Moves towards e-government do not provide enough opportunities for people to participate in the democratic process, according to a firm that specialises in electronic conferencing. Genesys Conferencing says although the turnout at the recent General Election was slightly up voter apathy is still a big issue.The company’s vice president, Nigel Dunn, said the issue needed to be addressed immediately through a simple extension of e-government. The 2005 targets for e-government, which aim to provide better and more cost-effective access to information and services, failed to provide opportunities for public to participation.

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Plans have been unveiled for a new national spatial address infrastructure, which will build on work already carried out by Ordnance Survey, local councils and other organisations to provide a single national database that will be maintained through a framework of address and property identifiers. The plans have been announced by the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister, Ordnance Survey and the Improvement and Development Agency for local government.The system will take forward what has been achieved so far by Local Government, OS, the National Land and Property Gazetteer and Royal Mail. A joint prospectus is available on the ODPM website, setting out the details of the proposal and asking for comments from interested parties.

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By Justin Davis Smith and Pat Gay Volunteering benefits society in terms of the delivery of essential services and the combating of social exclusion. The authors looked at the motivation for retired people to volunteer and what might be done to promote a greater willingness to volunteer by this expanding group. They challenge organisations to broaden their base of recruitment to include those groups of older people currently under-represented as volunteers. They also challenge government and other policy-makers to rethink both pre- and post-retirement education and the whole lifelong learning debate.

Partnership working has become a feature of delivering public services. NHS bodies and local authorities have a statutory responsibility under the Health Act to work together. In order to qualify for funding voluntary organisations frequently must demonstrate that they are working with others. This toolkit provides a brief overview of good practice in partnership working and includes a tool for assessing the effectiveness of a partnership group. It outlines the benefits to be gained when different organisations work effectively together, such as building on the strengths of organisations, allowing them to pool resources, avoiding duplication, and maximising impact.The Toolkit examines the barriers to effective partnership working including different organisational cultures, varying expectations of partners, lack of senior commitment and poor information exchange within and outside the partnership. It also sets out features which make partnerships successful. They include a balance of responsibility between partners, identifying the necessary skill mix, clear shared vision and goals, achievable outcomes and regular evaluation.

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Voluntary organisations in rural areas have had mixed experiences of regionalisation according to a new report looking into how the voluntary sector has responded to its changing relationship with government bodies at a national, regional and local level.The report has been produced by the National Council for Voluntary Organisations to examine the effect of the Government’s Rural Strategy of last year on voluntary and community organisations working in rural areas and its future implications.

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Government’s policies for families are exposing tensions and conflicts with Britain’s commitments on human rights that need to be debated and resolved, according to a study published today. The report, produced for the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, finds that while international conventions require the government to recognise the rights and needs of children and parents, the needs of different family members often compete and this reflected in inconsistencies in policy areas.The study has been written by Clem Henricson, the Director of Research and Policy at the National Family and Parenting Institute, and Andrew Bainham, Reader in Law at Cambridge University. They have reviewed the implications of the European Convention on Human Rights and the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child for child and family policy. The study also considers the possible impact of the Charter of Fundamental Rights under the proposed European Union Constitution.

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The Efficiency Map has been developed by the members of the NHS Productive Time Delivery Board. Its key purpose is to present initiatives to modernise service delivery, pay and workforce strategies, and IT systems within the NHS in a coherent way, highlighting expected benefits to front-line NHS of delivering the wider modernisation agenda, which ultimately will generate efficiency gains across all local health communities. It describes how process redesign can simplify the way some patient services are delivered, how skill-mix changes may result in a lower net cost, increased output or improved quality such as reduced treatment delay. It outlines how ‘NHS Connecting for Health’ is bringing modern computer systems to improve patient care and services. Over the next ten years it is expected to connect over 30,000 GPs to almost 300 hospitals and give patients access to their personal health and care information, transforming the way the NHS works.The map is available at: http://www.dh.gov.uk/assetRoot/04/11/05/61/04110561.pdf

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Patients have been given new assurances that they will retain control over access to their health records when new databases are launched next year. The newly-published Care Record Guarantee sets out rules governing information held by the NHS Care Records Service, the health record system, which will start to be rolled out across England.It makes 12 commitments to patients about their medical records, including a pledge that access by NHS staff will be strictly limited to those who need it to provide effective treatment. It promises, too, that in due course, patients will be able to block parts of the information to stop them being shared except in an emergency.

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The number of offenders being recalled to prison after being released on licence has more than trebled in the last five years and is set to increase further according to a report today from the Prison Reform Trust, which is calling for a review of the standards for breach of licence conditions and more support to help offenders to stay in the community.The report, “Recycling Offenders Through Prison”, says the dramatic rise in people being returned to jail is one of the hidden factors behind the rising prison population. Such prisoners, it says, make up nearly ten per cent of the inmates in some local prisons.

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By Michael Hunt and Barry J. O’Toole.The public service in the United Kingdom and in other parts of the world has been subject to more than fifteen years of constant reform. These reforms have raised numerous questions about the role of the public service in western political systems, the most important of which might be termed ethical questions. The questions are concerned essentially about the relationships between citizens and their governments and the roles and duties of politicians and officials in the aims, organisation and management of government. These questions raise further issues about leadership, both political and administrative and about the type of people who exercise leadership in our political and administrative systems.

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