Planners have warned there must be an end to the development allowed at a nursing home between Portsoy and Cullen. Aberdeenshire Council officers claim the planning service cannot support the “continued sprawl” of the Lythe Nursing Home, near Lintmill, Cullen.

Nursery fees in Scotland are increasing at almost twice the rate of those in England, according to a report. The survey, by Daycare Trust and Children in Scotland, also revealed that childcare costs north of the Border have gone up by more than five times the rate of those in Wales.

Scotland’s top social workers yesterday called for a Royal Commission to settle the row over methadone. The Association of Directors of Social Work (ADSW) has long argued that debate over the use of the heroin substitute had become too politicised.

Childcare experts yesterday condemned a 20-month jail sentence for a woman who neglected a baby so badly she resembled “a child from a concentration camp”.

Home care services in the Highlands are near the bottom of the performance league compared with the other 31 local councils across Scotland, new figures reveal. Highland Council is in the bottom 25 per cent for the number of home care clients aged over 65 receiving help in the evenings, overnight and at weekends.

It has long been blamed for creating a nation of couch potatoes. But a new report today claims that Britain’s love affair with television is causing far more damage – both physically and psychologically – than previously thought.

The head of a residential school for boys said he hoped a new insight into the establishment would help dispel the myths surrounding it. Chris McNaught’s comments came after TV cameras were allowed into Ballikinrain, in Stirlingshire, for the first time.

Battles are being won in the war against drugs in the north-east, with a drop in deaths and charges, police revealed last night. Drugs worth £105,000 have been taken off the streets in Grampian in the past three months, following a major operation last year that netted crack cocaine and heroin worth £1million.

Angus Council has agreed to look into issues surrounding its economic and cultural links to countries with poor human rights records, including the United States.

There have been many reports on health inequalities that cleave Scottish society in two, but research published today by Glasgow University on death rates across Scotland and Europe is about as bleak as it gets.