Review of the Papers, Thursday 19 April

**Government  **

• A £17bn overhaul of the London tube is under threat after a shareholder in the project said the operation's finances were "under increasing pressure". The crisis in the public-private partnership (PPP) contract to renew the creaking London Underground is embarrassing for Gordon Brown, who imposed the arrangement on the London mayor, Ken Livingstone, despite warnings that it would transfer a vital asset to a private firm with no power for local government intervention. The Guardian has learned that shareholders in Metronet could abandon the 30-year contract to upgrade three-quarters of the tube because of a £750m cost overrun caused by maintenance blunders that could undermine transport plans for the 2012 Olympics. The first public cracks in the consortium appeared yesterday as two investors warned of difficulties. http://business.guardian.co.uk/story/0,,2060337,00.html  
• Weekly rubbish collections have been ended for households in four out of 10 councils in England, according to Government estimates made public yesterday. The huge increase comes after more than half the councils in Wales either switched to collecting waste every other week or announced plans to do so and almost half the local authorities in Scotland did the same. As a result a third of all households - some nine million - now face the prospect of keeping food waste and other non-recyclable material in dustbins for a fortnight despite concerns that it encourages rats and causes unpleasant smells. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2007/04/19/nbins19.xml  
• The pay of hospital consultants has risen by an average of 27 per cent in three years while their workload has fallen, the Whitehall spending watchdog said yesterday. The National Audit Office (NAO) said it was "regrettable" that new consultants' contracts had so far failed to deliver promised improvements in productivity and patient services. Consultants' salaries rose to an average of £110,000 between the introduction of the new deal in 2003 and last year. During this period the amount of clinical care they provided to patients fell. The average number of hours they worked dropped by 1.4 hours per week, from 51.6 to 50.2. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2007/04/19/ndoctors19.xml  
• Tougher laws and enforcement over the past 10 years have failed to curb the availability of hard drugs, according to a report published yesterday. The report, commissioned for the launch of the independent UK drugs policy commission, also says that education programmes aimed at steering young people away from drug use appear to have had "very little impact" on experimentation with illicit substances. "The prices of the principal drugs in Britain have declined for most of the last 10 years and there is no indication that tougher enforcement has succeeded in making drugs less accessible," the reports states. It confirms that the UK has one of the highest levels of problem drug use and the second highest rate of drug-related deaths in Europe. The total value of the UK market for illicit drugs is estimated at £5bn a year. The findings were seized on by opposition MPs as conclusive evidence that the government's drugs strategy had failed, prompting calls for a radical rethink. http://www.ft.com/cms/s/092e41f8-ee13-11db-8584-000b5df10621,dwp-uuid=34c8a8a6-2f7b-11da-8b51-00000e2511c8.html  
• Satellite technology could be used to allow families to monitor elderly relatives or those suffering from Alzheimer's, the Government suggested yesterday. Malcolm Wicks, the science and innovation minister, told MPs that satellites currently monitored the planet in various ways - including the -climate, the Antarctic and crops. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2007/04/19/nsatnav19.xml