Society daily 03.02.12

Sign up to Society daily email briefing Today's top SocietyGuardian stories • Royal College of GPs calls for David Cameron to scrap health bill • Free nursery places may not help children's education, watchdog finds • Waterstones ends unpaid work placements after investigation • Hospital patients more at risk at weekends • Divorced fathers to get more contact with their children • Why this case matters: R (KM) v Cambridgeshire County Council • Polly Toynbee: The welfare reform bill will incentivise people: to turn on David Cameron • Workless families: a convenient untruth • Deputy head criticises UK drugs culture after son's death from ecstasy • Kenneth Clarke to 'wipe slate clean' for hundreds of thousands of ex-offenders • Stephen Dunn: Yes, Hinchingbrooke hospital will be run privately. No, that's not a bad thing All today's SocietyGuardian stories On the Guardian Professional Networks • Past, meet present: Southwark council unites old maps and modern GIS • Shortsighted pay decisions are bad for us all , warns Richard Vize • What housing can learn from profit-driven property guardians • A newly qualified social worker looks at how the BBC's new documentary series Protecting Our Children reflects the challenges faced by child protection teams • Sarah Brown, from the Women's Resource Centre, shares her advice on how to overcome the difficulties of measuring social return on investment • The NHS procurement strategy has undergone many changes but failed to secure lower prices from industry . What's wrong, asks Colin Cram On my radar ... • The Guardian Public Services Summit , which continues today. Debate today is focusing on the pace of reform, the role of public services in sustaining communities, and innovation, failure and risk taking. Arun Marsh is live blogging the day's events or you can follow via the Twitter hashtag #pss2012 • Benefits camp . FutureGov is today hosting an event looking at how the benefits system can be reshaped. Groups at the event in Westminster and online are examining a number of issues , including improving admin, saving money and introducing more collaboration and peer support. See also the Twitter hashtag #benefitscamp . Meanwhile, the Joseph Rowntree Foundation has published some really useful figures on large families in the UK . JRF statistician Aleks Collingwood says the government's proposed benefits cap is likely to have the biggest impact on large families and collates the figures on where large families - those with three or more children - live, what they do for a living and their ethnicity. She says: None of this solves the argument about the merits or problems of the benefit cap. But it does help us to understand exactly who we're talking about when we're discussing it. • National Libraries Day , which takes place tomorrow. Events are planned around the country by library supporters, but as Benedicte Page reports, councils are under greater financial pressure than ever to cut services • Question of the day: Are managers just witch-doctors? On the Flipchart Fairy Tales blog, writer Rick responds to a post on another blog describing management as "a set of rituals which are wrongly supposed to have effects on the outside world" . He writes: There is enough of a grain of truth in this to give it a certain credibility. We all know people who have succeeded largely because of luck and then spun the success as being due to their own talent, and people who, when they screw up, pass the blame on to forces beyond their control. Often, they are the same people. But can it really be true that having good managers or mediocre managers actually makes little difference to the business over the long-term? If it is, HR executives, business academics and the entire talent management industry are wasting their time. Alas, I don't have time to do a review of the research this morning, though I promise to do one soon. In the meantime, though, I'd be interested to know what people think. Are managers really just witch doctors? Does organisational success depend on so many uncontrollable factors that managers can only make a marginal difference? Are organisations successful because they have talented managers or are managers seen as successful because they happen to be in high performing organisations? • A "cooking revolution", which has been launched on Merseyside. Social enterprise Can Cook aims to raise £50,000 in 100 days to fund cooking lessons for families in the city. It wants to see thousands of families across the city learn how to cook healthy, affordable meals. Other news • BBC: Weekly bin collection scheme offers councils £250m • Children & Young People Now: Adoption service inspections not tough enough, Ofsted concedes • Community Care: Personalisation 'wrongly used to devalue social workers' • Independent: Female staff win equal pay deal at council • Inside Housing: Regulator plans to axe landlords' right to appeal • Localgov.co.uk: Staffordshire members' allowances frozen • Public Finance: Outsourcing is a 'threat to FoI' • Telegraph: Duchess of Cambridge meets recovering addicts on secret visit to treatment centre • Third Sector: North Somerset Council to consider new restrictions on charity shops 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 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]