News

Children’s services from Sure Start to schools and NHS mental health are at breaking point, according to a coalition of 120 organisations that have called on the chancellor to invest in young people in the budget next week.

Local authorities backed the call, saying council-run children’s services were fast approaching a tipping point as they struggled to maintain services in the face of a funding gap estimated to reach £3bn by 2025.

An extra £1.67bn is to be paid to tens of thousands of disabled benefit claimants after years of underpayments, the government has revealed.

The Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) was criticised for its handling of the employment and support allowance (ESA) after revealing that an estimated 180,000 recipients were due arrears payments totalling £970m.

Labour is to try to force the government to publish analysis into the impact of universal credit on claimants’ incomes, amid increasing signs that ministers are delaying the controversial programme following a backlash from MPs.

GPs in England are being given permission to prescribe patients “social” activities, such as dance classes, to tackle loneliness.

The strategy, announced by Prime Minister Theresa May, will also see postal delivery workers checking in on isolated people during their rounds.

The government says about 200,000 older people have not had a conversation with a friend or relative in over a month.

And many GPs see between one and five people a day suffering with loneliness.

GPs in England will be able to refer people to take part in social activities such as cookery classes, walking clubs and art groups to combat loneliness, the prime minister has said.

Instead of offering medication, doctors will be encouraged to use “social prescribing” to refer lonely patients to activities that could help tackle feelings of isolation.

Thousands of vulnerable survivors of domestic violence in England are being housed in dirty and unsuitable accommodation, including dwellings overrun with mice and mould, holes in the floor and no electricity.

Housing lawyers and charities said a lack of social housing and poor council decisions meant women were increasingly being put in temporary accommodation that was not fit for purpose, putting them at risk of returning to the perpetrators of abuse.

Growing numbers of patients with learning disabilities are being physically restrained in mental health units, despite ministers telling NHS trusts to use such techniques less often.

Staff in NHS mental health hospitals deployed restraint on such patients 22,000 times last year, almost 50% more than the 15,000 occasions in 2016, BBC research has found.

Social care workers are cutting short visits to frail elderly people, or working unpaid overtime to keep up with huge workloads, a new report finds.

Some are paid as little as £5 an hour for helping Britain’s growing number of older people to live at home – assisting with eating, taking medication and getting out of bed. One in three earns less than the national minimum wage or national living wage because they are not paid for time spent travelling between clients.

Council staff in one of London’s most ethnically diverse boroughs have accused bosses of institutional racism, claiming that racial tension is escalating at the local authority with devastating consequences.

In a strongly worded letter to councillors in Lambeth, a group of staff who call themselves Lambeth Black Workers write of the “despair, humiliation, disappointments, rejection and loss of staff unity that are direct consequences of racism at work”.