Review of the Papers, Monday 30 July

Government

• The former head of the Environment Agency has said he would have given up his bonus if he had been in charge during this month's floods, increasing pressure on the current directors. The management were already facing growing demands to repay the five-figure sums they were awarded days before the worst floods of modern times. Asked by the BBC whether he would have kept his payout, Ed Gallagher, the Agency's former chief executive said, "No, probably not. I would certainly expect my bonus to be reduced." The details of the bonus payouts were slipped out at the end of last week, on the last day of Parliament and triggered accusations of a cover-up. The news aroused fury in the worst-hit areas of Britain where water supplies are only just beginning to be returned to hundreds of thousands of flood victims. However, Sir John Harman, chairman of the Environment Agency, defended the bonuses, saying staff were rewarded for the long term work they had done. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml;jsessionid=J4M3RYJKA32P1QFIQMGSFFOAVCBQWIV0?xml=/news/2007/07/30/nbonus230.xml
• British doctors are to rebel against high prices set by pharmaceutical companies for their products by giving patients a cheap but unlicensed drug that prevents blindness, the Guardian has learned. Unable to afford to treat all those losing their sight with a licensed and extremely expensive drug, Lucentis, some primary care trusts are giving NHS doctors the green light to use tiny shots of a similar drug, Avastin, which is marketed for bowel cancer, but costs a fraction of the price. Avastin is widely used for eye complaints in the United States. A call from the former health secretary, Patricia Hewitt, for Avastin's manufacturer to put the drug through trials for wet age-related macular degeneration went unheeded. Now the NHS is funding a groundbreaking trial which will compare Avastin directly with Lucentis. Both drugs are manufactured by Genentech. http://society.guardian.co.uk/health/story/0,,2137638,00.html  
• The introduction of the biggest NHS pay reform, which rewrote the job descriptions of more than a million nurses and other staff, increased the wage bill to £30bn a year without benefiting patients, an influential independent health thinktank says today. The King's Fund found the Agenda for Change pay reform, introduced in England nearly three years ago, "was rushed and exceeded all cost estimates". The government scheme was supposed to benefit patients by encouraging staff to improve their skills and work more flexibly, breaking down traditional demarcation lines. It was implemented in December 2004 after seven years of negotiations to re-evaluate the work of NHS staff from nurses and therapists to porters and cleaners. http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk-news/story/0,,2137549,00.html
• The NHS is suffering from a chronic shortage of specialist beds which means seriously injured patients are having to wait for days in severe pain, according to a leading surgeon. He said the hospital system was paralysed by red tape and funding disputes, which put thousands of patients waiting for treatment in specialist wards at risk. In a damning critique of current NHS policy, Martin Bircher, a consultant treating victims of major accidents, said the best efforts of doctors and nurses on the frontline were hampered by layers of managers whose major concern is the budget rather than patient care. Following his revelations in a Sunday newspaper, politicians and campaigners last night called for a shake-up in the management of Britain's trauma centres. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2007/07/30/nhealth130.xml
• An RAF computer clerk who suffered a hand injury while typing in numbers has cost the Ministry of Defence £484,000 in damages and legal costs - almost 30 times what a soldier injured in combat might receive for a similar injury. The clerk, who is in her 20s and has not been named, was diagnosed with the RSI-style condition de Quervain's tenosynovitis. A serving soldier who comes home from war suffering from "permanent severely impaired grip in both hands" would only get a one-off payment of £16,500. The official tariff of payments for wounded soldiers shows they can expect £28,750 for blindness in one eye, £57,500 for the loss of a leg and just £8,250 for injuries associated with surviving a gunshot wound to the torso.Major Charles Heyman, the editor of Armed Forces of the UK, said: "An award like this to a civilian who is never going to be in fear of her life drags down morale." http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2007/07/30/narmy230.xml
• Emissions from air travel and shipping must be included in the Government's proposals for dealing with climate change which are at risk of becoming "incoherent," a committee of MPs says in a report today. A Commons select committee identified the omission of international aviation and shipping among a number of "weaknesses" in the Government's proposed Climate Change Bill, expected to enter Parliament this autumn. "We are unimpressed by the Government's arguments for excluding international aviation and shipping emissions from the UK's carbon reduction regime," says the Environmental Audit select committee, which calls for them to be included "immediately". It says there is already an internationally-agreed way of attributing and recording these emissions and the Government should simply use this to track and reduce emissions from aviation and shipping within Britain's overall carbon budget. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/main.jhtml?xml=/earth/2007/07/30/easelect130.xml
• Information from the home information packs being brought in this week will be used to push up council tax bills, it was claimed last night. The Valuation Office Agency, the body responsible for deciding a property's council tax band, is said to have applied for access to the information, which it could then use to assess tax rates. The Conservative Party warned that the packs would herald a "backdoor council tax revaluation", with homeowners forced to pay for the privilege of inspectors entering their home to help the tax man record, log and tax it. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2007/07/30/nrates230.xml
• An acute shortage of judges is causing long delays in bringing criminal trials to court, putting more pressure on overcrowded prisons and delaying justice for victims of crime. The Times has learnt that Jack Straw, the Justice Secretary, received a list of approved candidates to fill the growing number of vacancies for Crown Court judges some weeks ago But Mr Straw has not indicated how many appointments he will make nor when he will announce them. Retired judges are being pressed into service, and part-time recorders are being repeatedly asked to serve for longer periods. Such ad hoc measures save money because the Government does not have to pay holiday allowance or pension contributions for retired or part-time judges. As the criminal justice system struggles to cope, serious cases are being put back until 2008 and overcrowded remand prisons are holding record numbers of inmates.  http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/politics/article2163887.ece
• Primary schools will reach an important target for national curriculum tests for 11-year-olds this summer - five years after the original deadline for attaining it. The percentage of children reaching the required standard in both maths and English tests will rise by between 1 percentage point and 1.5 percentage points this year, according to a survey of local education authorities by The Independent. This would mean that, for the first time, 80 per cent were reaching the required standard in English - the target figure set in 1997 for 2002. The failure to reach that target on time forced the resignation of then Education secretary Estelle Morris. In maths, it would mean 77 per cent reaching the required standard - compared with a target of 75 per cent. Such a rise would be good news for Gordon Brown's Government - coming as it does before reforms to English and maths teaching designed to raise standards come into effect. But it still leaves schools short of the one-time target - which then became an "aspiration" - of 85 per cent in both subjects by 2006. http://education.independent.co.uk/news/article2816688.ece

Other

• Rogue gangmasters are supplying migrant workers to look after the elderly in care homes in an attempt to avoid controls on the provision of labourers to farms and packing warehouses, according to trade unions and MPs. Cowboy operators are also providing foreign labour for construction sites and the cleaning industry, and overseas waiting and cleaning staff for hotels and restaurants. Two years after the creation of the Gangmasters Licensing Authority (GLA), which regulates all labour provision in the fresh food and farming sector, trade unions are gathering evidence that a number of unscrupulous gangmasters have moved into new sectors rather than comply with the law. http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/crime/article2163485.ece