A National Director for Social Care is to be appointed in what senior social services staff say is a major step forward in revolutionising the way adult social care is thought about and talked about. An advertisement for the post specifies that the successful applicant must be a current or recently experienced director of adult social services.
Initially the post will be a one-year secondment but with an option to renew for two more years. 

Public sector organisations are being urged to consider updating their IT stock more frequently. The call has come from Remploy e-cycle, which says it is in line with the National Audit Office’s ‘Improving the disposal of public sector ICT equipment’ report. The company is highlighting the report’s claim that the public sector could benefit by as much as 70 million pounds a year.
The company is part of Remploy, the UK’s leading provider of employment services for disabled people. 

Council leaders have reacted to a report stating that they are using so-called ‘spy laws’ to snoop on their citizens and are claiming they use the powers as part of their commitment to putting local people first. The Press Association used the Freedom of Information Act to ask 97 councils if they had used powers under the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (Ripa) to carry out surveillance. It found some councils had used the Act more than 100 times in the last 12 months. 

Schools across the country are to get access to advice and training materials on how to support children and young people who stammer. The work will be done by the Michael Palin Centre for Stammering Children, which has been given 340,000 pounds by the Government to develop a stammering information programme that will be rolled out to all schools by 2010.
The Centre is acknowledged as a world leader in the field. 

A poll published by The Children’s Society, as part of its Good Childhood Inquiry, reveals mounting concern about children’s mental health and well being. The Society was seeking evidence on the general health of children, but a large number of responses highlighted children’s mental health and well being, which is an issue barely acknowledged by past generations.
The poll showed that only one in ten respondents felt children nowadays are happier. 

Working across boundaries is vital to the Transformational Government strategy which is steered by the Cabinet Office. Sharing confidential data between public bodies is an essential part of joint working, but there is a high risk of information falling into the wrong hands. In a move to develop processes for joint use of confidential data, ten local councils have set up a shared learning group to refine best practice. 

The Greater London Assembly does not provide effective scrutiny of the London Mayor and should be scrapped. In calling for its abolition, the New Local Government Network argues that scrutinising the work of the Mayor does not require 25 full-time elected politicians and that much of their work is spent compiling reports and investigations that have little impact. It suggests that other London politicians could do the job more effectively.
The Greater London Assembly was set up in 2000. 

Doctors still top the poll as the professionals that the public trust most. An Ipsos MORI survey commissioned by the Royal College of Physicians shows that doctors come out first when the public is asked whom they generally trust to tell the truth. The annual poll indicates that nine in ten adults say they trust doctors to tell the truth.
Ipsos MORI asked almost 2,000 adults in Great Britain to say whether they generally trusted 16 different types of people to tell the truth or not. 

The Government is being urged to introduce elected mayors in every major town and city in England to encourage central government to decentralise more powers to local government. The call comes from the Institute for Public Policy Research which also believes that more mayors would also result in stronger local political leadership and clearer accountability. 

Failure to value the work of those who manage volunteers and low levels of funding to support volunteers are undermining the quality of the services they provide. A national survey of volunteer management capacity by Volunteering England found a chronic need to invest more financial and human resources and to change the ‘cost free’ culture.
The survey found that over a quarter of managers of volunteers said they would not want more volunteers even if they were given additional funds.