New Initiatives
What's Going On...
The Blast-It project over the next 12 months will be to focus on what the ConDem government are up to.
The Cameron government are currently engaged in a social engineering project on the scale of a Hollywood epic. Every corner of Civil society, even the private space between our ears is now subject to some new policy initiative or another.
The package of measures currently underway are part of our leader Dave's mission to mend broken Britain. Our mission will be to track Dave's progress across 2012.
Theresa May wants action on yobs
Police will no longer be able to ignore homeowners whose lives are being made a misery by yobs, the Home Secretary is set to announce.
Once three separate complaints have been lodged, officers will h ave no option but to take action. The same will apply if five individuals from five different households in the same neighbourhood complain about the same issue.
If councils and police still fail to respond, they can be hauled in front of a ‘crime commissioner’, who will have the power to fire chief constables.
The new response to anti-social is expected to be in place by November.
Changes to Legal Aid
Part two of the bill is going to affect a lot of people: the parents of babies brain-damaged at birth, victims of human rights abuses like those in the Trafigura case, and victims of media corporations' desire to print half-truths and invade privacy.
Yet the same part of the bill has been sold to a willing media as an attempt to reduce motor insurance premiums. The legal aid bill is being presented by Cameron and Co as targeting ambulance chasing lawyers rather than a defence of money and power.
In essence the proposed changes to legal aid for poor people will mean that they will nolonger be able to take on the big boys unless they are prepared to lose everything in the event of losing a case.
Health & Safety: Dave is now waging war on large birds
The Prime Minister declared that health and safety legislation had become an "albatross around the neck of British businesses", costing billions of pounds a year and leaving entrepreneurs in fear of speculative claims and he vowed to kill it off.
Ah, but he should take care and recall The Rime of the Ancient Mariner….
And every tongue, through utter drought,
Was withered at the root;
We could not speak, no more than if
We had been choked with soot.
Ah! wel-a-day! what evil looks
Had I from old and young!
Instead of the cross, the albatross
About my neck was hung.
Mr Cameron has asked the Health and Safety Executive to bring forward to the end of 2012 its timetable for abolishing or consolidating up to half of all existing regulations. He vowed to "kill off the health and safety culture for good" by reducing the costs incurred through no-win no-fee deals, cutting back red tape and making the self-employed exempt from certain rules.
"I want 2012 to go down in history not just as Olympics year or Diamond Jubilee year, but the year we get a lot of this pointless time-wasting out of the British economy and British life once and for all." Moves to tackle the compensation culture form part of a general assault on red tape following the 2010 Young Report and last year's Lofstedt Report into how to minimise the burden of regulation.
Dave's comments were branded "appalling and unhelpful" by those who earn their living in the health and safety industry. However, it sounds as if Dave has become the dupe of afternoon TV marketing from the no-win, no-fee lawyers.
Integrating Health and Social Care
5 January 2012
David Cameron has called for the integration of health and social care services – does our great leader never sleep. Cameron made integration one of his five "personal NHS guarantees" last year – can you name the other four?
At the moment, health and social care – the help given mainly to old or disabled patients to help them continue to live at home rather than in hospital or nursing homes – are different systems in England. Local authorities look after the social care bit, supposedly. The new duty would oblige providers of medical care to start working closely with social care providers in order to streamline the care patients receive, ensure they have to deal with fewer organisations and departments and deliver more care in community settings rather than hospitals.
Cameron has told the health secretary, Andrew Lansley, to drive through changes that health policy experts claim will make life more convenient for patients, improve care and save the NHS money.
The first move towards creating joined-up services is likely to see Lansley tell the NHS that it has to give integration the same priority that keeping waiting lists under control has had for the last decade.
This new target is the key recommendation of a new report on integrating care by the King's Fund and Nuffield Trust health thinktanks, whose chief executives both advise Downing Street.
They want the introduction of "a clear, ambitious and measurable goal to improve the experience of patients and service users, and to be delivered by a defined date. This goal would serve a similar purpose to the aim of delivering a maximum waiting time of 18 weeks for patients receiving hospital care.
The prime minister has been persuaded by senior doctors and Downing Street health advisers that, without integration, the NHS could become unsustainable due to rises in the number of patients with long-term health conditions such as obesity, diabetes and breathing problems.
The changes will lead to some hospitals closing, warned the pro-integration NHS Confederation, which represents hospitals and other major NHS employers. The confederation's deputy policy director, Jo Webber, said: "Integrating care will improve services, particularly for people who are frail and those with long term conditions. But it will also involve making some really difficult decisions as hospital activity is reduced and moved into the community."
In addition, "fundamental reform of social care" – which the charity Age UK said was "an absolute disaster" – was vital, otherwise integration would not work, Webber said. Achieveing joined-up services "will require significant political courage and leadership."
Cameron is keen to include new guarantees that patients will receive an agreed care plan and a named case manager responsible for co-ordinating care for all their needs, and changes to the existing "tariff" system – where hospitals are paid for providing episodes of care – to favour the planning and delivery of ongoing programmes of joined-up care for people with complex health and welfare needs.
The care services minister Paul Burstow who has an Outcomes Framework. said: "Integrated care should be the norm. That's why we asked the NHS Future Forum to specifically work on the issue. Our ambition for the NHS and social care is a simple one – to achieve better results for people and carers. “
In sum: The NHS is a mess, social care is a mess and Dave’s solution is…. create an integrated bigger mess.
Taskforce to tackle Gang and Youth Violence
02/11/11
Teresa May, MP, Home Secretary and Minister for Women and Equalities finally lauched 'Call Me Dave's' blueprint to intervene in the lives of tens of thousands of poor people. On Monday she published the details of how the Government intends to end gang and youth violence.
She has a crazy blueprint, she has a taskforce of a mere one hundred advisors and a miniscule budget. In total the budget for this scheme adds up to £11.2 million, that's £10 million sythoned away from other Home Office initiatives and £1.2 million of new money, to be used over 3 years to tackle gang crime against girls.
The brains behind this scheme is Iain Duncan-Smith MP, Secretary of State for Work and Pensions. He says, "there is no quick fix" for the problem of Gang and Youth Violence.
You could download his report but I'll save you the trouble. Now, if you have a son or daughter involved gang violence and they come to the notice of The Taskforce you can expect a knock on the door. Open the door and you'll find a Multi-Systemic Therapist waiting to swing into action.
We don't actually know what training these MSTs have had that enables them to save the family from what ails them but rest assured, they form part of a multi-agency intervention army. This emphasis on 'multi-agency' is vital because it enables the lead agency, i.e. the Home Office to spread the load in terms of finance and responsibility. Hidden within the report is an unspoken assumption that up to 30 agencies, who at some time or another, come into contact with young people who might, potentially, become drug dealing knife wielding raping nasty bastards by the time they reach 15 years old will receive intervention along the way. In short, their sickness will spotted and dealt with - an end to Gang and Youth Violence.