Review of the Papers, Friday 17 August

Government

• Rail regulators were last night threatening to put the brakes on huge fare rises. Amid public anger over fare increases up to 30 per cent on some routes, the Office of Rail Regulation has agreed to define what increases should be regarded as "excessive". This could lead to rail companies being ordered to cut fares, including ones already announced if they were found to broken competition law. Rail regulators had refused to step in when South West Trains pushed up some fares by 20 per cent and Arriva Trains Wales imposed 30 per cent rises. Now Bill Emery the ORR's chief executive has clarified his position in a letter to the consumer watchdog group, Passenger Focus. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2007/08/17/nrail117.xml
• The courts have been officially warned that teenagers who breach their Asbos should not normally be jailed and that "excessive" sentences should not be passed on adult offenders in similar circumstances. The proposals from the official body that lays down guidelines on sentencing come after latest figures show that 46% of the 7,500 people successfully prosecuted for breaching their antisocial behaviour orders in 2005 were jailed. The sentencing advisory panel, in its proposals for new guidelines to the courts for dealing with Asbo breaches, says that in most cases involving young offenders the appropriate sentence should be a community order. The judges, police and prosecutors on the panel say that jail should only be considered for young people if their breach involved serious harassment, alarm or distress, or if there had been a series of serious breaches. http://www.guardian.co.uk/crime/article/0,,2150619,00.html

Conservatives

• David Cameron will today seek to reconnect with the core Tory vote by signalling support for a Conservative policy report that will recommend £14bn of tax cuts. The Tory leadership will not officially endorse the proposals from its economic competitiveness group, which include the scrapping of inheritance tax and stamp duty on shares. But George Osborne, the shadow chancellor, is expected to support the overall call for lower taxes when he speaks at today's launch of the report, alongside the head of the policy group, Thatcherite former cabinet minister John Redwood. The report comes as Mr Cameron is undergoing the most testing period of his 20-month leadership. Gordon Brown has bounced Labour to a consistent lead in recent opinion polls, sparking renewed calls from the Tory right for the leadership to change its modernising, politically centrist, stance. http://www.ft.com/cms/s/950a8682-4c5a-11dc-b67f-0000779fd2ac.html