Following the publication of the Green Paper Care Matters: Transforming the Lives of Children and Young People in Care on 9 October, Minister for Children and Families, Beverley Hughes, has announced the membership of four working groups which have been set up to look at specific aspects of care.

{mosimage}Lord Herbert Laming, who led the Victoria Climbie enquiry, will chair the group looking at placement reform.

This group will develop the proposals set out in the Green Paper on radically transforming both foster and residential care.

Martin Narey, Chief Executive of Barnardos, will be responsible for chairing a group exploring the characteristics of the care population and examining the ideas in Care Matters of developing a vision of care in the future.

Dame Professor Pat Collarbone, of the Training and Development Agency, is chairing a group which will look at ways of ensuring that all children in care receive the best possible education in schools.

An immigration detention centre with a violent history including a death and repeated disturbances is getting worse, the prisons watchdog has warned. Chief inspector of prisons Anne Owers said Harmondsworth in west London was hard to run – but her report was the poorest ever on a removal centre.

Detainees said they feared bullying, and staff were unaware of a special plan to prevent suicides. The Home Office said it would draw up a plan to improve the centre.

{mosimage}The centre near Heathrow Airport is the largest in the country, handling thousands of people facing deportation every year. In 2004 a detainee committed suicide, sparking a major disturbance that led to its temporary closure.

Since then, Harmondsworth has been at the centre of ongoing campaigns against detention of failed asylum seekers. In 2005, some 50 Zimbabweans held at the centre launched a hunger strike to try to force their cases back into the courts, saying they had been unfairly treated.

Twice as many people would feel sympathy for a homeless dog than for a homeless person with drug or mental health problems, a survey suggests. And 41% of those questioned believed many homeless people did not want to be housed, the survey for the BBC found.

{mosimage}Some 2,000 people across the UK were questioned for the survey, carried out by TNS and commissioned to launch the BBC’s No Home season of programming.

The season will highlight ways the public can help homeless people.

No Home coincides with the 40th anniversary of the screening on BBC One of Ken Loach’s drama-documentary Cathy Come Home which explored the impact of homelessness on families.

A BBC spokesman said: “Although homelessness is still an issue in the UK 40 years on from Cathy Come Home, the nature of the problem has changed.

Home Secretary John Reid and Premiership footballer Rio Ferdinand are helping to launch an anti-knife campaign on the sixth anniversary of the death of Damilola Taylor. The Respect Your Life Not A Knife campaign hopes to convince youngsters not to carry blades in a bid to reduce street violence.

A report into the wellbeing of prisoners at Peterborough’s jail has revealed that two out of three inmates are suffering from mental health problems. Bosses at the privately run HMP Peterborough in Westwood say they need more money to cope with depressed prisoners.

Paying for the cancer drug Herceptin means treatment for other cancer patients will have to be dropped to “balance the books”, doctors warn. The Norwich team says the body which recommends drugs for the NHS should change the way it works. In the British Medical Journal, they say the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence should say what should be cut to fund new drugs. But the government said it was up to local trusts to plan effectively.

A pioneering new debt centre is being set up on the Bournville estate in Weston to tackle poverty in North Somerset. The Money Advice Service is the first of its kind in the country and is designed to help people who are struggling with mounting debts and rent arrears. North Somerset Housing, North Somerset Citizens Advice Bureau and Weston and District Credit Union have set up the innovative scheme to offer a range of financial advice on debt, low interest loans and money management.

More than half of violent thugs caught by police now escape with a ticking-off, it has emerged. Instead of being hailed before the courts or jailed, more than 50,000 violent attackers were simply handed a caution last year – an increase of more than a third on 2004. They included more than 1,300 louts guilty of life threatening wounding and even threatening to kill their victim. The Conservatives said the revelations were “an insult to the victims of crime”.

Teenage muggers and burglars sentenced to jail by the courts will instead attend local schools and live alongside orphans in open children’s homes. The hardened criminals would normally be locked in detention centres with specialist classrooms. But it has emerged an overcrowding crisis in the juvenile prison system is forcing the Government to dramatically relax the law. It will allow the criminals to mix with society’s most vulnerable youngsters in the relaxed regime of a mainstream children’s home for the first time. And some will even be allowed to attend local schools.

Liz Railton, director of children’s services in Essex, has been announced as the programme director for the new national children’s centres support programme being led by the Together for Children partnership. Liz has over 30 years experience in local government delivering social care and children’s services. Liz was director of social services in Cambridgeshire before moving to Essex in 2003, initially to take up the combined role of chief education officer and director of social services.