The Health Minister Alan Milburn has announced a three year freeze on change to the funding formulas of health authorities and primary care groups while the method of funding is reviewed.Under cover of the funding programme announced in the Comprehensive Spending Review, which gives health providers some certainty about their forthcoming budgets, work will take place to find a fairer formula for funding the future NHS. 

The Government has spelled out the nature of the deal it expects to strike with IT and telecommunications businesses which want to be part of the massive planned expansion into schools and colleges.The price for a share of L700 million pounds worth of investment in the National Grid for Learning is a commitment to developments which will help educational institutions, and price tags that schools and colleges can afford. 

A pilot project using a joined-up approach to rough sleeping has been praised by the Housing Minister Hilary Armstrong.She said that local authorities, voluntary organisations and other bodies in Sheffield and other cities, working together with the Government, had already achieved a dramatic reduction in the number of people sleeping rough on the streets.
A recent street count in Sheffield showed that the number of people on the streets on any one night had fallen from 11 to one. 

The DETR has received so many letters from people frustrated by their neighbours’ refusal to reduce the height of leylandii and other high garden hedges, that it has produce a guide available on the internet to the courses of action available to them.Quick-growing and invasive leylandii can block light to gardens and homes; views from windows and their roots can even damage property through causing subsidence. 

A pre-paid postcard campaign is one of the features of the Listening to Women initiative launched by the Government.They will be available through GPs’ surgeries, libraries, Citizens Advice Bureaux and in mass circulation women’s magazines so that women who might otherwise not be reached can let the Government know their views.
There will also be a Listening to Women roadshow visiting eight regional centres and a conference of women’s organisations in March next year. 

Five authorities - Blackburn with Darwen, Devon, Redcar and Cleveland, Sheffield and Mansfield - are to participate in a pilot project over the next month to test out how to improve services across the whole of local government.The aim of this Local Government Association project is to inform plans for how the new improvement and development agency will operate once launched next Spring. 

More details have emerged about growth plans for the National Grid for Learning.Within the Prime Minister’s announcement of seven hundred million pounds for schools to support information and communications technology for UK schools, was news of further development of the Grid, with a section to be devoted for teacher use to improve teaching standards. 

The Government has called upon British business to help make Britain’s public transport system better.Ahead of further guidelines due soon which will urge businesses and local authorities to work harder on greener transport policies, Transport Minister Dr John Reid said public transport could be made more effective if the commercial opportunities in the New Deal for Transport were seized by the private sector. 

The Government has begun a major and controversial process of consultation over future policies to promote the well-being of family life.The Consultation Document “Supporting Families” offers a comprehensive package of practical programmes designed to help families provide children with greater stability. 

A new forum of representatives from the private sector, IT industry associations and Government are to push forward the electronic government agenda.Public Service Minister Peter Kilfoyle said he and the Minister for the Cabinet Office, Dr Jack Cunningham, would be personally involved in the project, to ensure it stayed on track.