Foster carers are urgently needed in Derbyshire for children over five years old, according to figures released by a children’s charity.

AN innocent care worker was shot dead as she walked into a “Wild West” shoot out between two teen­agers, the Old Bailey heard yesterday.

Totnes hospital worker Stephen Aitkenhead sexually assaulted a disabled woman as she sat at home in her wheelchair, a crown court heard.

Social services bosses have been forced to make an embarrassing apology after a frail 81-year-old was branded potentially dangerous by staff who were supposed to be helping her.

A mental health unit which has more than doubled in size has been officially opened. Following £7 million of work, the Herschel Prins Centre, at Glenfield Hospital, can now accommodate women for the first time.

Labour is making the fight against child poverty a central aim because the party feels “outrage” at the waste of lives, unlike the Tories who pay “lip service” to the government’s commitments, a senior cabinet minister said yesterday.

Children at risk of abuse or neglect face even greater danger because of a new system designed to cut costs and speed up care proceedings, the Government has been warned.

Figures seen by The Times show that since the new system was introduced last September, the number of applications to take children into care in London has dropped by 30 per cent as local authorities struggled to make it work. London was one of a dozen areas – and the biggest – chosen to pilot the new system. The Government was unable to provide data for the other pilot areas.

In some London boroughs applications to courts for “care orders”, which are legally required to take children into local authority care, have fallen by 75 per cent since the pilot began.

A decision to close three residential centres in East Sussex will see 10 disabled people having to move home, the county council has said.

The homelessness service provided by Preston City Council is ‘good’ but with ‘uncertain’ prospects for further improvement, according to an independent report released today by the Audit Commission.

Mike Wardle, chief executive of the General Social Care Council, on how social workers must respond to the increasing trend for individualised services