Scottish prisons are reforming their drug-testing regime and stepping up security after a damning report on their own staff’s concerns about heroin use behind bars.

The Social Care Association are to hold their fourth consecutive annual lecture in Scotland on 23rd November. The keynote speaker, at what is now entitled the Dr Ian Mallinson Memorial Lecture, will be Diana Kerr, Research Fellow at the Centre for Research on Families and Relationships, Edinburgh University.

A leading charity which provides support for people with learning disabilities has been forced to terminate a council agreement because of insufficient funding. The move by Ark Housing Association, which has been working with Aberdeenshire Council, follows a similar decision earlier this year by Turning Point in Glasgow and highlights a growing crisis in the voluntary sector.

Most councils are not meeting minimum standards on supervising violent criminals, according to a report by inspectors. Home visits are insufficient, supervision is failing to address offending behaviour and risk assessments are inadequate, according to the results of a nationwide review by the Social Work Inspection Agency (SWIA). Earlier this month The Scotsman revealed that emergency orders had been placed on more than 60 high-risk sex offenders to control their movements, amid growing police frustration at the numbers being released from jail with few restrictions.

The Scottish Borders region is losing out on new residential care facilities because Scottish Borders Council social work bosses fear an invasion of elderly English people – taking advantage of the Scottish’s Executive’s much-vaunted free personal care regime – will put undue strain on local services and budgets. That is the view of Liberal Democrat councillor Jock Houston who this week supported a proposal from Trinity Medical Properties Ltd for a £6million nursing home, with 60 beds and employing 40 staff, in Kelso Road, Coldstream.

More than 100 suspected dealers have been arrested in one of Scotland’s biggest drugs operations, prompted by growing public unrest over the scourge of drugs. A series of dawn raids carried out across some of the west of Scotland’s most deprived areas saw more than 500 police officers target 80 houses.

Alzheimer Scotland has condemned the final guidance produced by the National Institute of Clinical Excellence (NICE), which says that drugs to help treat Alzheimer’s will not be available on the NHS for people in the early or late stages of the condition. The guidance states that the dementia drugs Aricept (donepezil), Reminyl (galantamine) and Exelon (rivastigmine) should only be used to treat those with moderate Alzheimer’s disease.

Four former residents of a children’s home who claim they were abused by staff are to get their day in court, a judge ruled yesterday. They have been given leave to sue Quarriers Homes in Bridge of Weir, Renfrewshire, even though they raised the actions outwith the statutory period of limitation.

An immigration judge has called for an urgent review of the procedures for detaining illegal immigrants after expressing his “revulsion” at the manner in which a Chilean refugee facing deportation was treated by the Home Office.

A prison siege in which a warder was taken hostage was broken only after staff opened the jail’s drugs dispensary to inmates, a court heard yesterday. Hooded prisoners took the warder hostage at Edinburgh’s Saughton jail after an inmate’s wife was banned from visiting.