Thousands more thieving drug addicts, alcoholics and wife beaters should escape jail, John Reid has ordered. The Home Secretary, exposing his own tough rhetoric on law and order as a sham, also wants to downgrade hundreds more offences so they can be punished with a fine only.

Care passports have been officially launched within East Sussex hospitals. Carers can use the passport to share details of the patient’s needs and preferences with hospital staff, thereby improving the care of vulnerable patients and utilising the carer’s specialist knowledge. In East Sussex over 50,000 people provide unpaid care for friends or family. In many cases the person they care for is unable to communicate for themselves due to illness or disability.

{mosimage} Judges are likely to get powers to prevent the early release of dangerous criminals, under new sentencing proposals due to be announced today. Under current guidelines both dangerous and non-violent offenders are automatically freed from jail halfway through their sentences and then supervised in the community by probation officers.

Judges may also reduce the minimum jail term to be served by a dangerous offender in return for an early guilty plea. In July the home secretary, John Reid, pledged to examine whether judges should be able to order that serious offenders should stay in jail longer.

Today the Home Office will announce the results of that review, which are also expected to include ways to make jail terms clearer to the public.

The founder of a private drug treatment clinic has been struck off the medical register. Dr Colin Brewer, who headed London’s Stapleford Clinic, was found guilty of serious professional misconduct by the General Medical Council (GMC).

Experts are to carry out a probe into Portsmouth’s mental health services after they were rated among the worst in the country. Inspectors will look at the way mentally ill patients are looked after and make recommendations to improve the service.

The latest attempt by the Department of Health (DH) to extricate mental health from the service ghetto it has historically inhabited was launched this week with the publication of new guidance on how users can be guaranteed improved choice and access to treatment.

Mental illness is on the rise in the Sussex town of Crawley, according to a health boss. Lisa Rodrigues, the chief executive of Sussex Partnership NHS Trust, said the demand for services is greater than ever before. This comes just two weeks before work is due to begin on the new mental health hospital in Langley Green.

Taxpayers in Cambridgeshire are forking out around £4million more than average to help the county’s children in care. In the past four years, they have faced a 114 per cent rise in costs – almost four times more than other areas in England. The figures have been revealed after Government inspectors looked at the way Cambridgeshire County Council manages its services for children and young people.

Labour has warned Ealing’s kids may suffer at the hands of the Conservative-led council – despite children’s services being praised in a recent government report. The report by Ofsted and the Commission for Social Care Inspection said Ealing’s overall children’s social care grade was “good” and the capacity for further improvement was “excellent”. But Labour councillors say that if the children are not made a council priority their services will suffer.

Bosses at an under-fire mental health trust have hit back at staff threatening to strike. Nurses passed a vote of no confidence in managers at Manchester Mental Health and Social Care Trust and are preparing to vote on strike action over plans to cut 40 out of 160 community nurses.