The Government is stepping up its commitment to schemes designed to improve road safety and reduce road noise with the announcement of a programme of road schemes. The works will focus on some of the most congested points of the national trunk road network but have been designed to provide local solutions to deal with the problems.The schemes outlined by the Transport Secretary, Alistair Darling, include for the first time a timetable for the removal of all 74 stretches of concrete surface on the motorway and trunk road network. The first phase will see the resurfacing of 26 stretches at a cost of 77 million pounds. It is estimated that more than 11,500 householders across the country will benefit from reduced traffic noise from this phase alone.

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More than half of the local councils, which have been granted Beacon Status in the latest round of the scheme to reward the best public services, are receiving the award for the first time. The 54 authorities being rewarded this year will receive a share of government funding worth 5 million pounds to help them promote best practice. This year, for the first time, some of this funding will be used to encourage the Beacon councils to work directly with authorities in need of improvement in a peer support scheme.The results of the latest round of the scheme, announced by the Local Government Minister, Nick Raynsford, see 58 Beacon awards – including some for joint projects – being given to the 54 authorities. For the first time the winning bodies include a fire authority – Cheshire – which is picked out for its work on Community Cohesion. A quarter of the awards this year go to district councils.

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This briefing, commissioned from Catalyst by the Transport and General Workers Union, sets out the key issues of concern in the debate over Foundation Hospitals, warning that they could inject a competitive ethos into the NHS and open a gap in service delivery between a small elite of favoured hospitals guarding their position against a lower tier of “second class” provision upon which the majority will depend. Foundation hospitals represent a full-blown assault on public services and a giant step towards privatisation.Link: http://www.catalystforum.org.uk/pubs/paper14.html

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