just £64.30.

In total the DWP hopes to save half a billion pounds over three years by cutting the 2.7 million people on incapacity benefit by one million.

Matthew Elliott, chief executive of the TaxPayers' Alliance said: "Taxpayers will be very concerned that so many fit and well people have been receiving incapacity benefit, on top of other generous allowances.

"One of the most perplexing issues is why this test or a similar one has not been carried out before, to stop taxpayers from being ripped off." ...

Telegraph  01 February 2010

Top

Towards Cameron's Small State

There is a spectre haunting anyone who is not in work.

The Tories have there eyes firmly fixed on the welfare budget, and are looking for ways to cut it.

This is to be camouflaged by much talk of tackling poverty, a matter of complete indifference to the Tories in the nineteen eighties.

David Cameron appears to want two diametrically opposing forces: something called 'society' - activated by social norms - alongside highly competitive 'free markets' which - as we've seen - drive jobs overseas, and - much worse - create a fractured, individualistic, 'culture' in which we are encouraged to see the less fortunate in cost-benefit terms, ie a drag on the taxpayer.

Blogger 49niner sums up the real problem: the economy has surplus labour since the Pareto efficiency superceded full employment as the central objective of government in 1979.

All the talk about

... innovative charities, social entrepreneurs and grassroots organisations ... [IND]

may sound supereficially like Ivan Illich, Charles Leadbeater, or Amartya Sen, but the Tories are vanishingly unlikely to be on their wavelength!

It misses the point
49niner wrote:

Wednesday, 11 November 2009 at 05:59 am

We don't need more hand outs dressed up in a different guise. We need people to be able to earn a living wage without all the complicated paraphenalia of a complex and illogical system of benefits and tax credits.

Since the collapse of many of our industries in the early 1980s, large areas of our country, not least the north east where I live, have never recovered. Far too little has been done to encourage new industries to take root and grow. An artificially high pound, propped up by an interest rate policy that favoured the City of London and financial services, has led to effective the export of British jobs abroad.

In turn, to keep up with the Joneses we've erected an elaborate system of living on tick. We've had two consumer booms fuelled by inflated property prices. We should have learned from our mistakes in 1990-92 but here we have an even worse situation after the crash of 2007-08.

As a nation, we need to learn to pay our way. Too many people are left either existing on benefits or doing what have become known as McJobs. Poverty and benefit dependency are the result. Cameron's plan merely dresses up the same old problem in new clothes.

This country has been living an illusion on borrowed time and borrowed money. We need to learn to utilise our talents as a nation in ways we once did. Until we do, poverty will be the result.

Independent  11 November 2009

We will tackle poverty by building strong community ties

Tories 'can fight poverty best'

David Cameron urges 'can do' attitude

Cameron outlines programme to restore 'natural bonds' of 'duty and responsibility'

Top

Benefits plan to 'make work pay'

Proposals to allow low-paid people to keep benefits longer and to streamline the system have been published by a think tank set up by Iain Duncan Smith.

The Centre for Social Justice says the system makes it hard for people to earn more at work than they get in benefits.

The ex-Tory leader proposes merging 51 benefits into two and subsidising the low paid, at a cost of £2.7bn a year ...

The report says claimants taking a job paying less than £15,000 a year are currently worse off than if they remained out of work.

People are being put off from going for jobs, it argues, and benefits should be removed gradually by lifting the income threshold at which they are phased out.

Mr Duncan Smith told the BBC ...

"We believe that if you want to end child poverty, if you want to help people then you need to be able to help the worst off best, and you need to be able to help them do the most important thing in their lives - which is that we believe every household should have work."

The report says the proposals would cost £2.7bn a year - on top of the £74bn already being spent on benefits.

But Mr Duncan Smith said the potential savings in terms of administration, as less staff would be needed to run the system, and the social cost of worklessness - including health and crime, were "dramatic".

The report estimates it could be £3.4bn a year ...

BBC NEWS  16 September 2009

Iain Duncan Smith urges welfare reform to get jobless into work

Benefits plan to 'make work pay'

Call to simplify benefits claims

Top

Welfare to destitution

I can't make any sense of the government's attitude to financial risk. When big companies or rich individuals are willing to take it, the official view is that they must be rewarded for having the courage to gamble. That's why PFI schemes are potentially so profitable for the private sector, why bankers still get bonuses, and why profits on share dealings are taxed at less than income. Yet when it comes to the poorest people, the policy now is to push them into taking tremendous risks, with a high probability of loss, and no corresponding hope of tremendous gains.

The welfare-to-work reforms are intended to discourage everyone but the very ill or disabled from leading a life on benefits. Fine, except for two problems. The first one we all know about: as last week's figures made plain, the jobs aren't there.

The second problem is just as serious. Jobs aren't what they were ...

McGoldrick (Community Link) says the majority of benefit claimants are now going into unstable jobs. They may be commission-based, or agency work, or zero-hours contracts. That means the income and hours worked can vary wildly from week to week. Someone on zero hours, perhaps with a shop or a cleaning firm, may have to be available for work at any time over a 40-hour working week. But there's no corresponding requirement on the employer actually to give them anything to do. So a worker may do a three-hour stint one week, 17 hours the next, 32 in the third week, and four hours at the end of the month.

Trying to deal with that sends benefit offices into meltdown. People earning a low wage can still be entitled to all kinds of financial help. But if their incomes fluctuate from week to week, so will their entitlement, and the system can't keep up. Weekly changes must be reported, and it can take weeks for each claim to be processed. Meanwhile, panicking claimants may find that their housing benefit has been cut or suspended, or their jobseeker's allowance withdrawn, on the assumption that what they earned three weeks ago is what they're earning now ...

Guardian  19 August 2009

Retention bonuses back at Merrills

Community Links

Vulnerable Workers

Carer Watch

Top

'Six million British adults on benefits'

The last official figures, issued in February, showed that the total was 5.8 million.

There were 1.4 million people on Job Seekers’ Allowance and 2.6 million on Employment Support – formerly known has incapacity benefit. The total also includes people claiming benefits as lone parents, as carers and because of disability.

The Daily Telegraph revealed earlier this year that the state will pay out more in social security benefits than it raises from workers in income tax this year.

In 2009/10, the Treasury is expecting to take in £140.5 billion in gross income tax receipts. Social security benefits are projected to be £164.7 billion.

Official unemployment figures last week said there are now almost 2.5 million people unemployed in Britain.

Neil O’Brien, Director of Policy Exchange, said the benefits data showed that the real number of people not working is much higher than that.

He said: “Any day now the total number on benefits will officially pass the six million mark. The narrow unemployment figures we are used to seeing tell you less and less about the real number of people who are trapped on benefits.”

“Instead of investing in the future, we are paying the price for failing to reform the benefits system.”

“Our unreformed benefits system is too complicated. It gives people too little financial incentive to work, and too little pressure and help to find work. Other countries have successfully reduced the number on benefits. We will need to totally change our benefits system. There’s nothing kind about leaving people to rot on benefits ”

Telegraph 18 August 2009

Six million Britons to claim benefits

Top

Tory benefit cuts may raise jobless to 4m

UNEMPLOYMENT figures could rise to more than 4m during the first year of a new Conservative government.

Senior Tories are drawing up plans to shift 1.5m people who claim incapacity benefit on to jobseeker’s allowance within 12 months of taking office. The move would temporarily send the official figures on unemployment soaring.

However, the Conservatives believe the move could immediately save £1 billion and would eventually get hundreds of thousands of people currently considered too sick to work back into the labour market. They believe 60% of those signed off as long-term sick are capable of some kind of paid work.

“The initial figures are going to be very scary,” said a senior Tory aide.

“It might look as if we are losing control of the economy, so we will begin a campaign in September so that people understand better what is happening.”

Labour has also promised to reduce the figure of 2.5m people claiming incapacity benefit but, so far, only about 100,000 people have been placed on a new system of conditional benefits.

Sunday Times  16 August 2009

Top

Inquiry into private firm's cash lure for jobseekers

Ministers launched an urgent inquiry last night after investigations by the Observer revealed that a private company being paid by the government to find jobs for the unemployed had offered £100 cash gifts to sign up people who had already found work.

The inquiry into Triage Central, a major Scottish employment company, came amid a chorus of demands from senior politicians for the police to examine mounting evidence of malpractice at the heart of the government's welfare policy.

The Department for Work and Pensions said last night it was "extremely concerned" about the way Triage Central - a key player in its Pathways to Work policy which aims to get claimants off incapacity benefit - had tried to enlist people who already had jobs onto its books. The revelation will prompt suspicions that companies are claiming government success fees for getting people into work, when in fact they have played no such role ...

The Observer revealed last week how staff of at least two private recruitment companies had deliberately inflated the number of people they had got back to work, apparently to maximise their "success rates". Further cases have since come to light but so far investigations have only been carried out by the DWP and the companies themselves ...

Pathways to Work was billed as a bold attempt to tackle the biggest challenge in welfare reform - helping move up to 2.6m incapacity benefit claimants into work. It was running 73% short of its target in January this year, according to official figures.

Overall, the private sector-led programmes had delivered 60% of the expected number of jobs in the six months to September 2008, while using 98% of the expected expenditure ...

Observer  05 July 2009

Top

Slumping Economy Tests Aid System Tied to Jobs

Nearly 14 million Americans are unemployed, and more than 100,000 people join their ranks each week. Eight states have double-digit unemployment rates; California and Michigan have counties where the rate reaches Depression-era levels of 25 percent.

Still, the challenges seem especially stark when set against the assumption on which the modern safety net was built: that low-wage jobs, however onerous, were at least easy to get. Urging the needy to take them, policy makers expanded wage subsidies (which now top $5,000 a year in some states), while putting time limits on cash benefits, cutting access to training and giving states wide discretion to turn aid-seekers away.

The new welfare program, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, also gave states financial incentives to cut the rolls, and critics warned that the program would fail to grow in tough times to meet rising need. Now millions of jobs have disappeared, and caseloads have scarcely budged.

In many places they have continued to fall, including Mr. Obama’s home state, Illinois, which trimmed the rolls 8 percent last year as joblessness surged. Nationally, the rolls are down about 70 percent from the 1990s highs.

To encourage states to expand the welfare rolls, the recovery package Mr. Obama signed includes $5 billion of subsidies for programs with caseload growth ...

The program that responded most readily to the recession, food stamps, has done so in large part because it serves the working poor and jobless alike. In the 12 months ending this February, the rolls grew 17 percent. One in 9 Americans now gets food stamps, and the recovery package temporarily raised the average benefit about 19 percent, to about $500 a month for a family of four ...

No one envisions a return to the time of unconditional aid. Even critics of the tougher welfare system credit it for raising employment rates; and poverty, though on the rise, is lower than in the early 1990s.

“It worked better than, I think, a lot of people anticipated,” Mr. Obama said at a campaign event last year. “One of the things that I am absolutely convinced of is that we have to have work as a centerpiece of any social policy.”

But progress had stalled even before the recession began, and two sets of problems had emerged. One is that the neediest people — the addicted, disabled or mentally ill — often fell through the cracks, finding neither welfare nor work. Another is that most low-wage workers were failing to advance ...

Beyond the recession, several big poverty challenges remain. Wage inequality has continued to rise. So has the share of children born to unmarried mothers, which increases their odds of growing up poor.

And huge deficits have made the long-term budget outlook bleak, as Robert Greenstein of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities warned fellow conferees in Washington. Even as the meeting got under way, California was mulling its governor’s cost-saving plan to outright abolish programs of cash welfare and children’s health insurance ...

NYT 31 May 2009

Welfare Aid Not Growing as Economy Drops Off

Top

£64.30 a week. That's Dave's reward for 20 years of work

Dave lost his job in a northern city two months ago. He had worked for more than 20 years, and in ­recent years earned about £30,000 a year from his marketing job – about a quarter more than the average wage. It's his income that has paid for the mortgage and most of the bills, because his wife, as the mother of two young children, has a part-time job.

Dave had never been unemployed. When made redundant, with just three weeks' redundancy pay, he assumed that the national insurance he had been paying all his life would provide a financial cushion until he could find work. Instead he's been ­staggered to find that, because his wife is earning at a low level, all he's entitled to is £64.30 a week.

Overnight, the family's take-home income dropped by about £1,500 a month. There's still a mortgage and bills to pay, but the state won't offer any help unless Dave's wife also loses her job. Then it will pay the full mortgage after 13 weeks, housing benefit if necessary, free school meals, and a host of other benefits. But while Dave's wife is working, he won't get a penny more – and in practice, considerably less – than someone who has never worked ...

Guardian 20 May 2009

Top

Workfare has arrived in Britain

This is shabby politics. The government has poured billions into propping up a bankrupt financial system, and only whimpers ineffectually about millions being paid out in bonus packages to bankers courtesy of the British taxpayer. But while its lavish generosity to one set of citizens seems to have few limits, it is hard at work on welfare reforms aimed at another set of citizens which pare back even further the meagre sums on which they are expected to keep body and soul together.

The only thing these two sets of citizens seem to have in common is their capacity to provoke popular resentment: the bankers and the benefit claimants are used as media bogeymen to frighten good taxpayers ...

To howls of anguish from anti-poverty campaigners, Purnell offers reassurance that sanctions are a last resort. But in evidence to the select committee last month his bluff was called. He was asked what would happen if a mother rejected a jobcentre personal adviser's offer of childcare because it was too far away and poor quality. Purnell liked the example. It showed, he said, how "the system will be able to be personalised", but "in the end it will be the personal adviser's decision with the possibility of appeal, because if we did it the other way round that would clearly have the potential to drive the cart and horses through the conditionality regime" ...

Purnell has repeatedly justified these reforms in terms of reducing child poverty. Like many other Labour ministers over the last 10 years, he repeats the mantra that work is the best route out of poverty. But last week's report by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation blew that claim out of the water in spectacular style. Its research found that the majority of children living in poverty in 2005-6 had at least one parent in work. It showed that millions of children and their parents are trapped in poverty no matter whether they work, and for all its vaunted ambition on child poverty, Labour has nothing to offer them ...

Guardian 23 February 2009

Majority of children living in poverty have at least one parent in work

Top

'Everyone will be expected to work'

It is one thing to streamline the system. It is quite another to provide the much-enhanced level of support - the motivation and new skills - that will be needed by many to succeed in the workplace.

The heart of the solution here is to move away from general programmes towards an approach based on personal advice for each individual, which has proven effective in the extensive piloting of recent years.

A series of five trials across the country will test a funding mechanism in which private and third-sector consortiums invest in bringing people back into the world of work and are paid out of subsequent savings in welfare payments.

Such a payment by results approach is likely to focus the providers on successful outcomes rather than the provision of services that can be inappropriate for many clients ...

Blogger Nigel, Birmingham, asks:

Where are these jobs going to come from? It's all very well saying "get them digging gardens" but what about the people who currently work as gardeners? How will they cope when faced with an army of slaves doing their jobs for £60? Will they have to work 40 hours a week for £50 in order to compete?

The Times 10 December 2008

Sending claimants out to work at a tough time to find jobs

Poverty is the root of so many of our problems

Top

Welfare mothers to be forced to work

ALMOST all benefit claimants will be forced either to look for a job or prepare for work if they want to continue to receive state handouts, under a shake-up of the welfare state.

Single mothers of children as young as one and people registered unfit for work will be compelled to go on training courses and work experience or risk cuts to their benefits.

In an interview with The Sunday Times, James Purnell, the work and pensions secretary, said: “Virtually everyone will be doing something in return for their benefits.”

The welfare reform white paper, to be published this week, is set to provoke anger from rebel Labour MPs and campaign groups who believe such measures are unfair in a period of rising unemployment.

The conviction of Karen Matthews for kidnapping her daughter Shannon has shown the perverse consequences of the welfare system. Matthews, who had seven children, had never worked and was existing on £400 a week in benefits.

The government will also announce plans to:

- Reform housing benefit to ensure the jobless can no longer live in large houses courtesy of the taxpayer.

- Allow companies to bid for contracts to place the long-term unemployed in work.

- Introduce a medical testing regime for people on incapacity benefit.

- Impose US-style “work-fare” schemes forcing those who refuse to take jobs to work in return for benefits.

At the core of the reforms is the proposal to divide benefit claimants into three groups.

The first group is made up of unemployed people on jobseeker’s allowance. From 2010, single mothers whose youngest child is aged seven or over will be moved from income support to the allowance ...

The second group will include about 400,000 single parents whose youngest child is aged between one and six, and more than 2m people claiming incapacity benefit. These claimants will face job centre interviews before being forced to undertake training courses or unpaid work placements.

A third group, including seriously disabled people and mothers of young babies, will continue to receive “unconditional” benefits ...

Sunday Times 07 December 2008

Free benefits are over, says minister

Welfare plan 'could leave parents worse off'

Top

Urge lone parents into jobs.
Just put away the big stick

The usual reactionary responses to an article from Polly.

Perhaps we should look at this from another angle. I don't consider claimants to be scroungers. Rather its all the public employees who live off the unemployed and poor that are the real parasites. What justification do these people have for their salaries?

Lets abolish jobseekers allowance and incapacity benefit, housing benefit, working tax credits and all the jobs of the pencil-pushers that administer them.

Instead, give people of working age a non-means tested benefit (say £7,200). Allow them to top up their benefit by working and once they reach a certain threshold of aggregate earnings (£12,000), reduce the benefit through the tax system - ensuring that there is still an incentive to earn. This would mean that income tax would start at £12,001.

We can waste time and money trying to beat people into contributing or we can turn those resources to creating more wealth.

By removing the threat of losing benefits, a large number of people could enter the job market in part-time roles.

I would also abolish child tax credits and instead give proper financially significant vouchers for child care so creating financial incentives for the creation of nursery places. This would help across the spectrum of families in the UK.

LostTransportation
Dec 02 08, 5:29am

Guardian 02 December 2008

Top

Welfare reforms have whiff of the workhouse

We were surprised and saddened to see The Observer endorse, even with qualifications, the government's draconian welfare reforms (Leader, last week).

These reforms are not about compassion. They are more about cutting benefit budgets to aid the Treasury and creating revised demarcations of the 'deserving and undeserving poor'.

Even in good economic times, they are invasive and unnecessary; now, in a time of crisis, they have the smell of the workhouse about them.

The Child Poverty Action Group (CPAG) asserts: 'Some groups will actually be worse off under the new Employment Support Allowance [ESA] by as much as £400 a year.'

Many disabled people on benefits are feeling frightened, demonised and unwanted with the emphasis on work as the only option. Most disabled people do want to work. What is required is genuine welfare reform that puts the individual claimant at the centre, not just as a profit vehicle for private companies.

John Rogers
Sheffield Welfare Action Network

Observer 30 November 2008

Top

Government to replace sick notes with 'fit notes'

The government is to scrap the sick note that GPs have used for 60 years to sign people off work.

Alan Johnson, the health secretary, and James Purnell, the work and pensions secretary, said yesterday sick notes will be replaced in England by electronic "fit notes", allowing doctors to say what work their patients can do as well as what they cannot.

Sick leave costs the economy £100bn a year, including the loss of about 172 million working days.

Johnson said sick notes were introduced in 1948 to protect vulnerable people, but they had become a mechanism for consigning thousands of workers to long-term unemployment.

People who left the workplace due to poor mental health, for example, often found it hard to return and were denied the stimulus of work that could have improved their condition.

Purnell said the government wanted to encourage "a fundamental culture change" to help people stay in work ...

Guardian 26 November 2008   

Top

Incapacity: 'loss of meaning and respect'

There are very high rates of incapacity benefit claims in a number of Britain’s classical post-industrial regions: areas dominated in the past by coal, steel, dock work, ship-building and various manufacturing industries. South Wales, the north east of England and the Glasgow conurbation have particularly high rates.

There are a number of reasons why incapacity is a problem for public policy. First, the number of people on incapacity benefits has more than trebled since 1979. Whilst what is known as the inflow onto incapacity benefit has stabilised over the last ten years or so, 7.6 per cent of the population of working age are in receipt of incapacity benefits. Moreover, the duration of time on incapacity benefit has increased, and there is evidence that duration is strongly linked to the likelihood of a return to work.

Secondly, rates of incapacity claims are unequally distributed across social classes and regions. Although this may seem to be common sense, the discussion of what is to be done tends to be undertaken without any clear sociological analysis of either the cause or meaning of this inequality.

Thirdly, incapacity is a ‘wicked issue’. Therefore, although incapacity benefit has traditionally been the responsibility of the Department of Work and Pensions, it relates in complex ways, to patterns of ill-health and wider issues of economic development, poverty and social exclusion that are the responsibilities of other departments of government. ...

The interesting feature of incapacity, as understood in this way, is that it is both a health indicator and an economic indicator. Indeed, we could say that incapacity and its distribution tell us something important about the functional relationship between chronic ill-health, the labour market and forms of social and economic life in different groups and localities.

Enduring political anxiety about the growth of a population of working age unable to work because of ill-health or impairment lies at the heart of the way in which States screen and process populations. Most of the discussion of incapacity benefit at the present time examines it in the context of what are referred to as New Labour’s ‘activation policies’ (Walker and Wiseman 2003), their strategy to modernise the welfare state by encouraging movement from welfare benefits into work, and by making that movement worthwhile in financial terms: work for those who can, security for those who cannot ...

Inequalities in limiting-long term illness

... The proportion of adults aged 45-64 who have a limiting long-standing illness in Wales, the north-east region of England and Northern Ireland is almost double that in south-east England.

When we examine the different regions those with the lowest rates are uniformly in south-east England. Of the worst ten, five are in south Wales, two are in northern Ireland, one is in the west of Scotland (the city of Glasgow, of course), one in north-west England, and one – the worst of all – is in north-east England. Indeed, in most tabular representations of this issue, Easington, Merthyr Tydfil and Blaenau Gwent (which includes a number of former coal and steel towns like Ebbw Vale) appear to jostle for a position at the top.

In reality of course, people living and working in these areas are often profoundly depressed by such public representations of what is increasingly discussed judgmentally as a matter of personal, professional and municipal failure ...

Localities with high rates of LLTI are the same areas with the highest rates of incapacity benefit claimants.

Loss and Change

You would of course expect economic inactivity to be higher following redundancy in areas in which there are fewer appropriate opportunities for work. However, Robert Cornwall [] is also conveying something else: that the relationship of these men to their work and the manner in which the work was taken away from them are also partly responsible for subsequent long-term economic inactivity.

The sense of loss of meaning and respect, and impending hardship are palpable.

Let me give you another example of this sense of loss, and the way in which it affects more than the immediate workforce. Following a major strategic review in February 2001, Corus the steel makers announced that they were going to restructure their enterprise and activities in Wales. The company had 64,900 employees at the end of 2000, with approximately 33,000 of those employed in the UK, and almost 11,000 of them working in Wales.

The main element of the restructuring was the announcement of the closure of the well-known Ebbw Vale steelworks. Most of the Corus jobs were those of full-time, relatively well-paid men (£26,000 per annum on average, at 2001 prices), occupying posts that encompass a wide range of skills.

Contrary to popular impression, many – possibly most – of the job losses occurred amongst men aged between 30 and 50, with long-term domestic responsibilities and financial commitments. Most of these ex-steel workers would have found it very difficult to transfer to similar jobs with comparable levels of remuneration. Moreover, the loss of the wages of the steel workers was sharply felt throughout the local economy.

As part of a rapid analysis of the impact of the announcement of steelwork closure, during 2001 we interviewed a small number of people working in the towns and villages within the local authority area of Blaenau Gwent close to the Ebbw Vale steelworks. They comprised health professionals, church ministers, welfare officers, and other ‘key informants’, and were asked about what they thought was going to happen to the area. Here are two community psychiatric nurses:

The deterioration in Blaenau Gwent has been on-going for many years… [But] this has been a big blow for the community because this has been a steel working community for years. This is just the final nail in the coffin…

[Closure] has always been a threat. My father-in-law worked there in the 1930s. He said they always said that it was going to shut and it never has. And so they automatically think that it is never going to happen…it’s always been said but it’s never happened. [Now] I think the community is a bit shocked.

... The impact of the loss of employment in coal and steel, and the manner in which it was handled by both national governments and local agencies had a huge impact on the people who lost their jobs and on the wider networks, communities, societies and economies in which they lived. In research undertaken by Huw Beynon and his colleagues, comparing the impact of colliery closure in different coalfields, they make a number of important points, nicely encapsulated in the following Durkheimian proposition:

[In South Wales] this was not just a case of localised economic decline but rather one of cultural crisis. The collapse of coalmining undermined a range of mechanisms of social regulation that were grounded in the politics of the workplace and the trades unions, but spread more widely into local society and politics. There was an acute sense of loss in places in which coalmines closed after decades of existence. This was typically accompanied by a period of grieving as people in these places tried to come to terms with the manifold implications of the precipitate ending of the economic raison d'être of their place. ...

It is interesting how quickly the massive contribution of these now stigmatised communities to Welsh, British and global capitalism can be forgotten, and how any attempt to understand their contemporary predicament in historical terms is pushed to one side by the false positivism of evidence-based policy.

It seems to me that there are opportunities here for an historically-informed sociology of work and non-work related ill-health. The complex patterns of long-term illness and incapacity in localities of the kind I have described are the product of the interaction of a number of processes: a long-term legacy of working class hardship, the political destruction of the economic base in which those working class lives had been rooted, the impact of this on what is nowadays referred to as the ‘resilience’ of once robust communities and ways of life, the growth of poverty in those communities and inequality in relation to other communities nearby, and the modernisation of the welfare state into one which seeks to place people in work of any kind, however time-limited, insecure, low paid, disrespectful and purposeless it may be.

Medical Sociology September 2007

NB: This link seems to be no longer available;
an email to the author - Prof Gareth Williams - has not been returned

Top

A History of the War on the 'Sick Note Culture'

1992

The 'war on benefit scroungers', and in particular those 'Going on the sick', started with the-then Secretary of State for Social Security, Peter Lilley, in 1992.

Despite what at the time was presented as a draconian crackdown on IVB claimants, nothing much seems to have changed.

The 2006 Welfare Reform Bill [set] a target of an 80 per cent employment rate amongst working age adults.

To achieve this Pathways to Work [is to] be rolled out across the country by 2008.

The numbers on Incapacity Benefit will need to be reduced by one million.

One million more older people and 300,000 extra lone parents will need to be motivated into work.
[Compass]

NB: No longer available from Compass website!

2006

Work and Pensions Secretary, John Hutton, announced a further 'crackdown' in December 2006, which was followd by the publication of the Freud Report

2007

This recommended:

Greater use of private and voluntary sector resources and expertise so harder-to-help benefit claimants receive more employment support.

A new focus on long-term mentoring to tackle the problem of repeat benefit claimants.

Greater rewards for organisations that are successful in helping claimants find and stay in work.

Greater personalisation of employment support, with higher financial incentives for organisations to target resources at the hardest-to-help who need more support before they are ready to return to work.

Retaining Jobcentre Plus’ role in helping customers during the early stages of their period on benefit and creating a new role for the organisation to assess how much support individual claimants are likely to need before they are ready to return to work.

Rebalancing rights and responsibilities in the welfare system - matching increased support with greater obligations on claimants to look for work.

Simplification of the benefits system.

Further changes were announced by Peter Hain in November 2007:

New incapacity benefit tests are to be introduced, which ministers say will mean fewer sick and disabled people will qualify for being unable to work. Work and Pensions Secretary Peter Hain says the changes, introduced next year, will end "sick-note Britain". [BBC]

In the meantime, David Cameron's Tories were taking an active interest in welfare schemes across the pond, and in particular the Wisconsin Works scheme.

Shadow work and pensions secretary, Chris Grayling, told the Telegraph:

2008

Last week I was in New York, meeting the people who run the city's successful programmes to get people off benefits and into work. One of the most impressive of these programmes helps people off their equivalent of incapacity benefit. Their experience is that the majority of claimants can go back into work, even if a medical condition makes it impossible to do the same job they used to. A building worker with a bad back may be able to do something different even if continuing to work on a building site is not realistic. Indeed, they say that, in their experience, one in 10 people should never have been claiming the benefit in the first place.

'Going on the sick' shouldn't be a career option 06 January 2008

Mr Grayling went on to make the claim - which is at variance with the experience of claimants I have met - that:

The majority of people signed on to this benefit by filling in a form and sending in a note from their doctor. Most claimants are then simply left to their own devices ...

The Telegraph returned to its 'campaign' in February 2008:

Up to two thirds of people claiming incapacity benefit are not entitled to the state handout, the Government's new welfare adviser warns today.

David Freud, an investment banker hired by James Purnell, the new Work and Pensions Secretary, said the disability tests used to award state aid were "ludicrous" and could be costing billions of pounds.

More than 2.6 million people claim incapacity benefit at a cost of more than £12 billion a year to the taxpayer.

However, Mr Freud suggested that less than a third may be credible recipients while several hundred thousand work illegally on the black market.

Under his review, the private sector is to be brought in to run large sections of the welfare system and lone parents will be encouraged to work as soon as their children go to school.

People refusing to co-operate and find a job will have their benefits "sliced" under the plan to get about 1.4 million people back to work. The system should be in place within five years, he said.

Private companies will be put in charge of finding jobs for the long-term unemployed. They will be paid by results, with large fees if they succeed in keeping people in work for more than three years and nothing if they do not.

"We can pay masses," Mr Freud said. "I worked out that it is economically rational to spend up to £62,000 on getting the average person on incapacity benefit into the world of work."

1.9m on benefit 'should go back to work'

In a side-swipe at Peter Hain, Mr Freud told the Telegraph:

...there had been a transformation in the Government's approach to welfare since Mr Purnell's appointment. "Purnell is showing astonishing energy - there is going to be a much more single-minded ferocity". Peter Hain, his predecessor, had been more "worried about the Left".

The Economist took a more realistic view of the prospects for success:

Much cited are America's 1996 reforms, which encouraged states to impose time limits on benefits and pay private companies and charities to help people find employment. One such company, America Works, recently offered its expertise to both big British parties.

The firm has found that getting welfare recipients into the rhythm of work by making them show up for a good part of the working week, coaching them for interviews and holding their hands through the early days of a new job are as successful as compulsion in reducing welfare rolls—suggesting that British politicians are thinking along the right lines. But it warns against a preoccupation with pre-job training, which often teaches the wrong skills and misses basic graces (such as time-keeping and not being cheeky to the boss) that many claimants lack.

American employers, it seems, are keener on having a decent, low-hassle workforce than on subsidies for training or incentives to hire the jobless. And they co-operate with welfare-to-work programmes when they get it.

But British employers already have good workers on tap, thanks to the endless stream of eager east Europeans seeking jobs. Whether they can be persuaded to take on long-idle locals instead—even ones who have their hands held—is moot.

Welfare reform - Going to work

Several concluding comments:

• The sweeping claims made about the numbers of claimants who are "swinging the lead" are not matched by any of the forecasts as to the numbers likely to return to work;



• The LSE Depression Report found that there are more mentally ill people on incapacity benefit than there are registered unemployed, but the waiting time for treatment - if available at all - is over nine months.
  Perversely, at a time of growing need, services for the mentally ill are actually being cut back. Karen Reissman    Super Mental Health Hospitals



• The likelihood of a return to full employment - as it was known in the 1950s - is vanishingly remote;



• A Newsnight reporter, speaking from the North East, airily told viewers that industry might have vanished, but there were plenty of jobs in IT and call centres.
  
  This sort of flipancy is challenged by the work of Gareth Williams in South Wales who has made the effort to find out why so many fall into mental illness.
  
  His findings are consistent with the writings of David Smail, Oliver James, and Paedar Kirby.



• The possibility that the minimum wage, and the tax regime [AW] might be changed so as to make work more attractive, do not seem to figure in the thoughts of New Labour or Tory commentators on this subject;



• The sort of approaches suggested by Claus Offe, NEF, and Talis Fotopoulos, are also off the radar. Alternatives to Welfare



• The warning from the Crime and Society Foundation of the trade-off between benefits and incarceration rates has also failed to register with the political elite;



• Finally, the intimate involvement of U.S. insurance corporation UnumProvident in Pathways to Work suggests that the familiar "broken privatization" agenda is also in operation.
  
  The grim reality of 'welfare' across the pond - which seems to be the line of travel of the current round of reforms - is examined in greater detail by Johann Hari.

---

---

Top

National Care Service

Tories 'not attending' talks Councils 'failing to prepare for ageing population Care home patients given feeding tubes Social care - the next big issue? Dementia patient care criticised Fears over care home drug errors 'Free personal care' for elderly Victory for lawyer who protected the elderly 'cruel' treatment of elderly patients Alzheimer's is not a 'health condition' Elderly 'put at risk' by axing of 24-hour wardens Benefits system has failed poor pensioners A squeeze on attendance allowance UK elderly fourth poorest in EU 'Shaping the Future of Care Together' Debts that threaten the elderly and vulnerable Leaking roofs, incontinence pads on the floor 'Liquid cosh' treatment kills dementia patients £6bn black hole in funding of care Thousands of elderly abused in care homes More on Care for the Elderly

Labour accused of doing too little, too late Campaign groups and opposition politicians pointed out that the Government has had 12 years to address the unfair system, and now just months before a general election had offered a wide range of uncosted options for debate. They also pointed out that even if the proposals do come into force, by only offering long-term solutions they will provide little or no help to the millions of pensioners currently struggling to find help ... Tony Blair told the Labour Party conference in 1997 that he didn't want children "brought up in a country where the only way pensioners can get long-term care is by selling their home". Although the Government ordered a Royal Commission into long-term care for the elderly, in 2000 it rejected its suggestion that personal care should be paid for from general taxation. The Green Paper has been eagerly awaited since May 2008 when Gordon Brown launched an "engagement" process on future options for care. It was expected in spring this year but delayed repeatedly as final details were hammered out. It will be followed by a consultation process that runs until mid-November, and although the Green Paper claims a detailed White Paper will be published during 2010 there is little chance of it making any progress before the election that must take place by June. Even on the Government's own timescale, the first of the changes would not be phased in until 2014 at the earliest, leaving those who have already retired with little chance of benefiting from the changes ... Telegraph  15 July 2009 More

Top

Tories 'not attending' talks on future of elderly care

The Conservatives are refusing to take part in a conference about the future of social care in England, as they say the summit is a "political ploy".

Labour and the Lib Dems will join care providers and charities in talks over options for a national care service.

Many are likely to tell ministers a compulsory fee would be the best funding option ...

BBC NEWS  19 Feb 2010    Election 2010    'Putting People First'

Charities back government plans to pay for care of elderly with inheritance levy

Compulsory social care bill plan

Top

Councils 'failing to prepare for ageing population'

The Audit Commission found that most local authorities have not made plans for how their services will be affected by the growth in the number of elderly people.

The failure to plan and reform services now raises the risk that services like housing and care will be unaffordable when today’s workers come to the retire ...

The auditors inspected the medium-term financial plans of 112 councils to see how well they were preparing for such demographic change.

In a report, the commission found that “many councils place little emphasis on the challenges of an ageing population.”

Just over half of the financial plans included any reference to demographic change. Only one in ten attempted any estimate of the financial impact of the ageing population.

And those councils that had made financial plans for ageing focused narrowly on social services and transport, ignoring “long-term issues” ...

Telegraph  18 Feb 2010

Councils 'will struggle with ageing population'

Parties row over Tory plan for elderly care insurance

Long Term Care

Top

Care home patients given feeding tubes 'to save on staffing'

A growing number of patients are being fed “nil by mouth” when it is inappropriate, with some care homes insisting residents are fitted with feeding tubes, doctors warn today.

An expert report states that artificial feeding — involving tubes inserted into a person’s stomach — is being used too frequently, often because staff shortages mean there is not enough time for conventional feeding.

The report concludes that many patients, such as Alzheimer’s sufferers, are receiving the treatment because it is an “easy option”.

The technique risks infections and also deprives patients of the pleasure of taste, and social interaction that come with normal eating.

The authors, from the Royal College of Physicians, said there was anecdotal evidence of homes closing their doors to patients if they did not adopt artificial feeding, an approach they described as “completely unethical” ...

Times  06 Jan 2010

Care homes forcing elderly to have feeding tubes fitted

Thousands condemned to live in squalid care homes

Top

Social care - the next big issue?

A quick glance at the report into social care by the Care Quality Commission regulator, may suggest that everything is rosy in the sector.

But it does not take long for the impression to unravel. While 95% of councils in England got an excellent or good rating, it is clear that this has only been achieved because they are providing services to fewer people.

In the place of the state in has stepped an army of carers.

Estimates suggest there are nearly 6m people helping loved-ones wash, dress and eat - 1.5m of whom provide more than 20 hours of care a week.

And this is why social care - for the first time in many years - is near the top of the political agenda ...

BBC NEWS  03 December 2009

Care agencies accused of exploiting migrant care workers

'Councils will cut care funding as recession bites'

'Concerns' over social care in eight areas of England

Concerns over social care plans

Dementia patient care criticised

NHS nurses attacked for 'cruel' treatment of elderly patients

Patients Association

Elderly 'put at risk' by axing of 24-hour wardens

Southern Cross

England’s dirtiest care homes must be shut down

'Liquid cosh' treatment kills dementia patients

Top

Dementia patient care criticised

Patients with dementia occupy one in every four hospital beds

Half of all dementia patients leave hospital in a worse state than when they arrive, it is claimed.

The Alzheimer's Society says patients with dementia stay far longer than patients being treated for the same illness or injury without dementia ...

The main reasons for a hospital stay were falls, broken hips or hip replacements, urine infections, chest infections and strokes.

The average length of a hospital stay is about a week but more than half (57%) of dementia patients with a broken or fractured hip stayed two weeks or more.

For urinary tract infections more than half (53%) stayed two weeks or more.

Nearly half of the carers (47%) said being in hospital had a significantly negative effect on the general physical health of the person with dementia.

And more than half (54%) said being in hospital had made the symptoms of dementia worse ...

The Patients' Association said it was a "sad indictment" of the priority our society gives to elderly people.

"There is now an overwhelming amount of evidence that elderly patients are being neglected in hospitals across the NHS.

"Whether they have dementia or not, if they are in need of help with personal care many of them won't get it. Time after time the issue is raised, but the problems continue." ...

BBC NEWS  17 November 2009

Health trusts prescribing 'chemical cosh' to Alzheimer's patients

Top

Fears over care home drug errors

Elderly people living in care homes are being put at risk because of sub-standard systems for handing out medicine, according to a report.

University of London researchers found seven in 10 residents were victims of drug errors, having carried out half-day snapshot inspections of 55 homes.

They blamed inadequate information, over-worked staff, poor teamwork and often complex courses of medication ...

... the majority of teams working in more than 20,000 care homes across the UK do not include people with clinical training.

During the inspections, which took place in the mornings when two-thirds of the daily drug courses would be taken, researchers gathered data on 256 residents.

In total, mistakes were made in 178 cases with many the victims of more than one error ...

BBC NEWS  05 October 2009

Top

'Free personal care' for elderly

Free personal care will be introduced so the frailest can be cared for in their own homes, Prime Minister Gordon Brown has pledged.

Under what is being dubbed the National Care Service, some 350,000 people with "the highest needs" would receive home care regardless of personal wealth.

Currently anyone with savings over £23,500 receives no state assistance.

Ministers hope to implement the scheme in England by mid-2010 ...

The National Care Service will bring together the NHS and local authorities which currently provide social services, Mr Brown said.

The proposals for personal care will affect some 350,000 people in England who require assistance with every aspect of day-to-day living - from dressing to cooking. It would not apply to those already in residential care, but in principle help people to remain in their homes.

A total of £400 million a year will be taken from low priority areas of the NHS budget, including marketing and communications, to help pay for the plan ...

BBC NEWS  29 September 2009

Top

Victory for lawyer who protected the elderly

A solicitor who devoted herself to improving the lives of hundreds of disabled and elderly care-home residents has won a historic battle which had threatened to end her career.

Yvonne Hossack, 53, was yesterday cleared of professional misconduct after local councils, angered by her successful campaigns to stop the closure of care homes, mounted a "witch- hunt" to get her removed from the solicitors' roll.

The case has given hope to thousands of other professional campaigners and charities which work against the odds to improve the lives of disabled and elderly people ...

Ms Hassock, previously shortlisted for a human rights award, built her legal practice out of helping residents challenge the power of local authorities to shut down care homes.

But Ms Hossack's high-profile campaigning brought her unwelcome attention from local authorities in Northamptonshire, Hull and Staffordshire, who regarded her activities as an embarrassing obstacle to their cost-cutting plans.

They used technical rules about working with clients in an attempt to get Ms Hossack struck off. The case was prosecuted by the Solicitors' Regulatory Authority.

But in a hearing this week, clients and families came forward to praise the work of Ms Hossack ...

In a dramatic twist to the case this week, the Home Secretary, Alan Johnson, was called as a witness to help save her career.

He told the tribunal that he had sent emails congratulating her for the work she had done.

Yesterday the panel of judges dismissed all the most serious charges against her, leaving Ms Hossack to describe the terrible stress and trauma of her disciplinary ordeal.

Independent  19 September 2009

Top

NHS nurses attacked for 'cruel' treatment of elderly patients

Many elderly patients are being treated in a demeaning manner by a small number of "bad, cruel nurses" according to a report published today by the Patients Association.

The charity's investigation presents 16 stories in detail from a database of hundreds of stories from patients and their relatives who claim to have been badly treated by the NHS.

It reveals stories of people allegedly left lying in their own faeces and urine, having call bells taken away from them and being left without food or drink.

LordBrett
27 Aug 09, 9:10am

... The training game now is `bums on seats`- universities are under pressure (from themselves mainly) to fill courses.

When I interview for student nurses, I am told we are short of (number) of places.

I know that out of 40 students, perhaps 5 will be very good, 20 ok - mediocre and the rest awful.

When they inevitably start to fail written work and/or placements, we are practically told to move heaven and earth to keep them, because each student is worth thousands.

We are even told teaching jobs are on the line if we lose students.

That`s why I`m leaving - its all become like an episode of The Wire.

Guardian 27 August 2009

Patients Not Numbers, People Not statistics

The Patients Association has campaigned for many years to improve the quality of care provided by the NHS and throughout that time our efforts have been fuelled by the accounts we receive from patients and their relatives through our HelpLine on a daily basis.

As a consistent pattern of shocking standards of care has emerged we have decided to publish a number of these accounts to highlight the unacceptable experiences facing patients up and down the country on a regular basis.

The Patients Association calls on Government and the Care Quality Commission to conduct an urgent review of the standards of basic care being received by patients in hospital and demands stricter supervision and regulation of hospital care ...

Extracts from the accounts:

Account 1: Leslie Kirk

"Toilets were not cleaned properly with faeces clearly left from several previous uses. My sister often had to clean them herself before she'd let my father use them."

"At no time during my father's stay on the ward did we feel there was anyone who cared for patients enough and who took responsibility for ensuring they got the attention they needed."

Account 2: Pamela Goddard

"Upsettingly for my brother who visited her frequently, she was often found in her own faeces and urine when he arrived. He would need to prompt staff to come and wash and change her."

Account 3: Florence Weston

"She was also told that, because of being unable to use the toilet facilities through being immobile, she should wet the bed. This was highly embarrassing for her. Even worse, on one occasion, a night nurse told her off for doing this severely enough to reduce her to tears and cause her to ask me if she could go home."

Account 4: Oenone Hewlett

"When she arrived at Wexham Accident and Emergency following her stay at St Marks, the doctor thought she must have been at home alone and neglecting herself. We had to explain she had been in hospital. He couldn't understand how she could've become so dehydrated."

Account 5: Bella Bailey

"Confused patients often wandered around semi naked and some staff passed them by in the corridor without a care. Night time and weekends were the worst. Night time was often the most busiest and noisiest. Staff squealed and giggled whilst patients tried to grab a bit of sleep in between their discomforts."

Account 6: Thomas Milner

"The nurse also failed to provide incontinence pads as had been done during the evening and night before. He was bleeding rectally and he ended up laying in urine and blood. He also wet the floor and my elderly mother wiped this up while the nurse and assistant nurse watched on and did nothing to help. They did not even bring a mop and bucket afterwards to disinfect the floor."

Account 7: Anne McNeill

"I remember on one occasion I visited her and found her sitting in a chair with her own vomit all over her clothes. It was dried so it seemed as if it must have been left there for some time. There was also dried vomit in bowl next to her. I looked up and down the ward and couldn't find a nurse anywhere."

Account 8: Thomas George Dalziel

"When we were taken to his bed we were not prepared for the horrific sight of seeing him, eyes wide open with a resuscitation tube down his throat. This image has traumatised not only us but also my sister and brother in law for the rest of our lives!"

Account 9: Jayne Knowles Smith

"I used to pride myself on being a nurse and hopefully I was caring and thoughtful. I have had the misfortune of seeing nursing from another angle as a patient. It's a scary world out in the wards. I'm not sure if it's the training that's lacking, the basic skills or just understaffing."

Account 10: Colin Richard Purkiss Smith

"That evening my husband wanted to go to the toilet. I needed help from staff to take him and so I asked staff for help. Over an hour later still no one had come and my husband had an accident in the bed. I went outside of the room to the nursing station to get one of the staff to get clean sheets for the bed and when I looked, I noticed that one of the staff on duty was surfing the internet."

Account 11: John David Drake

"I then went to the Hospital and when we arrived at the Ward, we were both shocked to see the state that my Husband was in. My Husband appeared very de-hydrated and even more confused. My Husband had not been washed and neither was there water on my Husband's locker. I washed my Husband myself and gave him a lot of water to drink. It took some time as it was hard for him to swallow but with some patience and care he was able to drink plenty of water to quench his thirst."

Account 12: Professor Leslie C Vaughan

" I find it unacceptable that a man at this point so obviously close to the end of his life should be left alone behind a curtain on a busy ward. The staff had phoned us and knew we were coming so that they surely could have spared a sympathetic nurse to sit with him until we arrived.

Account 13: Margaret Bristo

"Often you would stand right in front of them (the nurses station) but staff would keep their heads down and avoid eye contact with you. All my brothers and sisters felt the same. One even said asked "am I invisible" after being ignored time and time again."

Account 14: Alice Fowler

"I witnessed patients struggling to open plastic packages of sandwiches and/or fruit juice. Sometimes if patients weren't awake during meal times their food was left uncovered without any attempt to wake them or encourage them to eat. The food would then be taken away untouched."

Account 15: Barbara McVernon

"A few mornings after Mum's admission, I arrived to discover a patient with dementia in her room, going through her belongings. When the old lady refused to leave and became aggressive, I rang the nurses' bell but no one responded. I was reduced to shouting down the corridor. Eventually a non-uniformed woman came and led her away."

Account 16: Patient A

"The toilet was disgusting. It was soiled and had a soiled toilet brush. The public toilets downstairs were bad enough, often dirty and blocked. It's horrifying to see this in a hospital let alone on a ward. There are countries poorer than us yet their hospitals are clean and immaculate." ...

The Patients Association

'Cruel and neglectful' care

Top

Alzheimer's is not a 'health condition'

NHS Worcestershire ruled that Judith Roe, 74, did not qualify for NHS funding because her condition was a "social" rather than "health" problem, even though she was so ill she could not make a cup of tea and regularly left the stove on.

She was forced to sell her £200,000 home to pay her £600-a-week nursing home fees, which would have been funded if she had been categorised correctly ...

Telegraph  18 August 2009

Alzheimer's carers awarded £300,000

Top

Elderly 'put at risk' by axing of 24-hour wardens

Dozens of councils and housing trusts are facing legal action after axing 24-hour wardens from sheltered housing and allegedly hastening the deaths of some pensioners and causing agony and distress for others.

Now, instead of a full-time guardian on the premises, many of the estimated half a million sheltered home residents receive no more than a daily check call over an intercom ...

Until April, £1.6bn of government grants to local councils was ring-fenced for "supporting people" projects such as hostels, refuges and sheltered housing. Now, with that ring-fence removed, local councils can spend it on whatever they consider their priorities. This has meant removing wardens from sheltered accommodation and introducing "floating support" – wardens who visit daily or weekly ...

Some private housing companies began reducing the number of wardens some years ago, with devastating consequences. Anona Thorpe died from hypothermia aged 70 in July last year after falling in her sitting room in her Derby residential home. Several days passed before she was spotted unconscious behind the sofa by neighbours.

The warden had been removed months earlier following a cost-cutting shake-up of housing support that saw visits cut from daily to monthly. The coroner criticised the housing provider, Derby Homes, for not telling her relatives about the reduction in care ...

Observer 09 August 2009

Top

Benefits system has failed poor pensioners

Victims of 'Complexity' Brown

Means-tested benefits have failed to lift more than two million pensioners out of poverty, according to a group of MPs who are calling on the government to make a bigger effort to increase the incomes of poor people in retirement.

A further one million pensioners live on less than 50% of average incomes, the report found, highlighting the increasing divide between those over-65s without private savings and workers in generous final salary pensions who can enjoy incomes equal to 80% to 90% of their pre-retirement salary when state benefits are included ...

MPs on the select committee said it was already the case that two million pensioners were missing out on means-tested benefits, mainly because they were complicated and government agencies were failing to advertise them ...

Guardian  30 July 2009

Pensioner poverty 'unacceptable'

UK elderly fourth poorest in EU

Top

A squeeze on attendance allowance support

Putting people second

Attendance allowance is £47.10 or £70.35 a week, depending on need, and paid to 1.6 million people in Britain aged 65 and over. Yet the social care green paper, launched earlier this month, suggests converting attendance allowance into some kind of means-tested social care grant administered by councils.

"In developing the new system we think that there is a case for drawing some funding streams together to enable us to deliver the new and better care and support system we want to create," says the green paper.

It continues: "We think we should consider integrating some elements of disability benefits, for example attendance allowance, to create a new offer for individuals with care needs."

The argument for ditching the allowance is that it is not means-tested and duplicates the local government social care assessment and grant process. The Department of Health argues that the current system is fragmented and complex to understand, access and administer. "To meet the challenge of more people needing care, we want to target public money as effectively as possible," says a DH spokesman ...

Gladys Humphries, 82, from Lowestoft in Suffolk, is blind and cares for her husband James, 83, who has severe Alzheimer's disease. Her attendance allowance not only pays for taxis for hospital appointments but opened the door to pension credit and council tax benefit, resulting in an extra £150 a week. If it were scrapped she would lose all this money and would not be able to care for her husband, since she would not qualify for a social care grant.

Gladys cannot understand why the system should change. She says: "I would say to the government, put yourself in my position and see how you would cope without the extra money. Please, please think again before you do anything."

Guardian  29 July 2009

UK elderly fourth poorest in EU

Pensioners' lost millions

Top

UK elderly fourth poorest in EU

The UK has the fourth-highest level of poverty among over 65s in Europe, behind countries like Romania, European Commission figures have shown.

The figures reveal many British pensioners are living on incomes far below the national average.

The European Commission figures come shortly before the Work and Pension Committee's review of government efforts on pension poverty is published on Thursday.

The EU research, which compares relative poverty in the 27 member states, shows nearly one in three UK over-65s were living in poverty in 2007, the same proportion as in Lithuania (30%) ...

BBC NEWS  27 July 2009

Top

'Shaping the Future of Care Together'

Launching a consultation on the future of social care, the health secretary, Andy Burnham, told the House of Commons he wanted to create a system which was "fair, simple and affordable" to all.

He has already ruled out full state funding from general taxation, on the grounds it would place too great a burden on people of working age ...

Today he called on the public to give their views three possible solutions:

• A "partnership" approach, under which the state would pay around a quarter to a third of the cost of basic social care and support, leaving individuals to find the remainder;

• A voluntary insurance scheme, under which the state would pay the same proportion, but would also make it easier for individuals to take out insurance – at an estimated cost of around £20,000 to £25,000 at today's prices – to cover the rest;

• Compulsory insurance for all, costing around £17,000 to £20,000 at today's prices and providing free care for all who need it.

The national care service would offer assistance with needs such as dressing, washing and moving around at home, but individuals who need to go into residential care would continue to pay the cost of accommodation and food themselves, whether they had taken out insurance or not ...

Guardian  15 July 2009

Care: New ideas for old problems

Labour accused of doing too little, too late

Care funding: pros and cons of the options

Elderly face £20,000 bill for social care

Cough up! Advent of the National Care Service

Top

Debts that threaten the elderly and vulnerable

Resident A still cannot be identified, because his death was so contentious. What we know is that a man in his sixties was living at Newark Care Home in Port Glasgow, Renfrewshire. The modern 61-bed home is owned by Southern Cross, the biggest elderly care home provider in the UK.

A nurse, it is claimed, was responsible for administering to Resident A an anti-coagulant drug but allegedly failed to do so. The man's foot turned blue. Rushed to hospital too late, Resident A had his foot amputated and later died.

Two weeks ago, the Nursing and Midwifery Council sat to decide whether the nurse was incompetent and covered up her failure to give the injections. The nurse denies the charge. The tribunal adjudicating the case understands there may be suggestions that others shared responsibility. The case continues.

Unquestionably, caring for the elderly is far from easy. Yet the Resident A case is the latest in a long line of serious problems affecting Southern Cross. The quoted giant, with revenues totalling £889.4m, has been prosecuted five times in seven years after a series of deaths and safety failings.

Last January, eight pensioners died in an Oxfordshire home from chest-related infections over a two-week period after the central heating broke down for up to 10 days over Christmas. Southern Cross said they provided temporary heaters and that temperatures did not fall below the recommended level; investigators issued the home with a "requirement notice to improve" for not informing the authorities of the heating failure or the deaths of residents sooner, but did not hold it responsible as there was no evidence of a link between the heating breakdown and the deaths.

With 730 homes and 37,000 beds, Southern Cross has a 10% share of what is a fragmented market. Offering a range of services, including nursing, residential and dementia care, the Darlington-based company employs 41,000 staff. Floated on the stock exchange by Blackstone, the US private equity giant, in 2006, it was valued at £425m; Blackstone quadrupled its original investment.

But Southern Cross, like many of its rivals, has since faced a series of serious challenges caused by the bursting of the leverage bubble that helped turn it into a plc. Since it floated three years ago, it has seen the back of two chief executives and three finance directors. Its business model was undermined by the property crash and shareholders have seen much of their investment wiped out.

Worryingly, its care is rated well below average by the UK's health watchdog, the Care Quality Commission, with 29% of its homes deemed adequate or poor, the two lowest categories in the rating system. A series of deaths at homes it owns has now attracted the attention of MPs, who are demanding an independent inquiry into the company ...

Guardian 17 May 2009

Rising death rate hits Southern Cross profit

Worries about the care home operator first surfaced late last year when Philip Scott, chief executive, quit to be followed shortly by Mr Sizer.

In November, The Sunday Times conducted an undercover investigation, with a reporter posing as a carer, and documented a series of alleged abuses and said the home was under-resourced and understaffed.

The company said it was convinced the home was providing a proper standard of care. However, the negative publicity may have impacted the number of admissions it received since.

Bill Colvin, chairman and a former director of rival care home operator NHP, stepped into the chief executive role to replace Mr Scott.

The Times 30 June 2008

Southern Cross: Latest News

Media House

Southern Cross Healthcare cuts debt

Southern Cross is a star as profits soar 24%

Southern Cross in emergency talks over £46m loan deadline

Southern Cross homes in on profits

Turkey of the week

Care homes firm eyes £550m float

Blackstone Acquires Southern Cross Healthcare

AEA

Top

Leaking roofs, incontinence pads on the floor ...
... thousands in care homes forced to 'live in filth'

The full horror of conditions in England's dirtiest care homes has been revealed. Watchdogs found that 169 care homes – one in 60 – had 'major failings' on hygiene and cleanliness. This meant they were squalid and had a shoddy attitude to infection control ...

Daily Mail 10 March 2009

England’s dirtiest care homes must be shut down

Top

'Liquid cosh' treatment kills dementia patients

Sufferers in care homes 'kept quiet' to give staff an easier time, study finds

The lives of more than 100,000 people with Alzheimer's disease in Britain are at risk because of the toxic effects of the "liquid cosh", powerful sedatives widely used to suppress difficult behaviour, a study shows.

The drugs, called antipsychotics, were developed for patients with schizophrenia and similar mental illnesses but are also prescribed to control agitation, delusions and aggression which can occur in patients with Alzheimer's and other dementias. Researchers have now found that the death rate of patients dosed with the drugs was 70 per cent higher after three years, compared with those given placebo.

Experts have warned for more than a decade that antipsychotic drugs have been overused to keep patients quiet and give staff in care homes an easier life, to the detriment of the patients. But this is the first conclusive evidence of their lethal effects. The NHS watchdog, the National Institute for health and Clinical Excellence (Nice), recommends that the drugs should be used in severe cases only for short periods. But the average length of time they are prescribed for Alzheimer's is one to two years, the researchers say. ...

The Independent 09 January 2009

Top

£6bn black hole in funding of care for older people

A looming £6bn black hole in the funding of social care for older people in England was acknowledged last night by Alan Johnson, the health secretary.

He said the cost of maintaining the current, often inadequate level of personal care services was set to double to more than £24bn in 2026 as a result of rapid growth in the number of frail older people. Without new sources of funding, the government expects "a £6bn funding gap for social care" to emerge within 20 years.

Johnson will today launch a six-month public consultation on how individuals, families and taxpayers might be expected to share the costs of providing a satisfactory service.

The problem is understood to be regarded in Whitehall as possibly the most serious challenge to public services over the next 20 years, during which the number of people over 85 is likely to double and the cost of disability benefits is expected to increase by 50%. ...

Guardian   12 May 2008

Top

Thousands of elderly abused in care homes

The first ever audit of calls to England's social care watchdog shows that more than 1,000 were made in just six months by people who suspected their relations or friends were being abused by care workers.

Social services chiefs estimate that a further 60,000 "alert calls" are made directly to local councils every year.

The Commission for Social Care Inspection (CSCI) has uncovered homes where residents were routinely tied to their beds and chairs, locked up or dragged around by their hair. Some were refused food to punish "bad behaviour", denied trips to the lavatory or stolen from by staff.

The figures show that 1,043 calls were made to the CSCI in the six months ending in March, regarding 506 residential homes and agencies providing home helps. No national statistics are kept on the number of cases logged when relations contact councils to raise concerns. ...

The inspectorate has already said 248 homes do not meet basic safety standards. Investigations have revealed a woman of 85 who had her fingernails ripped off by a care worker, a 78‑year‑old covered in cigarette burns, and a number of thefts of pensions by "home helps".

Charities are calling for new laws to oblige councils that are told about possible abuse to investigate, as is the case in child protection. They say the current voluntary system means social workers and police fail to step in even when relations identify risks. ...

Telegraph 04 May 2008

Report slams elderly care home treatment

---

Top

'Prozac Nation'

Grandfather's killer gets life Depression costs economy £8.6bn a year Catastrophic shortage of psychiatrists Call to increase child therapists 'social concentration camps' Criminalising mentally ill people Four psychiatric patients dying each NHS discriminates against over-65s Free therapy Depression among the young 'alarming' Sexual assault in hospitals Many mental health wards 'poor' Karen Reissmann Cheap Labour LSE Depression Report Affluenza Guardian: Mental Health The Moral Tyrannies of Therapy

Cartesian Dualism and the Mentally Ill Peadar Kirby looks at the treatment of the “mentally ill” in Western countries, and argues that notions of ‘individuation’ - springing from Cartesian ‘dualism’ - are seen as the key to treating mental health problems: The mind is separate from the body, the disease from the person who has it ... people become the 'objects' rather than the 'subjects' of their own activity ... This dominant Western psychology of the self ... has led to the emergence of a psychotherapeutic model that is largely based on individualistic assumptions. In such a schema, 'individuation' and a strong separate ego are seen as the key to mental health. This constricted sense of self highlights our division from one another, and allows for the objectification of others and ourselves. ... The ideological framework informing much of the psychological treatment given to those who are labelled 'mentally ill', identifies their behaviour as 'abnormal' ... the moral and political dimensions of the deviant behaviour are not addressed. Illness in such a world view is an individual matter. There is no language of social suffering that can speak to the moral and political experience of both sufferer and the suffering community ... Denial of the desire to live in harmony with the natural world leads to alienation, numbness, anxiety and depression. [VaV page 156, pbk edition 2006]

Top

Grandfather's killer gets life

A MENTAL patient who stabbed a devoted granddad to death while being cared for in the community has been jailed for life.

Paul Cusack, 33, had showed the murder weapon to social workers just six days before he attacked Sidney Waller at Mauldeth Road West in Withington.

Cusack, an habitual crack cocaine user who had spoken of murderous impulses as long ago as 2001 and was known to carry a knife, pleaded guilty to manslaughter on the grounds of diminished responsibility last December.

Judge Gilbart QC sentenced Cusack to a indeterminate sentence for the public protection and told him he must serve five years before he can be considered for parole, and even if released, he would spend the rest of his life on licence.

Judge Gilbart, the honorary recorder of Manchester, said he was not passing sentence under the Mental Health Act because there were no beds available ...

"i remember well how ms Reissman raised issues concerning mental health provision in manchester.

There are two underlying issues that remain unresolved and will mean a very similar incident happening again in the future.

firstly Assertive Outreach, who have responsibility for dealing with the hard to engage people in the community are not up to the job, previously they were a small scale group operating under the name of Engage and have taken on too much by winning the tender for the assertive outreach service.

Secondly there is a chronic shortage of bed spaces available in Manchester meaning that people in crisis are left in the community not through a clinical decision but one based on the availability of beds..

i imagine that the decision not to section mr Cusack went something like this " hes missing appointments, he has shown us a knife and is back on drugs".. but is he showing signs of mental distress ?

"no" in that case we have not got enough to put him in hospital, you know the situation with beds!

minnie royle

21/09/2009 at 19:11

MEN  21 September 2009

'Why did you kill my dad?'

'Voices' stab man pleads guilty

Catalogue of failure in 'voices' killing

Karen Reissmann: Manchester Mental Health Cuts

Assertive Outreach

Assertive Outreach Teams

Minister hails mental health service success

Mental health team averts likely violence and detention

An Examination of the Use of Coercion by Assertive Outreach ... Teams in Northern Ireland

Mental illness drug payments call

Top

Depression costs economy £8.6bn a year

The blight of depression affecting hundreds of thousands of people across Britain is costing the nation's ailing economy £8.6bn a year, £3bn more than a decade ago, The Independent can reveal.

Mental health workers are demanding more funds to attempt to turn around the rising cost to the country of the condition, which leads to lost working hours, inefficiency and long-term unemployment. But many fear spending will be squeezed further by a reduced NHS budget, which looks increasingly likely ...

Jo Swinson, the Liberal Democrat MP who commissioned the figures, described the findings as "shocking evidence of the dramatic scale of the cost of depression".

She said: "Unemployment is already growing. In this financial crisis we can no longer afford to ignore the preventable causes of depression that are all around us. High levels of unsecured personal debt, job insecurity and workplace stress all damage our wellbeing. More Government focus on mental health and wellbeing makes economic sense. Measures to tackle workplace stress, extend flexible working rights, encourage responsible lending and keep people in work, would benefit us all. Ministers can no longer allow mental health care to be a Cinderella service." ...

The Independent 16 June 2009

A depressingly widespread problem

Cheap Labour

Top

Catastrophic shortage of psychiatrists on NHS

Prof Robert Howard, dean of the Royal College of Psychiatrists (RCP), said the number of UK doctors was far too few to fill hundreds of training posts.

He pointed to an over-reliance on overseas doctors, saying some were brilliant but cultural awareness was an essential part of being a good psychiatrist ...

Telegraph 04 June 2009

Top

Call to increase child therapists

Children's mental health services need an extra 1,000 therapists to help them cope with demand, an influential government adviser has warned.

Lord Layard, whose advice prompted a recent £173m investment in adult therapists, said training of child specialists should start in 2010.

Over a three-year period, his proposals would cost £35m, his report said.

Around 10% of children have diagnosable mental health problems, said Lord Layard, who is emeritus professor of economics at the London School of Economics.

But only a quarter of them have seen a mental health professional of any kind in the past year.

This "unsatisfactory" state of affairs has serious long-term consequences, he said in his report.

To address the shortfall, 200 child therapists need to be trained every year for five years, he has calculated.

The additional workforce could be drawn from those who already have experience working with distressed children.

Any additional costs are relatively small compared with the NHS budget for mental health, which was £9.1bn in 2006/07 ...

BBC NEWS 04 May 2009

Child depression drug use soars

Top

Britain's estates are 'social concentration camps'

Millions of people have been condemned to live under "social apartheid" by 30 years of poor housing policies, a damning report on council estates will say this week.

The 107-page report, to be published on Friday, condemns successive governments for pushing poorer people into what it condemns as "social concentration camps" set away from private housing, jobs and shops.

Children born on such estates are more likely to end up unemployed, suffer mental health problems and die younger than their counterparts in private housing, says the study by the Fabian Society. Most damningly for the Government, it concludes that pledges by the then Prime Minister Tony Blair to end "no-go areas" and close of the gap between rich and poor have ended in failure.

The report, entitled In the Mix, finds that by concentrating council housing in estates set apart from the wider community, successive governments have produced a situation where living in social housing is not just a sign of poverty but a cause in itself.

It is blunt in assessing Britain's housing policy as "nothing short of disastrous" ...

The gulf between those left stranded on these estates and rich or even middle-income families is wider now than it was 30 years ago. In England and Wales, the average electoral ward is 16 per cent public housing, but in the poorest wards that figure rises to 70 per cent or more.

By splitting up those living in public and private housing, successive governments have fostered suspicion towards those who live on council estates. Research for the study found that a third of those polled felt people living on council estates had "nothing in common with them", and 60 per cent of those believed that mixed housing would be a bad idea.

It concludes that segregated estates have had a devastating effect on social mobility. "There is nothing inevitable about this correlation between housing and disadvantage. It has been caused by political and institutional processes – and such processes can be arrested and altered."

The Independent 03 May 2009

Top

Mentally ill inmates support call

A report on diverting mentally ill offenders from the prison system is set to call for better assessment and treatment and more community sentences.

It is expected to highlight how anti-social behaviour orders and penalty notices can accelerate the treatment of mentally ill people as criminals.

Lord Bradley's report is expected to make 80 recommendations it says could save thousands of prison places.

Some estimates suggest 70% of inmates have two or more mental disorders.

One in 10 has serious mental health problems, it is also estimated.

The report published on Thursday aims to "deal with what everyone in the criminal justice system accepts is a major problem", says BBC home affairs correspondent Rory Maclean.

Lord Bradley is expected to call for proper assessment of mental health and learning difficulties in custody suites ...

BBC NEWS 30 April 2009

Prison Reform Trust

Doubly punished

Jail healthcare 'not good enough'

Rise in use of secure hospitals

'Too many' mentally ill in jails

Top

Four psychiatric patients dying each day in NHS care

The NHS is today castigated for providing "inadequate" psychiatric help to vulnerable mental health patients, as new figures reveal an average of four deaths a day among those in its care.

Data collected by the National Patient Safety Agency (NPSA) shows that 1,282 people in England died in what it calls "patient safety incidents in mental health settings" in the period 2007-08.

Another 913 patients - more than two a day - suffered what is termed severe harm, or permanent injuries, in such incidents.

The figures include patients who died as a result of self-harming behaviour, including suicide, disruptive or aggressive behaviour, medication safety errors and accidents, although it is not specified how many deaths fell into each category ...

Paul Corry of the mental health charity Rethink was equally critical:

"These figures are very disturbing and unacceptably high. Almost 1,300 deaths in a year is far too many. The NPSA data tell us that too often NHS care for mental health patients is poor."

The NHS has reduced the number of suicides in psychiatric hospitals in recent years, said Corry, but guidelines intended to help another vulnerable group - mentally ill people who have recently returned home from care, among whom suicides are common - are widely ignored.

"Every mental patient who returns home is supposed to be visited within seven days to check on their mental state and see if they are feeling suicidal," he said. "In places where it's done it helps to stop people taking their own lives. But very often it doesn't happen." ...

Observer 12 April 2009

'If only the nurse had said there was a problem'

Mental Health

Rethink

National Patient Safety Agency

Top

NHS discriminates against over-65s

NHS mental health services often discriminate against people over 65 by withholding treatment that is freely available to younger adults, the Healthcare Commission said today.

It found older people in many parts of England do not have access to out-of-hours services, crisis support, psychological therapies, and programmes to tackle alcohol or drug abuse.

They are often excluded on grounds of age without any attempt to discover whether they would qualify on the basis of need ...

A second study from the commission found gaps in community mental health services for all adults. Almost half of the people needing specialist mental healthcare do not have an out-of-hours number to call if they are in a crisis.

And 55% of people with schizophrenia have not been offered recommended psychological therapies.

Guardian 31 March 2009

Mental services 'shut to elderly'

Elderly mental health care 'poor'

Elderly mental health 'neglected'

Elderly care 'a stain on country'

Top

Victims of recession to get free therapy

Fears of a depression and an anxiety epidemic, caused by the recession, are forcing the government to offer psychological help to millions of people facing unemployment, debt and relationship breakdown. Sufferers will be referred to psychotherapists for expert counselling via an advice network linking Jobcentres, doctors' surgeries and a new NHS Direct hotline.

Under the plan, which will involve training 3,600 more therapists and hundreds more specialist nurses, psychotherapy centres will be established in every primary care trust by the end of next year.

The moves, to be unveiled by health secretary Alan Johnson and work and pensions secretary James Purnell today, reflect growing anxiety in government that there will be a surge of people who become mentally ill and, as a result, could find themselves unemployed for the long term ...

Johnson will announce that 81 "talking-therapy services", offering cognitive behavioural therapy, a method by which people are encouraged to look more at potential solutions than the causes of their difficulties, will be set up this year - a 25% increase on the planned number.

A network of employment support workers will be set up at every centre to give advice on how to get back to work. While doctors will initially put sufferers in touch with therapists, ministers want to move towards a system in which people could refer themselves by walking into centres and asking for treatment.

Ministers have already pledged to invest £173m to plug glaring gaps in the provision of mental health services. But, as unemployment moves past the 2 million mark, much of the funding is to be accelerated and brought forward to this year, with the focus switching to mental health problems ...

The Observer 08 March 2009

Britain 'is true Prozac Nation'

Mentally ill employees to get support at work

Whitehall battle over army of therapists

Affluenza

The Depression Report

The Moral Tyrannies of Therapy

Top

Depression among the young at alarming level

A significant number of young people are depressed or struggling to cope and the situation is likely to worsen as recession takes hold, according to a report by the Prince's Trust.

One in 10 16- to 25-year-olds polled by the charity for its Youth Index study said they felt that life was meaningless, and more than a quarter (27%) said they were always or often down or depressed.

Almost half of all those surveyed (47%) said they were regularly stressed ...

Peter Kellner, of YouGov, which conducted the research, said the majority of young people had a generally positive outlook on life. He warned, however, that the serious concerns of the "core" of unhappy people under the age of 25 "need to be addressed". He added that failing to take the issue seriously "would be storing up big problems for the future" ...

Guardian 05 January 2009    Warning over youth mental health

Top

Sexual assault in hospitals

NHS has failed to stop sexual assaults on patients

You report (25 September) about the number of sexual assaults and rapes which have occurred while female patients are being treated in psychiatric units. The dismissal of the figures by the government "mental health tsar", Professor Louis Appleby, shows just how out of touch this government appears to be on the subject.

My own wife was sexually assaulted and seduced by a member of staff over a period of two months while being "treated" in a mixed-sex ward at a local inpatient unit. Despite the sexual assault, seduction and attempted exploitation being reported to them at the time, the NHS trust involved did nothing about it. I consider this to be a gross breach of duty by the trust to protect her from exploitation by their own member of staff, whose motive was to try to gain access to our money.

By the time the police got round to investigating matters (at my request), several months later, my wife was so ill and traumatised by all that had happened that she was not able to testify. This must be so in many cases, and it is the very vulnerability of many female patients which is why some less fortunate individuals are exploited, sexually assaulted, or raped. As far as I know such abuse and exploitation may right now be continuing in the very psychiatric unit where my wife was – since we have never been told what they have done to stop it being perpetrated again by the same predatory male healthcare worker, who still works for them.

Name and address supplied

Letter: The Independent 30 September 2008

Top

Many mental health wards 'poor'

The Healthcare Commission assessed all 69 mental health trusts in England, covering nearly 10,000 hospital beds.

Nearly a quarter of the beds were run by organisations given the bottom weak rating by the watchdog, with no trust top-scoring in all four key criteria. ...

The smaller trusts tended to perform better, meaning large numbers of inpatient mental health beds were in trusts that were given a weak rating.

Overall, eight trusts were rated as excellent, accounting for 843 beds, 20 were good, accounting for 2,808 beds, 30 were fair, accounting for 3,985 beds, and 11 week, accounting for 2,249 beds ...

BBC NEWS 22 July 2008

Mental health inquiry reveals security failures

Mental health poll reveals stigma

Top

The Sacking of Karen Reissmann

Tragedy in Manchester shows real cost of NHS cuts

The terrible cost of cuts in Manchester’s mental health services is clearly illustrated by the death of William Scott, a 49 year old man from Manchester. William suffered multiple stab wounds that his family say were self inflicted. This tragedy was neither unforeseen nor inevitable.

William had recently lost the support worker who had cared for him for the past eight and half years.

His family had pleaded with bosses at Manchester mental health and social care trust, who had recently “reorganised” their services, to allow William’s support worker to resume their visits, but to no avail. ...

William’s daughter Emma told the Manchester Evening News, “We tried desperately to get my dad admitted to hospital. I asked them, ‘Does he have to hurt himself or someone else before he gets help?’

“He had an excellent support worker who visited him two or three times a week, but after they left, dad went for three weeks without any home visits.”

In the week following William’s death, another vulnerable patient took her own life. According to the Manchester Evening News she was upset after her support worker was moved on. ...

Socialist Worker 23 October 2007

Karen Reissmann, a nurse for 25 years and an elected member of Unison’s national health service group executive, was suspended from work on June 15th. On a Friday afternoon, an important outpatient appointment with a very vulnerable patient and her consultant was interrupted, and on the direct orders of the chief executive, she was instructed to leave the out-patient consultation and the hospital. [RKR]

You can't go round telling people you've been sacked

healthemergency.org.uk

Reinstate Karen Reissmann

Reinstate Karen Reissmann

‘Executive coach’ hired to investigate Unison activist Karen Reissmann

Cheap Labour

... Apart from enabling a basic level of economic success, sufficient to pay for food, health and education, the purpose of government is to minimise the amount of mental illness by creating a benign society, like the Scandinavians have been doing for 70 years. Blatcherism has done the opposite. If you can face it, here's a glimpse of what really happened to our social psychology in the past 10 years, starting at the beginning of life.

Foetuses depend on having calm, happy mothers. There is abundant evidence that feeling stressed in the last trimester is an independent cause of hyperactivity and behaviour problems. The mother's high levels of cortisol - the fight-flight hormone - are passed through the placenta and continue to affect the child nine years later. Yet, since 1997, women have been more, not less, likely to work right up to the birth.

It just goes on from there, as if the New Labour control freaks are oblivious to the evidence of what makes for mental health. Caesareans have multiplied several-fold, even though they interfere with bonding. British babies are even less likely to be breastfed than anywhere in Europe, again reducing emotional intimacy. Then, mental illness-inducing strict routines for babies, like insistence on four-hourly feeding or imposed sleep schedules, have become widespread. Where is the government action, following the damning study of this method published last year? It shows that, compared with babies raised in infant-centred regimes (for example, demand-feeding or sharing the parental bed when distressed), at three months the routine-nurtured babies spend 50 per cent more time crying or fussing: the Discontented Little Baby. ...

Oliver James The Independent, 13 May 2007

Infected by affluenza

Top

LSE Depression Report

The report reveals the following striking facts:

• There are more mentally ill people on incapacity benefits than the total number of unemployed people on benefit. ..

• One in six of all people suffer from depression or chronic anxiety, which affects one in three of all families.

• Only a quarter of those who are ill are receiving any treatment – in most cases medication.

• Modern evidence-based psychological therapy is as effective as medication and is preferred by the majority of patients.

• In most areas, waiting lists are over nine months, if therapy is available at all. • A course of therapy costs £750 and pays for itself in money saved on incapacity benefits and lost tax receipts.

• We can therefore provide a service in every area at no net cost. This would require 10,000 therapists and 250 local services, with 40 new services opened each year till 2013. With proper leadership from the centre and protected funding, this is totally feasible.

LSE 19 June 2006

---

Top

There's No Such Thing as Society - More Links

Gangster Economics

MediaLens

Neoliberalism

The Corporate State

'There's No Such Thing as Society'

The Trap

The triumph of greed

Vulnerability & Violence

Vulture Funds

---

Back to top      Home Page