A Government scheme that is meant to help those people who are most in need is in fact making things worse for some of them. A new study of the Social Fund shows that it is increasing levels of poverty for some of Britain’s worst off people. The report, funded and published by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, calls for immediate reforms of the system.”The Social Fund: Current role and future direction” draws on group discussions with benefit recipients and taxpayers and concludes that a radical review is needed of the working of the Fund, which was set up in 1988 to help people on a low income, predominately those on means-tested benefits. It provides grants or repayable interest-free loans.

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The financial problems faced by some National Health Service Primary Care Trusts may have more to do with the types of patients they serve than the way they are managed. Research released today shows that trusts in deficit tend to be in better off areas.The research, published in the open access journal BMC Health Services Research, studied 29 trusts that are in deficit and 29 in surplus. It found those with a shortfall tended to be in relatively affluent rural areas in the East of England, while those with a budget surplus served more deprived urban areas. It reveals marked socioeconomic and density differences between the populations served by the two groups and concludes the differences between trusts’ financial performance are unlikely to be due to bad management alone and must be influenced by the characteristics of the populations they cover.

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