TWO former care home proprietors have been questioned following a dawn raid over disability benefits worth up to £358,000.

Charges for residents in Birmingham City Council care homes have rocketed by up to £183 a week – days after the local authority said it could only afford a 49p increase in the amount it pays for elderly people to be looked after in private sector residential homes.

A woman is planning to take legal action after her vulnerable mother was taken away from her home in a dramatic raid by council staff and police.

Social care employers will get £1,500 from the Department of Health for taking on an apprentice. The subsidy is part of the government’s plan to reduce unemployment. It has earmarked £75 million to get 50,000 jobless 18-to-24-year-olds into training.

The Government today outlined plans to “boost the status” of social care in order to cope with an increasingly ageing population.

POLICE are looking for two women who entered a family home posing as social service workers. A family in Eltham were visited on February 11 by two white women in their 30s, a blonde with curly hair and a Mediterranean with a mole on her jaw.

A device found outside a council office in Doncaster, South Yorkshire, before being made safe by an Army bomb disposal team was “intended to cause harm”, police said.

Unemployed young people will be offered 50,000 traineeships in the social care sector under a scheme called CareFirst, Chancellor Alistair Darling announced.

Despite the Government’s commitment to make increasing use of the third sector in delivering public services, progress has been slow. A new agreement between the Department of Health and specialist third sector organisations is set to increase the flow of contracts for health and social care services.

A CARE assistant murdered a frail dementia patient at a home by setting fire to her bed and leaving her to burn, a court has heard.