Review of the Papers, Wednesday 25 July

Government  

• Farepayers will nearly double their contribution to the cost of running the railways by the middle of the next decade, the government said yesterday. A big expansion in rail capacity, including 1,300 new carriages and an overhaul of the worst bottlenecks, formed the core of a five-year plan for the railways announced yesterday. However, the government confirmed a shift in policy by stating that passengers will foot three-quarters of the cost of operating the rail network, an increase from £5bn per year now to £9bn by 2014. At present fares account for around half the spending on railways, amid discontent over whether prices represent value for money. The rail minister, Tom Harris, said it was sensible that the farepayer should make an increased contribution. Yesterday's spending announcement confirmed that the government plans to reduce its subsidy from £4.5bn a year to £3bn by the middle of the next decade, with ticket holders plugging the gap. http://www.guardian.co.uk/transport/Story/0,,2134113,00.html 
• The government has approved arms exports to 19 of the 20 countries it has identified as "countries of concern" for abusing human rights, according to the annual report on its weapons exports released yesterday. They include Saudi Arabia, Israel, Colombia, China and Russia. "It's hard to see how this squares with the messages from the new foreign secretary that the UK should be a 'force for good'," said Roy Isbister, of Saferworld, an independent research organisation. The report also reveals that during 2006 the UK authorised the export of more than 15,000 sniper rifles to countries including Pakistan, Jordan, Turkey and Saudi Arabia. Saferworld said the exports to Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Turkey were of concern because the UK has no way of finding out where the weapons end up. http://www.guardian.co.uk/armstrade/story/0,,2134096,00.html  
• The government today calls on all NHS trusts to redouble their efforts against hospital infections which can kill fragile patients, as official figures reveal that MRSA appears to be slowly retreating but Clostridium difficile continues to rise. Health minister Ann Keen warned trusts that patients must be treated in a clean and safe environment. "We know that cleanliness and infection control are of great concern to patients," she said. The Health Protection Agency's statistics, published today, show a fall of 6.4% over the last quarter to March in the number of bloodstream infections of MRSA - the so-called superbug, methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus. Compared with the same quarter last year this is a drop of 28%. Over the whole year, April 2006 to March 2007, MRSA cases have fallen 10% from 7,096 to 6,378. http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk-news/story/0,,2133920,00.html
• Businesses have no confidence in the government's campaign to cut red tape, according to a report from the National Audit Office that says the measures are unlikely to tackle the types of regulation business finds most irritating. The administrative burdens reduction programme, launched in December, is intended to reduce the cost to business of providing information on regulations and set departments a 20 per cent target for cutting the £20bn burden by 2010. But a survey of businesses by the NAO found that 85 per cent were not confident the government would succeed in reducing the burden. Most thought Whitehall was ill-equipped for the task of slashing red tape, and was not consulting enough with business on priorities. The public spending watchdog also said the four departments that account for three-quarters of the regulatory burden were not targeting the activities that business rated as burdensome - frequent changes in regulations, the lengthy compliance processes and lack of information on which regulations apply. http://www.ft.com/cms/s/b28bcd54-39fb-11dc-9d73-0000779fd2ac.html
• Large businesses are subjected to an excessive number of tax investigations with only small sums of money at stake, according to a National Audit Office report. Despite an attempt to focus more closely on high- risk businesses, Revenue & Customs was still carrying out many low-value inquiries, the spending watchdog said today in a report on the management of large business corporation tax. Almost 60 per cent of the inquiries being pursued in February this year were expected collectively to produce less than 1 per cent of the total tax yield generated by compliance checks. http://www.ft.com/cms/s/ad02be92-3a46-11dc-9d73-0000779fd2ac.html
• Large-scale renewable energy projects will cause widespread environmental damage by industrialising vast swaths of countryside, a leading scientist claims today. The warning follows an analysis of the amount of land that renewable energy resources, including wind farms, biofuel crops and photovoltaic solar cells, require to produce substantial amounts of power. Jesse Ausubel, a professor of environmental science and director of the Human Environment programme at Rockefeller University in New York, found that enormous stretches of countryside would have to be converted into intensive farmland or developed with buildings and access roads for renewable energy plants to make a significant contribution to global energy demands. http://environment.guardian.co.uk/conservation/story/0,,2134066,00.html
• Britain will today signal that it is not prepared to see the recent controversies over the growing power of overseas state-backed investors used as a pretext for a new European protectionism. In his first major speech as Chancellor of the Exchequer, Alistair Darling will today say that Britain must resist calls for the EU to adopt a common approach to vetting corporate ac-quisitions by foreign state investors. His comments today follow a warning yesterday from Sir John Gieve, deputy governor of the Bank of England, that the rising power and financial clout of state-owned funds in globalasset markets will lead to political tension and calls for protectionism. http://www.ft.com/cms/s/5286db4a-3a48-11dc-9d73-0000779fd2ac.html