GOVERNMENT PLANS

More than £400 million in so-called dormant bank accounts is to be raided by the Government to fund charities, youth clubs, sports and community centres. Money in the accounts, which has been left untouched for at least 15 years, is to be grabbed by an independent body set up by the Treasury. The idea is that the new fund could start making donations to good causes by the end of next year.

The sums of money involved are something of a grey area. The consensus guess is £400 million, however some estimates put it as high as £1.5 billion. And while the fund will start off with around £400 million, extra money will be paid in each year as more accounts are classified as dormant. Interest payments will also top up the fund, while the government may extend the grab to include billions of pounds held in pensions or other investments which have not been claimed.

The money in dormant bank accounts will have been forgotten about by the owner, perhaps because it was paid into an account in their name when they were a child. Alternatively, it may belong to someone who has passed away and so, in theory, belongs to their remaining family members. The government and the banks are committed to trying to find the people who own the money before it is gathered into the new fund. (Source: Mail on Sunday, Mar/07)

The Government is planning the surveillance of all children, including information on whether they eat five portions of fruit and vegetables a day. Plans include a £224 million database tracking all 12 million children in England and Wales from birth, but critics say the electronic files will undermine family privacy and destroy the confidentiality of medical, social work and legal records. Doctors, schools and the police will have to alert the database to a wide range of "concerns" and two warning flags on a child's record could start an investigation.

There will also be a system of targets and performance indicators for children's development. Children's services have been told to work together to make sure that targets are met. Child care academics, practitioners and policy experts attending a conference at the London School of Economics will express concern about how the system will work. The Children Act 2004 gave the Government the powers to create the database but experts fear that genuine cases of neglect will be missed in the mass of detail.

Dr Eileen Munro, of the LSE, said that if a child caused concern by failing to make progress towards state targets, detailed information would be gathered. That would include subjective judgments such as "Is the parent providing a positive role model?", as well as sensitive information such as a parent's mental health. Also included would be the consumption of five portions of fruit and veg a day. Arch, the children's rights organisation, was also worried saying, "Government databases have a dreadful record."

It was revealed this year that more than half a million children had been entered on a DNA database created to record known offenders, even though many had never been charged with an offence. The Department for Education and Skills said, "Our proposals balance the need to do everything we can to improve children's life chances whilst ensuring strong safeguards to make sure that information stored is minimal, secure and used appropriately. Parents and young people will be able to ask to see their data and make amendments and will retain full rights under the Data Protection Act." (Source: Daily Telegraph, Jun/06)

Civil servants in war zones are banned from travelling in Snatch Land Rovers. Government chiefs issued the order three years ago because the unarmoured vehicles offer no protection against roadside bombs. Meanwhile 34 soldiers travelling in Snatch vehicles have been been killed by bombs, and troops still have to use them. Hundreds of pen-pushers working for the Foreign Office and the Department for International Development in Iraq got 50 bombproof Toyota Land Cruisers costing £3.2million to protect them. Private contractors working for both departments were also told not to travel in the Land Rovers.

Recently, a £700million programme to build more than 700 bomb-proof vehicles for troops was announced by the Ministry of Defence. Colonel Bob Stewart, former commander of troops in Bosnia, said, “In the end it comes down to money. The decision to get in better armoured vehicles could have been made quicker, and perhaps some lives would have been saved.” After the death toll mounted in Iraq and Afghanistan in 2006 military chiefs asked for more heavily armoured vehicles. But instead of buying a ready made vehicle off the shelf old ones were revamped, taking months to complete. Snatch cars are still used in both Afghanistan and Iraq. (Source: Sunday Mirror, Nov/08)