Society daily 04.07.11

Sign up to Society daily email briefing Social care and the £1.7bn question Economist Andrew Dilnot today presented his report on the future of social care funding. His proposals will cost the state about £1.7bn a year - one four hundredth of total public spending. Follow the latest developments on Andrew Sparrow's politics live blog ; we'll have expert comment soon from Peter Beresford, professor of social policy at Brunel University, and thinktank the King's Fund. On his blog, BBC political editor Nick Robinson asks Where's the money? He writes: "Andrew Dilnot believes that he has cracked the intellectual problem with his proposal for a cap on the personal costs of care. It is designed not just to reduce people's fears about losing their house and savings but to persuade the financial services industry to come up with products which will help people plan for the possibility of needing care in their old age - not just insurance policies but also equity release schemes and plans to allow people to get less out of their pension when well and more when in need. What he has not cracked - although he has tried - is the political problem. As the newspaper coverage of this report shows, people tend to focus not on the good news - the costs that are capped - but on the bad - the costs below the cap or so-called "hotel costs" which are not covered by the cap. The fear for ministers is that if they drive the Dilnot plan through they will be blamed for the bad and given no credit for the good while ending up having to find £2-3bn extra to pay for it." Disability rights campaigner Nicky Clark tweets "The whole capping debate demonstrates once again that it's not about what people are worth but what they cost." While Sally Bercow asks : "Is Dilnot all about funding or will it actually improve *standards* of elderly care?" Follow more reaction on Twitter using the hashtags #dilnot and #ukcare Today's top SocietyGuardian stories • Ministers 'hid evidence' over benefits cap • Homelessness builds into a social crisis for coalition • Firms going bust in social care sector up by 50% amid spending cuts • MP Frank Field seeks to secure rise for low-paid public sector workers • Charities threaten action over disability benefit cuts • Organ transplant waiting times rise fast • Thousands of charities join donate by text message scheme • Philip Inman: Sacrificing children for our pensions • Private tenants feel 'powerless' over landlord problems • Parents wildly overestimate the amount of exercise their children take • Police reforms could threaten public safety, warns senior officer All today's SocietyGuardian stories Other news • A secretive taxpayer-funded scheme is allowing GPs to pocket windfalls running into millions of pounds from their surgeries, a Telegraph investigation has found. It says doctors can buy buildings for their surgeries and then "rent" them back to the Department of Health, often for far more than the mortgage repayments. The surgery is then sold off – either to another doctor or a developer – when the GP retires and they are allowed to keep the profits from the sale of the building. • Society will suffer "immense penalties" unless more money is spent improving the lives of children from deprived backgrounds , reports the BBC. A report to the prime minister by Labour MP Graham Allen looking at the benefits of intervening to improve the life chances of children from poorer backgrounds warns that more investment is needed urgently. • Former health secretary Stephen Dorrell has pledged to hold a parliamentary inquiry into the treatment of NHS whistleblowers , according to the Independent. The pledge follows the case of Sharmila Chowdhury, a radiology manager at a London district general hospital, who is likely to lose her home after an inquiry found she was unfairly sacked after alleging that doctor colleagues were wrongly claiming thousands of pounds of public money every month, which the doctors and trust deny. Ms Chowdhury, who has an unblemished 27-year NHS career, was marched off the premises following an unfounded counter-allegation of fraud made against her by a junior whom she had reported for breaching patient-safety procedures. • Some of Britain's poorest neighbourhoods are at risk of becoming ghettoised if budget cuts halt efforts to pull them 'back from the cliff edge' , reports Inside Housing. A new book by Anne Power, Helen Willmot and Rosemary Davidson from the London School of Economics says even small improvements to deprived areas have dramatic effects on the wellbeing and ambition of the families who live there. • Francis Maude wants to see public sector workers who have been made redundant taking up unpaid roles as volunteer managers for charities , reports Third Sector. The Cabinet Office minister told a session hosted by Christian charity Oasis last week that many charities had plenty of potential volunteers but were unable to involve all of them because there was a shortage of volunteer managers. On my radar ... • This excellent post from Jules Birch on the leaked DCLG letter warning of the impact of benefit cuts on families. Writing for Inside Housing , Birch says: "... the government knew full well what the effect of the household benefit cap would be – and then went ahead and introduced it anyway." He adds: "... this is a political and ideological decision, one based on spurious 'fairness' to 'hard-working families', and the (probably correct) calculation that it will play well with the voters, never mind the blatant lack of evidence and misuse of statistics. So maybe, at the most basic level, the leaked letter and the (lack of) government response to it, are not so shocking at all and simply confirm all our most cynical prejudices about politics? That would be true were it not for the fact that a bad policy that increases homelessness and costs more money has already completed all of its stages in the House of Commons. In the face of well-argued criticism from Labour and some Liberal Democrat MPs, ministers have simply been able to steamroller that bad policy through. Despite arguing against it, even the official opposition tacitly acquiesced at Third Reading when the Labour frontbench failed to move any amendments to the cap so that it could concentrate on arguments that were more winnable. Backbencher John McDonnell tried but tweeted yesterday: 'Two weeks ago I tried to amend Bill to scrap cap but Labour frontbench refused to support. Now?" Birch also links to further commentary on the letter on the Alex's Archives , Nearly Legal and Red Brick blogs. • Philanthropy . In this response to a recent Comment is free piece by Zoe Williams on hedge fund philanthropists , Beth Breeze wonders how we can learn to love rich donors : "The problem with this sort of column is that regular use of words like 'unpleasant', 'vulgar' and 'obscene' to refer to rich donors, impacts on the decisions of the wealthy about whether, and how much, to give away. ... Many Guardian readers will have enjoyed Williams' rant, because in the UK many people conflate 'philanthropist' and 'tax dodger', and make assumptions that all fortunes have dubious origins. Tell that to the recipients of Anita Roddick's massive charitable legacy, who benefited from the wealth created by her ethically-sourced peppermint foot cream." • This really interesting interview with Jess Steele , head of innovation at community organisers' network Locality, about the "big society" agenda on the Beanbags and Bullsh!t blog: "I think every time we hear the words 'David Cameron's Big Society' it makes me cringe and I'm often on record saying 'it's not his, it's either all of ours, or it doesn't exist at all'. On the other hand I've always thought that the phrase, the concept of Big Society, is an interesting and useful input into a bigger debate. It's really important and good that we're talking about it. That doesn't mean that it's the right answer to the debate but it's a really good thing to be talking about it at last because a lot of us have been working in this kind of field for a long time and struggling to be heard by any mainstream press or politicians at all. So, at the moment it's interesting that you can get heard with ideas about neighbourhoods, about communities and about devolving power and shifting power downwards. I think that's quite helpful. At the end of the day, it's a £15 million project. It's a pretty small thing compared to the vast amounts of government spending on other programmes and the multiple millions it's spending on war abroad – let alone on other activities within The Big Society. We're in a really hard time for everybody. Huge welfare cuts will undoubtedly have more impact on the street than this programme can but I think this programme can have an impact. (Partly) because it's so open-ended, because the organisers bring no specific message and seek no specific outcome: they're not messengers from government, they're not messengers from Locality – they are people who are trained and supported and paid to work with what they actively seek out and find on the ground. So, yes I think in some ways it can have a huge impact on how we think about The Big Society." • Wise words from Polly Toynbee on the pensions strike , The strikers' real success was to expose Tory bombast : "On Thursday, according to Peter Kellner of YouGov, the people swung to support the public workers against Cameron by 50:40. But they didn't support the strike, with 50:40 against. The day of protest made its point forcefully, but unions need to nurture that public backing. Miliband says strikes are a sign of failure, but he needs to map out a better bargaining power for fairer long-term distribution of wealth. As for Cameron, his divide-and-rule strategy will fail. Had he talked to strikers and bystanders this week he would know how public and private workers are not separate tribes, but in the same households, parents, partners, sons and daughters. All use public services and many move fluidly between jobs in both sectors, truly all in this together." Our own poll revealed 70% support for the strikers. Meanwhile, Next Media Animation, the Taiwanese Animators behind the infamous animated video clips of news stories, has put together its own take on the strike . • New blog Rock Paper Politics, which aims to take a fresh look at politics (mostly from a left of centre stance), and will include contributions from social work blogger Monster Talk . • The sad tale of the Wirral Resource Centre in Birkenhead , reported by Private Eye. The charity-run centre, which provides play therapy and physio for children with disabilities , has been handed a £16,000 tax bill, linked to an accounting error in the 1990s. The charity has been given a year to pay up - but says it will have to restructure and lose staff as a result. See also this moving post from Sarah Ismail's Same Difference blog, which asks What happens to people while animals have hydrotherapy? • New research from the National Children's Bureau, which reveals how the early years workforce in local authorities is being hit by budget cuts. A survey of members of NCB's local authority early years network found that three-quarters of responding councils expect to make redundancies, and staff development will also be affected by cuts and the loss of ring-fenced funding for early years budgets. The NCB chief executive, Sir Paul Ennals, said: "Government has repeatedly said that those most vulnerable would be protected from the worst impact of the cuts. However, we know that children and young people, one of the most vulnerable groups in our society, are not being protected and are actually being hit several times over. Cuts to local authorities have led to significant reductions in play services, family support and youth services, and welfare reform proposals threaten the income of many families. These cuts simply add to the dramatic effect that the economic downturn is already having on their home lives – parents facing unemployment and increased stress." • The Every Disabled Child Matters campaign, which has today published a survey of families with disabled children (pdf). The survey asked families who receive help from the Family Fund about the barriers they face entering and remaining in employment . The biggest barrier it found is the high cost of childcare, and a lack of suitable provision. Just under a quarter of families in the survey use childcare, and 66% of them say they pay more for children with disabilities than for non-disabled children. One parent commented: "I could not afford to go back to work full time as both my children have disabilities and would need separate childcare … the cost would make working a pointless exercise." The campaign warns that despite introducing a 10% cut in support for meeting childcare costs from April 2011, the government has yet to set out proposals for childcare support within its plans for a Universal Credit. SocietyGuardian weekend highlights • Ed Vulliamy revisits Toxteth, 30 years after the riots • A working life: Special Olympics coach Greg Silvester • Iain Duncan Smith to unveil payment by results welfare system All Sunday's SocietyGuardian news and features All Saturday's SocietyGuardian news and features On the Guardian Professional Networks • Response to Dilnot: Social worker 'Sarah Smith' says it is local authorities and care workers that will take the hit • University of Hull lecturer says clinical evidence to support the use of the technology in NHS is 'still equivocal' • The need to cut costs is driving the trend to return council services in-house , but insourcing authorities are discovering all sorts of additional benefits, says Paul O'Brien, chief exec of APSE SocietyGuardian blogs Patrick Butler's cuts blog Joe Public Sarah Boseley's global health blog SocietyGuardian on social media Follow SocietyGuardian on Twitter Follow Patrick Butler on Twitter Follow Clare Horton on Twitter Follow Alison Benjamin on Twitter SocietyGuardian's Facebook page SocietyGuardian links SocietyGuardian.co.uk Guardian cutswatch - tell us about the cuts in your area Public Leaders - the Guardian's website for senior managers of public services The Guardian's public and voluntary sector careers page Hundreds of public and voluntary sector jobs SocietyGuardian editor: Alison Benjamin Email the SocietyGuardian editor: [email protected] SocietyGuardian.co.uk editor: Clare Horton Email the SocietyGuardian.co.uk editor: [email protected] Interested in education policy and news too? Sign up for the daily Cribsheet round-up