Review of the Papers, Monday 14 May

Government

• Prisoners are being held in court cells that cost more per night than a suite at the Ritz it emerged as ministers were accused of an "absurd waste of money". The Government faced condemnation after it was revealed that 77 prisoners had been forced to use cells in courts since the start of the year at an average cost of £1,800 a night. Nick Clegg, the Liberal Democrat home affairs spokesman, said that the average cost of court cells was more than the £1,600 a night which is charged for a deluxe suit at the Ritz Hotel in Piccadilly, London. The figures came as the prison population reached breaking point. The prison service said that nearly 300 people were being held in police cells on Friday as official figures showed there were 80,456 inmates in the prison system. The figure is less than 350 below 80,800, the absolute maximum capacity of the prison system. http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/crime/article2539347.ece
• The Labour Party is mounting a covert campaign to push through a new law to exclude MPs from the Freedom of Information Act, critics have claimed. An email from Labour's influential parliamentary committee urges its backbench MPs to support a private member's Bill that would prevent the public using the new right-to-know legislation to see MPs' correspondence. The Bill, championed by David Maclean, a former Tory whip, and due to go back to the Commons this week, has been criticised by some parliamentarians and freedom-of-information campaigners as an assault on democracy and an attempt to spare the embarrassment of MPs. If enacted, it would grant all MPs and members of the House of Lords an exemption from the law. The Government has refused to say whether it supports or opposes the Bill and has left it up to MPs to come to their own decision. But the intervention by the Parliamentary Labour Party is an indication that party managers want the exemption to go through. http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/politics/article2539385.ece
• Youth unemployment is sharply higher than when Labour came to power, according to a damning report that questions Gordon Brown's welfare reforms. Mr Brown, who was campaigning in Brighton yesterday, claims to have slashed youth unemployment and transformed life for the poor. Despite Labour spending almost £2 billion on the New Deal, the number of people aged 18-24 out of work has risen by 70,000 to 505,000 since its launch in 1998. Frank Field, the former welfare minister, says that the New Deal has been "woeful". In a study published today by Reform, a think tank, Mr Field questions the basis on which Mr Brown believes he has helped the worse-off. The numbers of young people "not in employment, education or training" are also higher than in 1998 and rising. They are up 246,000 on the low point recorded in summer 2001 and 131,000 above the level that Labour inherited in 1997. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2007/05/14/nbrown414.xml
• Knowsley Council in Merseyside, which - for years - has languished near or at the bottom of exam league tables, has abolished the use of the word school to describe secondary education in the borough. It is taking the dramatic step of closing all of its eleven existing secondary schools by 2009. As part of a £150m government-backed rebuilding programme, they will reopen as seven state-of-the-art, round-the-clock, learning centres with the aid of Microsoft - which has already developed links with one school in the borough, Bowring. The style of learning will be completely different. The new centres will open from 7am until 10pm in both term-time and what used to be known as the school holidays. At weekends, they will open from 9am to 8pm. Youngsters will not be taught in formal classes, nor will they stick to a rigid timetable; instead they will work online at their own speeds on programmes that are tailor-made to match their interests. Children will be able to study haircare, beauty therapy, leisure and tourism, and engineering as well as the more traditional academic subjects. They will be given their day's assignments in groups of 120 in the morning before dispersing to internet cafe-style zones in the learning centres to carry them out. http://education.independent.co.uk/news/article2539348.ece
• Prisoners released early under the Government's electronic tagging scheme committed, or were accused of, four times more crimes last year than in 2000, a report by a Tory MP has claimed. Just one in 40 tagged individuals committed a crime when the project started in 1999, but by last year the figure had jumped to one in nine, according to Grant Shapps. His report also said that on average nearly seven crimes were being committed every day by tagged offenders. Mr Shapps, who obtained statistics by tabling Parliamentary Questions, claims the figures show the Government is releasing unsuitable offenders early to relieve prison overcrowding. But the new Ministry of Justice, which has responsibility for prisons, said the rise mainly reflected changes in the rules on tagging introduced four years ago. Electronic tagging, officially known as the Home Detention Curfew (HDC) scheme, was launched in 1999. More than 137,000 prisoners have been released since. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2007/05/14/ntags14.xml
• An emergency review of the appointments system for junior doctors is being dominated by government apparatchiks, leading doctors claim in a letter to -The Times- today. The system and attempts to rescue it are a fiasco, write Morris Brown, Professor of Clinical Pharmacology at Cambridge, and more than a dozen leading specialists, as doctors prepare to challenge the outcome of the review in court. The hearing, which begins on Wednesday, will seek to have the computer-based Medical Training Application System (MTAS) declared so unfair as to be an abuse of power. It is expected to take two days. Victory for the doctors would leave the Department of Health, which has apologised for the debacle, in confusion. http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/health/article1784956.ece
• The 2012 Olympics will struggle to bring a boom in jobs, sport and housing, according to a new study. The event could result in "white elephant" venues, job losses and a "couch potato" generation hooked on television sports coverage. The report also claims it will be difficult to regenerate parts of east London, where the venues will be built.The report for the Greater London Assembly is the latest setback for the Games, whose costs have quadrupled to £9.3 billion. Researchers analysed the impact of events on Athens, Sydney, Atlanta and Barcelona. They found venues "struggled to make their mark" in improving employment and sports participation. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2007/05/14/ngames14.xml
• Growth in public spending on management consultants slowed considerably last year as Whitehall sought to tighten its grip on costs. Although figures published today by the Management Consultancies Association reported that fee income of consultants rose by 16 per cent to £5.4bn in 2006, the rise in public sector fees was "substantially lower than in previous years". The total income of MCA members, which represents about 70 per cent of the industry, was £3.7bn, of which fees from privatesector clients rose by 22 per cent to £3bn. Public sector fees rose by only 5 per cent to £1.6bn, said the MCA, which expects the "slowdown in spending on traditional management consultancy from the publicsector" to continue. Earlier this year the Treasury launched a drive to secure better value from the large sums spent by government on consultants. The move followed a National Audit Office report in December, which said it was far from clear that a 33 per cent rise over two years in the amount spent on consultants by central and local government and the NHS had produced value for money. http://www.ft.com/cms/s/ded10108-01b7-11dc-8b8c-000b5df10621.html
• Gordon Brown yesterday rammed home his determination to win middle England back for Labour as he pledged to create a "home-owning, asset-owning, wealth-owning democracy". The chancellor acknowledged the appeal of the Thatcherite ambition to widen home ownership as he laid out his pledge to build 200,000 new homes a year, including five new "eco-towns". They will contain up to 100,000 low carbon or carbon neutral homes powered by locally-generated energy from sustainable sources and would be built on old industrial brownfield sites, the first earmarked for an old RAF barracks in Cambridgeshire which is home to an immigration reception centre. http://politics.guardian.co.uk/labourleadership/story/0,,2078922,00.html