A further 2000 West Midland nurses could face unemployment when they qualify in April because of hospital debts, a leading nursing body has warned. The region’s Strategic Health Authority has insisted its NHS Trusts are on course to break even this year, but latest reports claim that West Midland hospitals are £73 million in the red.

Dozens of Irish prisoners in England and Wales who were in detention centres facing deportation are to be released in the next week after the government announced they would be exempted from the drive to send foreign national prisoners home. The immigration minister, Liam Byrne, said Irish prisoners were to be treated as a “special case” and would only be sent back to Ireland in exceptional circumstances or where a judge had ordered their deportation following a criminal conviction.

Gun crime is being exported from the inner cities to the shires, the senior officer in charge of the national firearms policing strategy has told The Times.

{mosimage}Keith Bristow, lead officer on firearms crime for the Association of Chief Police Officers, was speaking as Scotland Yard battled to contain the violence in London, where one man was shot dead and another injured over the weekend.

A man in his twenties was admitted to hospital yesterday with a leg wound after a shooting on Harrow Road in the west of the capital. It followed the fatal shooting on Saturday of a 28-year-old man in Homerton, East London. Three others were wounded in shootings in Manchester.

The latest attacks came after a spate of shootings in South London in less than a fortnight, including the murders of three teenage boys.

But as the death toll mounted in the capital, Mr Bristow gave warning that the gun problem was moving to the shires. The proportion of gun crime occurring outside the hotspots of London, Birmingham and Manchester has risen sharply from 36 per cent in 2002-03 to 45 per cent in 2004-05.

A review of gun laws to establish increased sentences for young offenders, with penalties for being gang members, was promised by Tony Blair yesterday amid fears that London’s gunmen are increasingly exporting drugs and firearms violence to other parts of the country.

South West MP Gary Streeter is campaigning for families to be given the right to take short breaks from the stress of caring for disabled children.

Former hostage Terry Waite has launched a branch of a homeless charity in Medway at Rochester Cathedral. Mr Waite is president of Emmaus UK, which offers homeless men and women a home, work and the chance to rebuild their lives within a community.

Ethnic minorities are now more likely to feel British than white people, research has found. The study by the Institute for Public Policy Research said that 51 per cent of blacks and Asians describe themselves as British compared with just 29 per cent of whites.

The government is facing the prospect of House of Lords defeat over controversial plans to lock up some mentally ill people.

The government has been accused of orchestrating a £345m sell-off of former hospitals in one year in an attempt to balance the NHS budget. The value of the sales is 14 times the previous year’s total. The Department of Health sold 89 properties to developers between March 2005 and 2006.

{mosimage}Of these, 78 went to English Partnerships, a regeneration agency set up by Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott to build affordable housing on brownfield sites. Many sales were contested because local residents wanted buildings to be retained by the NHS or land used as green belt. One of the largest sites sold last year was High Royds in Menston, near Leeds, one of the last psychiatric hospitals of its kind, which closed in February 2003.

The 200-acre site became redundant when nine modern mental health facilities were built in the area. It was sold to the Raven Group for £27.2m and, despite protests, there was no public inquiry. Another large hospital site, St Margaret’s in Walsall, West Midlands, went for £13.25m to Bovis Homes, despite a four-year campaign to keep the land as green belt. Some sites have retained their value to the NHS, such as social clubs taken over by a charitable trust or St Oswald’s Hospice in Newcastle upon Tyne, which has remained a hospice.

A Conduct Committee of the General Social Care Council (GSCC) has decided the case of a social worker from Loughton who was alleged to have breached the Code of Practice for Social Care Workers having been found guilty of tax fraud committed outside of work.