Society daily 18.07.12

Sign up to Society daily email briefing Today's top SocietyGuardian stories • Troubled families need one-to-one help to break cycles of suffering, says Casey • Olympics boost helps cut UK unemployment to 2.58m • Serco ordered to improve failing GP service • UK has third most inactive population in Europe • Drop in school sport support blamed on funding cuts • Schools deny girls cervical cancer jabs on religious grounds • Alzheimer's drug IVIg could halt patients' decline • City of London faces direct electoral challenge to way it is governed • Labour attacks lettings agencies who 'rip off' landlords and tenants • Seumas Milne: G4S should make it easier to beat the privatisation racket All today's SocietyGuardian stories In today's SocietyGuardian section • The civil servant who thinks she can fix troubled families • Cap on care at home could force under-65s into institutions • Austerity Britain: the people affected by cuts to frontline services • The 'despair' and 'loneliness' of austerity Britain • Why extending GPs' opening hours won't work • Junk food has no place in the Olympic lineup • Public sector leaders are not ready for tomorrow's major disaster • Sports book created by prisoners to be part of 2012 Cultural Olympiad On the Guardian Professional Networks • Live discussion: are councils doing enough to go green? • Social workers turn to charity to help make ends meet • Maya Prabhu from Coutts shares advice on charities making pitches to major donors • Can local authorities handle healthcare ? • How the wisdom of crowds can help reconnect the government with people in Canada's largest province On my radar ... • What the voluntary sector can learn from the G4S debacle. Writing for the Third Sector blog, Lucy Sweetman says the story is a stark illustration of an economy full of fixed-term, temporary, low-paid jobs with poor training . She comments: We must offer work placements, volunteering experiences and jobs that show young people that it is possible to work without being exploited, that there is dignity in a working life and that they should expect to be treated fairly and well in their job. Equally, they should work in a safe environment and not be put at risk from overwork or dangerous conditions. We should reflect on our heritage of campaigning for safety at work, fair pay and limited working hours. It is in the DNA of the charitable and trade union sector. And it is our responsibility to carry that inheritance forward, ensuring that the opportunities we offer to our young people, provide dignity and fairness at work. If we must model it for the über-corporations, then so be it. • News of the death of Paddy Masefield , award winning playwright, innovative theatre director and stalwart campaigner for disability rights. Disability Arts Online editor Colin Hambrook writes: Paddy Masefield's passing is a great loss to the Arts. None of the focus on Disability Arts in the current Cultural Olympiad programmes of work by disabled artists would have happened without him. And indeed it is likely there would be no DAO without the insistence of his arguments on the ridiculousness of the prejudice against Disability Arts and disabled people. Even now the employment of disabled people in the Arts does not waver much above the 3 per cent mark. The message Paddy spread, still needs to be made. Paddy, of all people, would recognise that the Disability Arts movement has not done its job. Thanks to Paddy a few more of us can now access more arts institutions than previously, but we still have a long way to go before the notion of equal access is achieved. Masefield wrote a piece for SocietyGuardian in 2005 to coincide with the publication of his book Strength: Broadsides from Disability on the Arts (thanks to Sarah Ismail for the link) • Quote of the day, tweeted by the King's Fund from its event today on social care: JT [Jeremy Taylor]: Waiting for ‪#Dilnot‬ is like waiting for Godot - need to make business case for ‪#socialcare‬ funding reform now - impacts health funding See more from the event - which includes a speech by care services minister Paul Burstow this afternoon - via Twitter using the hashtag #socialcare • A post by Gordon Hector on the Platform 10 blog, which asks whether there has been a fall in the number of "blue collar" MPs . Hector says the proportion of parliamentarians coming from manual occupations has steadily declined , and notes a steady rise of the political operative. He says since the early 1980s, there has been fewer former professionals, and more former politicos entering parliament and also looks at how the number of farmers and miners taking seats in the Commons has fallen. He writes: Now, it might look odd to graph these two specific occupations. But in their own way, they each represent a shade of postwar Britain – old agriculture and old industry. Both had their heyday. Neither exists in substantive political form anymore; and just as we're a generally urban, post-industrial country, fewer MPs now come from farming or mining backgrounds. In this sense, Parliament reflects the bigger societal change. Perhaps the same can be said for the decline of MPs from manual occupations – it might have something to do with the UK having far fewer skilled trade jobs than it did 30 years ago. So you can argue that the Commons is a mirror of the nation, and its composition can tell us something about the state of wider British society. If that's the case, we should worry about these numbers. They suggest our MPs are largely drawn from a small and shrinking pool. They are middle-class, and increasingly are political class. This is not the hallmark of a healthy, representative political culture. Other news • BBC: £20m donation to 'harness immune system' against cancer • Children & Young People Now: Threat of further budget cuts puts children's centre services at risk, warns 4Children • CivilSociety.co.uk: Next stage in Hodgson review is for sector to tell government what it thinks • Independent: Andrew Lansley reopens talks with doctors • Inside Housing: Scotland launches empty homes fund • LocalGov.co.uk: Council spend falls below pre-recession levels, figures show • Public Finance: Public sector managers 'overworked and stressed' • Telegraph: GPs 'too expensive' to run health authorities • Third Sector: Only half a per cent of sector fraud is reported to Charity Commission, says National Audit Office report SocietyGuardian blogs Patrick Butler's cuts blog 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 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]