Review of the Papers, Friday 13 April

Government

• Thousands of people across the country have been fined for putting out their rubbish on the wrong day. More than a dozen councils have levied fines since the introduction of legislation a year ago enabling local authorities to pursue residents, a Times investigation has found. Fixed penalties totalling more than £185,000 have been issued to people who put their rubbish out for the binmen too early, even if they breached the council's time limit by only a few hours. Some householders have been targeted for leaving wheelie bins on the street. Campaigners and residents attacked the measures last night, calling them heavy-hand-ed, and urged councils to take a more lenient approach. http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/article1647546.ece
• Schools are not being managed effectively because their governing bodies are filled with "well-meaning amateurs" who do not know how to challenge head teachers, the head of a teaching union warned yesterday. Chris Keates, general secretary of the NASUWT, said school governors were just "rubber stamping" budgets. "The vast majority [of governing bodies] are not fit for purpose," she said. "They are filled with well-meaning amateurs who struggle with the complexities of what takes places in schools." Because governors were volunteers, "they can't be required to be trained" and were "totally reliant on what their head teacher tells them", Ms Keates said. The government's policy of giving more autonomy to schools, particularly through the academies scheme of state-funded independent schools, was exacerbating the problem, she said. http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2e09f870-e95c-11db-a162-000b5df10621.html
• The introduction of the national minimum wage has boosted productivity because the lower paid now take fewer sick days, a study published today has found. Research into the correlation between pay rates and absence from work was presented to the Royal Economic Society's annual conference by Marco Ercolani from Birmingham University and Martin Robson from Durham University. Low-paid employees are more likely to be off sick than those on higher earnings, the report finds, and this significantly affects the workplace and economy. The direct cost of sick leave in value of lost output is estimated at more than £11bn, about 1 per cent of the country's annual gross domestic product. http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2e089d72-e95c-11db-a162-000b5df10621.html

Conservatives

• The Conservative leader is helping to restore his party's fortunes in Wales but Scotland appears to be immune to the "Cameron effect". The Welsh Conservatives are regarded by analysts as the most effective and coherent group in the Cardiff assembly. In recent years, they have tried to shake off their image as an English party, warming to devolution and to symbols of Welsh nationhood. By contrast, Scotland, much of it blue territory only a generation ago, is now a Tory desert. Unlike in Wales, where PC took over traditional Liberal, rural seats, the Conservatives in Scotland have ceded ground directly to the nationalists. The Tories regained a foothold in the principality in the 2005 general election, taking three seats. But in polls for the Scottish parliamentary elections, the Conservatives are stuck in a distant third place and could easily fall into fourth. They have only one Westminster MP north of the border. They are so weak they may even fail to make much headway in the Scottish local elections even though they will be run on a new, more proportional system. http://www.ft.com/cms/s/a9ae2276-e95c-11db-a162-000b5df10621.html

EU  

• Germany, this year's chair of the Group of Eight rich countries, has pushed the group to set a tough target for reducing carbon emissions, the first time it has been asked to commit to an explicit reduction. But environmentalists said the World Bank, which the G8 has asked to finance the shift away from carbon use in the developing world, was continuing to ramp up lending for oil and gas. A February draft of the final communiqué of the June heads of government meeting, obtained by the Financial Times, says: "Global warming caused largely by human activities is accelerating . . . beyond a temperature increase of 2 degrees C, risks from climate change will be largely unmanageable." The draft said the G8 would "contribute our fair share" to limit global warming by ensuring global greenhouse gas emissions peaked in the next 10-15 years and then cutting them 50 per cent by 2050 from 1990 levels. http://www.ft.com/cms/s/59ebbb78-e95b-11db-a162-000b5df10621.html