The Commission for Social Care Inspection has warned an NHS Trust that it must dramatically improve standards in the care homes it runs for people with learning disabilities, or face the possibility of prosecution.

A firm responsible for tagging and tracking offenders has failed to monitor some criminals for weeks, a BBC undercover investigation has found. Group Four Securicor (G4S), responsible for monitoring more than 1,000 people across the East Midlands, said it had failed in “a small number of cases”.

{mosimage}A BBC Inside Out inquiry found several men described by G4S staff as sex offenders were among those unmonitored. Five workers have been suspended and a Home Office investigation has started.

Ian Ridgley, COO for G4S Justice Services, said: “We recognise that the Home Office require us to work to a very high standard and we are sorry that in some minor number of instances we may not have operated to those standards.”

A BBC undercover reporter spent four months working as a temporary employee at G4S where he secretly filmed workers and managers and kept a detailed diary. He filmed G4S staff allegedly fabricating records of tagging installations to save money and meet government targets.

The BBC also learned tags were routinely removed from alleged offenders the night before their bail hearing on Home Office instruction. One violent offender was filmed drinking after his tag was removed by G4S. A week later he was sent to prison for assaulting a former partner. The policy of removing the tags before hearings is being reviewed by the government.

The NHS should record the ethnicity of all patients to ensure people with mental illness are not discriminated against, a watchdog has said. The Healthcare Commission said some black and ethnic minority groups were three times more likely than average to be admitted to mental health hospitals.

Many people living in nursing homes are enduring chronic pain, a study says. The work by the Picker Institute Europe for the Patients’ Association found nearly two out of five residents experienced constant pain.

The lord chief justice yesterday voiced his opposition to mandatory life sentences for murder, saying they “misled the public”. Lord Phillips put on record for the first time his disagreement with the government over the life sentence, which ministers insist must be retained to reflect the unique gravity of murder.

Health inspectors will today publish conclusive evidence that the government’s claim to have ended the scandal of mixed-sex psychiatric wards in the NHS was false, or at best misleading.

The Government’s plans to toughen up mental health laws are “fundamentally flawed” and could put the public more at risk from dangerous criminals, mental health experts warn today.

A sacked social worker had to be dragged screaming from a court after a foul mouthed tirade at a judge about gang culture today. Two members of an armed gang of hooded thugs that included the killers of Tom ap Rhys Price were been jailed for a minimum of five years each.

Hundreds of thousands of social care staff are working in settings with vulnerable adults before they have been given a full Criminal Records Bureau (CRB) check. Employers are appointing individuals who have been checked against the Protection of Vulnerable Adults (POVA) list only, instead of an enhanced CRB check, to tackle high turnover and vacancy rates.

A leading pharmacologist today condemns science degree courses in alternative and complementary medicine as pseudo scientific or even “anti-scientific”. Prof David Colquhoun of University College London says the rapid growth in “science degrees without the science” shows a sharp contrast with the closure of physics and chemistry courses at universities.