review of the Papers, Thursday 29 March

Government  

• Home secretary John Reid has finalised plans to break up the Home Office. It was confirmed last night that Mr Reid had passed his proposals to No 10 amid reports that Tony Blair will give the go ahead for the scheme in a statement today to parliament. Mr Reid has made clear he wants to turn the Home Office into a new ministry of security, while hiving off prisons and probation to a ministry of justice based on the Department for Constitutional Affairs. http://politics.guardian.co.uk/homeaffairs/story/0,,2045266,00.html  
• Gordon Brown has engineered the biggest cash squeeze on families for a quarter of a century, it has emerged. Soaring taxes have eaten dramatically into households' pockets, causing a deterioration in their disposable incomes. Government figures show that disposable incomes grew last year at the slowest rate since 1982, when unemployment hit three million. Experts said that when the ballooning cost of mortgage payments and utility bills were taken into account, households were likely to have suffered a painful fall in their wealth. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2007/03/29/nincome29.xml
• The House of Lords last night threw out controversial plans to site a supercasino in Manchester, despite Tessa Jowell's last-ditch attempt to win back support with a package of concessions. A fatal amendment - passed by three votes - forced the culture secretary's gambling reforms back to the drawing board, rejecting 16 smaller venues as well as the Las Vegas-style casino. The government needed majorities in both houses, rendering its 24-vote victory in a simultaneous Commons division worthless. http://politics.guardian.co.uk/homeaffairs/story/0,,2045198,00.html  
• The NHS is to get a minimum of 3 per cent real-terms growth a year between 2008 and 2011, Patricia Hewitt, the health secretary has said. Following last week's Budget, and the chancellor's settlement for education in the comprehensive spending review, Ms Hewitt told the Financial Times that the NHS "will continue to grow, and grow faster than the rate of economic growth -generally". Asked if that meant a minimum of 3 per cent, given Treasury forecasts that the economy will grow at 2.75 per, she said in an interview: "That is your deduction, but I am not dissenting from it." http://www.ft.com/cms/s/17353d88-dd92-11db-8d42-000b5df10621.html  
• NHS bosses charged with delivering the much-delayed £6.2bn IT upgrade to health trusts throughout England have launched a £100m-plus drive for "additional" IT suppliers to meet "immediate business needs". Separately, the Guardian has learned that the Australian group IBA Health is close to abandoning talks over a potential all-share takeover of cash-strapped software supplier iSoft, which is contracted to provide systems for 60% of the NHS's troubled National Programme for IT (NPfIT). http://business.guardian.co.uk/story/0,,2044984,00.html  
• Margaret Beckett should have been demoted from her job as environment secretary - not promoted to the Foreign Office - because of her role in the fiasco of reforming farming subsidies, an all-party committee of MPs says today. A damning report from the environment, food and rural affairs committee says the introduction of the single payments scheme was a catastrophe which wasted up to half a billion pounds and left many farmers struggling to cope. http://www.guardian.co.uk/country/article/0,,2045189,00.html

Conservatives

• The Tory party has established a high-level "anti-Miliband unit" amid mounting speculation that the Environemnt Secretary could challenge Gordon Brown for the Labour leadership. David Cameron's team has been set up at the Conservatives' new base in Westminster and is manned by staff previously tracking the Chancellor's movements. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2007/03/29/npols29.xml

EU  

• Airline passengers will gain new rights to claim compensation for cancelled flights under a European plan to close loopholes in the law. The European Commission believes that airlines are wilfully misinterpreting the rules to reject thousands of legitimate claims each month. An EU regulation introduced in February 2005 requires airlines to pay up to €600 (£408) in compensation to each passenger for cancelling a flight. Passengers are also entitled either to be reimbursed for their tickets or transferred to another flight. But airlines have taken advantage of a clause in the regulation that relieves them of the obligation to pay compensation if there are "unexpected flight safety shortcomings". http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/article1582376.ece