Two more Hampshire residential care homes face closure – because they cost too much to repair, say county bosses. The cash-strapped adult social services department of Hampshire County Council is proposing to shut the homes in Basingstoke and Lymington in a bid to save money.

Community groups and charities in Leeds are heading for a funding crisis – because £1bn of Lottery cash has been earmarked for the 2012 Olympics. And it is feared vulnerable people could be hit by the Government’s decision to help plug the Olympics cash shortfall with Lottery funds.

The country’s biggest employer of disabled workers is to close 43 factories under cost-cutting plans, unions have been told. The scale of closures planned by Remploy is worse than unions were expecting and sparked warnings of a national strike.

Leading mental health campaigner Suman Fernando has refused to accept an OBE on the grounds that he disagrees with the government’s proposed mental health bill plans.

The decision to bring in ID cards for foreigners before bringing them in for Britons may lead to “de-facto racial profiling”, MPs and peers have warned. The Joint Committee on Human Rights says black and other ethnic minorities may “disproportionately” be asked to prove their UK immigration status.

Council staff, charity workers and doctors will be obliged to tip off police about anyone they believe might commit a violent crime, under a Home Office plan revealed in a leaked document.

Children as young as four on Tyneside are looking after parents and family members with chronic long-term illnesses. Health reporter Jane Picken finds out about one project helping to ease the burden of being a young carer.

Prime minister-in-waiting Gordon Brown has been urged to help children across the country affected by domestic violence by backing more schemes like a pioneering project in Norwich.

More than six out of 10 NHS trusts have not carried out criminal record checks on staff who started work before new rules came into force, a survey has revealed. Research by BBC Radio Five Live said the number of workers who have not been vetted by the Criminal Records Bureau (CRB) could top 50,000.

Three years ago an official inquiry into the treatment of black people within Britain’s mental health services concluded that the system was riddled with institutional racism and blamed the Department of Health for ignoring what it called “this festering abscess…a blot upon the good name of the NHS”.

{mosimage}But now senior psychiatrists, some themselves from ethnic minorities, are hitting back, arguing that labelling psychiatric services as racist is both wrong and counter-productive. Professor Swaran Singh, a consultant based in Birmingham says, “the high rates of psychosis and the high rates of detention are not a result of racism”, he insists.

The experiences of black people in mental health services are undoubtedly shocking: black men up to 18 times more likely to be diagnosed with psychotic illness than whites and four times more likely to find themselves locked up under the Mental Health Act. Understandably, for many within the black community the figures are powerful evidence that services are profoundly racist.

Professor Singh’s view has seen him accused of setting psychiatry back 20 years, but he is adamant. He says the term “institutional racism” damages the very people it purports to help and “is erroneous and too simplistic an explanation for ethnic differences. What it does is it creates a wall of mistrust between between service users and service providers.”