A care home in York was so dirty and damaged that managers had to be hauled before top council bosses. Hygiene inspectors published a Care Home, in Gale Lane, Acomb, after visiting the premises last autumn.

Thousands of arthritis sufferers will be denied treatment with proven benefits by a decision not to pay for a new drug.

The Youth Justice Board, set up seven years ago by Labour to cut juvenile crime, has failed to hit any of its key performance targets in the past 12 months, according to its annual report.

High-stress jobs make young workers twice as likely to suffer from major depression and anxiety disorders, according to a British study of mental health in the workplace.

Plans to turn a £1.7m house in Surrey into a “home from home” for families of injured service personnel have been approved despite residents’ objections.

MPs and pressure groups yesterday rounded on ITV after it issued a “clarification” over a landmark documentary in which a man with Alzheimer’s was filmed as he supposedly passed away.

{mosimage}In fact, the network admitted yesterday that the man died two and a half days later, and not while the cameras were still rolling.

Paul Watson, the acclaimed documentary maker at the centre of the latest row, last night defended the film, saying he never intended to imply the footage portrayed the exact moment of death. But ITV’s admission was immediately seized on as further evidence that TV must get its house in order.

“We are very disappointed to learn that yet another documentary appears to have been doctored,” said the shadow culture minister, Ed Vaizey. “I hope this is now the final lesson to be learned by production companies who often make good programmes that are undermined by misleading publicity campaigns.”

With broadcasters having declared zero tolerance on misleading viewers in the wake of the row over publicity footage for BBC1’s A Year with the Queen and a series of other incidents, ITV’s “clarification” was the latest example of their jittery disposition.

Last week, the broadcaster faced criticism for proposing to show the final moments of Alzheimer’s sufferer Malcolm Pointon as part of a moving documentary by Watson that tracks the debilitating effect of the disease over 11 years.

It defended scenes in which Mr Pointon is surrounded by his family as he slowly loses consciousness. His widow, Barbara Pointon, also appeared on the radio and in newspapers including the Guardian defending the decision.

Children born with the help of donated sperm or eggs should have the fact recorded on their birth certificates, a group of MPs and peers has suggested.

Mental health patients’ care is being threatened by nursing staff shortages, nurses say. A poll of 600 mental health nurses by the Royal College of Nursing found nearly half thought low staffing compromised care once a week.

Conservative leader David Cameron has attacked the “pupil referral units” used to teach disruptive youngsters as expensive and ineffective.

High court judges yesterday dealt a fresh blow to the government’s handling of the prison crisis when they ruled that inmates serving new “open-ended” sentences had unlawfully been left in overcrowded local prisons without access to the compulsory rehabilitation programmes they need to secure their release.