The Department of Health’s new guidance ‘The National Framework for NHS Continuing Healthcare and NHS-funded Nursing Care’ has been heavily criticised by charities including the Alzheimer’s Society who believe the guidance doesn’t go far enough to give vulnerable people with dementia access to long term care funding.

The Home Office has abandoned its threat to take into care the children of failed asylum seekers who refuse to leave the country. The climbdown follows a pilot scheme involving 116 families facing deportation, which showed that the policy of threatening to withdraw all welfare support had proved a flop.

“The evidence from the pilot … indicates that there was no significant increase in the number of voluntary returns or removals of unsuccessful asylum-seeking families,” says the Home Office study, published yesterday.

A Home Office review of family removals also recommends that very young children should not be separated from their mothers, and families with school-age children about to take exams should not be detained. It also suggests that immigration enforcement officers involved in family work should be issued with clothing in softer colours than their current navy so they are less intimidating to children.

The immigration minister, Liam Byrne, said the policy of threatening to take children into care introduced in the 2004 asylum legislation was intended to encourage cooperation with removals:

“While we think it is important to retain a provision to withdraw support from families who will not cooperate with removal, we do not think it is appropriate for it to be used on a blanket basis.”

Mr Byrne also said he was making concessions over the much criticised section 4 support for failed asylum seekers who are unable to leave Britain because of circumstances beyond their control. He said that extra support would be given later this year to pregnant women and mothers with children in this category, including access to basic clothing and travel as well as food and toiletries with vouchers.

Hundreds of thousands of elderly people are too scared to leave their homes for fear of falling on uneven pavements, according to a survey by Help the Aged.

A fresh row over the government’s crime statistics broke out last night after two criminologists said the authoritative British Crime Survey excludes 3 million offences a year.

Falls are costing the NHS nearly £1bn a year, mainly due to older people tripping on damaged or uneven pavements, a charity warned last night.

Doctors are threatening an all-out attack on the government’s NHS reform programme, labelling it “not fit for purpose” and damaging to patients. Hundreds of medics will debate the critical motion at the start of the British Medical Association’s four-day annual conference in Torquay.

Four in 10 people in England do not believe the NHS has got better under Labour, a poll says. The British Medical Association said the findings should act as a “stark message” to Gordon Brown as he prepares to become prime minister this week.

The number of pensioners being abused in their own homes in Bolton has increased by more than a quarter in just a year. There were 148 reports of elderly people being physically abused by family, close friends or care workers between April 2006 and April 2007 – an increase of 30.

Millions of people are to be prescribed cholesterol-busting drugs on the NHS in Britain’s biggest mass medication programme for adults. The government’s drugs watchdog is expected this week to recommend the systematic screening of all adults at 40, 50 and 60 for heart disease.

Government ministers are considering the crisis at Brent tPCT after being presented with a dossier by Brent Council, which highlights the financial pressures placed on the authority and the impact on residents of huge cuts to local health services.