Posts tagged "Home Office"

Home Office tour to study drug policies in 10 countries

Review to include Portugal’s limited decriminalisation, Denmark’s ‘fixing rooms’ and Sweden’s zero-tolerance approach

A Home Office study of international drug laws is to get under way this week with a visit to Portugal to look at the long-term impact of its policy of limited decriminalisation.

The Liberal Democrat minister Jeremy Browne, who is leading the review, is to look at drug policy in about 10 countries and will later this month go to Denmark.

This leg of the tour is likely to include Copenhagen’s “fixing rooms” or drug consumption rooms where addicts can inject heroin or use other class-A drugs without fear of prosecution. A similar initiative is under consideration by Brighton council to reduce drug-related deaths.

Browne is also likely to go to the two US states of Washington and Colorado, which both voted last November to legalise the recreational use of marijuana.

Browne will visit Sweden, whose zero-tolerance take on drug policy and abstinence-driven approach to drug treatment have been advocated by Tory champions of a more restrictive approach. He is also likely to go to Japan, which also operates a hardline zero-tolerance policy.

The study – ordered by the home secretary, Theresa May, in response to the Commons home affairs select committee’s call for a royal commission to report on how to reform Britain’s 40-year-old drug laws – is likely to be completed by the end of the year.

May ruled out decriminalisation, saying there was no need for a fundamental rethink of Britain’s approach to drugs. But she did say there was a need to learn from new evidence of what works in other countries and that any debate of alternative approaches should be based on clear evidence and analysis.

Browne starts the international study on Mondayin Portugal, where a policy of “depenalisation” – removing criminal penalties for personal possession of all illicit drugs but not making them legal – was introduced in 2001.

This move was matched by a sharp increase in the availability of drug treatment and harm reduction measures which have led to a fall in HIV infection rates and a decline in drug-related deaths. The Home Office team will visit the European monitoring centre for drugs and drug addiction, based in the capital Lisbon.

The Lib Dems have long been committed to a major review of Britain’s drug laws, including considering decriminalisation.

Browne said he was keeping an open mind on the lessons that could be learned. “I’m proud of the UK’s drug policy and there are strong signs our approach is working. Illegal drug use is at its lowest level since records began and far more people are leaving treatment free from dependency than ever before,” he said.

“But I’m not complacent. The UK cannot deal with this issue in isolation – my counterparts around the world are grappling with the same challenge of addressing the misery drugs inflict on individuals and communities and the considerable damage done globally by drug traffickers. I’m keeping an open mind about what lessons we can learn.”

Browne will look at drug-related crime rates and collect data on consumption levels. In particular he will examine countries’ different responses to the new psychoactive synthetic drugs marketed as legal highs.

Britain has adopted a system of temporary banning orders as each new drug has appeared, while the official body of drug experts, the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs, assesses whether they should be permanently prohibited.

Drug policy around the world

Portugal

Abolished criminal penalties for the personal possession of small quantities of illegal drugs in 2001 up to 1g of heroin and 25g of herbal cannabis. Police issue users with a notice to attend a “dissuasion commission” within 72 hours. Addicts are required to attend treatment or face a range of possible sanctions. Prevention campaigns highlighting the harmful effects of cannabis and heroin are also given a high priority. Commons home affairs committee said the moves had clearly reduced public concern about drug use and was supported by all political parties and the police.

US: Washington State and Colorado

Eighteen states and the District of Columbia allow the use of medical marijuana on prescription. Last November Washington State and Colorado voted to extend that to the legalisation of recreational use of cannabis.

In Colorado, adults aged over 21 are to be allowed to buy and possess up to an ounce (28g) of cannabis and grow six plants in a private, secure area. It also intends to license cultivation facilities and retail stores and introduce a tax on wholesale sales of marijuana, with the first $40m (£25m) used to build public schools. In Washington State the authorities intend to levy a 25% tax on marijuana sales and limit the number of retail outlets. Licences are to be issued by the state liquor control board.

The two state marijuana laws are in direct conflict with federal law and President Obama’s drug policy head, Gil Kerlikowske, warned that the federal administration had no intention of honouring them.

Sweden

Has the toughest zero-tolerance approach to illicit drug use in western Europe. It has been widely praised by Conservative politicians and by advocates of the “war on drugs” for its low levels of illicit drug use, especially cannabis.

However, problematic drug use, including injecting amphetamines and heroin, is very high as a proportion of overall drug use. Tight restrictions on the use of methadone as a substitute for heroin has led to mortality rates among heroin addicts in Stockholm that are twice as high as other European cities. There are very limited harm reduction measures in Sweden, although needle exchange services have recently become legalised.

Both the use and possession of illicit drugs are illegal and minor use can attract a prison sentence of up to six months but usually leads to a fine. Sweden is unusual in making drug use itself a criminal offence in 1988 “in order to signal a powerful repudiation by the community of all dealings with drugs”. Drug testing is compulsory for those suspected of having consumed drugs.

Denmark

Copenhagen is filled at weekends with Swedes taking advantage of the fact that cannabis is easier to buy there and alcohol is cheaper. Denmark’s capital is planning a three-year experiment to place the criminal drugs trade under direct municipal control with sales restricted to Danish citizens. That may yet be blocked by the national government.

The Danes are the latest to join Switzerland and Spain in creating drug consumption rooms where chronic users can legally inject themselves with class-A drugs. Needle exchange programmes have operated in Denmark since 1986, and clean needles and syringes are now dispensed through machines in public sites. Methadone has been available since 1970.

Home Office fears Clegg will veto ‘snooper’s charter’

Redrafted communications data bill makes concessions on civil liberties but Clegg is still under pressure to block it

Home Office ministers fear that the Liberal Democrats may veto the latest version of the so-called “snooper’s charter” and are privately warning that Nick Clegg will be taking a major risk at a time of terrorist attacks in the US, and instability in the middle east.

Theresa May, the home secretary, has redrawn her proposed snooper’s charter legislation – the communications data bill – to monitor internet and social media use and is battling to get it included in the Queen’s speech on 6 May.

Home Office sources were pointing to the ever varied way in which criminals are using the internet to plot crimes and attacks. Liberal Democrat sources say Clegg, whose previous intervention sent May’s original draft bill back to the drawing board, is currently examining the new proposals to see if he can back them as a “proportionate and necessary” response to the problem. The Lib Dem leader will be hoping that he can dampen any controversy until at least after the county council elections next week.

Liberal Democrat activists, angry at the leadership’s decision to give the go-ahead to secret courts, are already warning that they will not tolerate another assault on their party’s reputation for protecting civil liberties. Richard Morris, an influential activist, wrote on his blog this week: “If the Westminster party thought the grassroots gave them a hard time on civil liberties before, just try and propose some legislation that does anything but roll back the state’s powers in this area. You haven’t seen anything yet.”

The “snooper’s charter” is expected to be on the agenda for home affairs committee of the Cabinet, chaired by Clegg, when it discusses the contents of the Queen’s speech, which outlines the government’s legislative programme for the next session of Parliament.

It is understood that the home secretary’s new proposals include significant concessions. She has repeatedly told the Commons that the rewritten bill will meet the substantive concerns raised by peers and MPs.

May’s new proposals are believed to include:

• Narrowing the scope to give police access to types of communications data that there is only a current and pressing need for. Ministers are believed to be ready to concede that powers to collect and access new and significant gaps in data can be bestowed if and when they emerge through a “super-affirmative” parliamentary order that MPs must vote on.

• New safeguards for the controversial “request filter”, which privacy campaigners argue mark a new extension of the database state, and which funnels requests to communications service providers such as BT, Virgin Media, Google, for access to data.

• A new more robust costing figure for the project. The price tag is expected to be in the billions, but could be lower than the current estimate if the programme is scaled back.

•A new round of consultations has been carried out with privacy campaigners and the internet industry, although some have argued that it was less than meaningful without the disclosure of crucial details.

However the new proposals are believed to have included no real movement on the power of the police to access individual internet and mobile phone histories.

The decision to redraft the bill came after a joint scrutiny committee of both houses of parliament delivered a withering verdict on the original Home Office legislation, describing it as “overkill” and warning that it “tramples on the privacy of British citizens”.

The scrutiny committee, which included Lord Armstrong, a former cabinet secretary, also described its estimated price tag of £1.8bn over 10 years and much of its background analysis as “fanciful and misleading”.

A Liberal Democrat source said they were discussing the issue now: “Nick [Clegg] had significant concerns about the draft bill and insisted it be put before the joint committee. That is what we are currently discussing in government.”

Julian Huppert, the Lib Dem backbench home affairs spokesman, said: “It is clear that the Home Office has got this wrong. We should not spend well over a billion pounds keeping track of which websites everyone goes to. And if we become the first country to force internet providers to collect data from overseas providers, the rest of the world will follow. We would encourage authoritarian countries to snoop on their citizens.

“The Home Office has not done the basic work needed to see how the existing data is used. Far more could be done to use existing data more effectively, and the money could be spent better to support policing.”

Asylum seeker death investigated by Home Office amid healthcare concerns

Khalid Shahzad, 52, died alone on train hours after release from Colnbrook removal centre after being deemed unfit for detention

The Home Office has launched an investigation into the case of an asylum seeker who died within hours of being discharged from an immigration removal centre (IRC) where he had been held for three months.

The day before Khalid Shahzad, 52, was released he had collapsed and was judged unfit to be detained because of his poor health, but officials at Colnbrook IRC decided to let him travel unaccompanied. He died en route from Euston station to Manchester on 30 March.

The Pakistani national had been held at the centre, which is near Heathrow airport and operated by Serco. He had been issued with removal directions to Pakistan.

The Guardian has learned Shahzad suffered cardiac problems and had an artificial heart valve fitted prior to his arrest. He collapsed twice at the centre and was taken to hospital. Detainees at Colnbrook say he was told he did not have long to live.

On the day of his death he was discharged from custody after being deemed unfit for detention. He was given a travel warrant and travelled alone to Euston station where he boarded a train for Manchester. British transport police were called to the train at Wilmslow, Cheshire, where he was pronounced dead.

The Guardian has spoken to detainees at Colnbrook. One said Shahzad suffered from constant breathing difficulties during his time at the centre.

Deborah Coles, co-director of the Inquest campaign group said the death of a critically ill man, alone on a train, only hours after being discharged as unfit to be detained, suggested an abdication of Serco’s responsibility for his welfare.

“The circumstances of this death and the wider concerns about the quality and standards of healthcare for immigration detainees at Colnbrook – criticised by an inquest jury only last year – must be thoroughly scrutinised, both by the prisons and probation ombudsman and an inquest jury,” she said.

The Home Office said: “We will provide specialist support to individuals being released from detention if recommended by healthcare professionals. An investigation into this case is under way and it would be inappropriate to comment further.”

Serco said: “Mr Shahzad was discharged on Saturday March 30 from Colnbrook immigration removal centre. Tragically, he was found dead later that day on a train to Manchester and our thoughts are with his family. An investigation is being carried out and there will be an inquest into his death.”

Asylum seeker death investigated by Home Office amid healthcare concerns

Khalid Shahzad, 52, died alone on train hours after release from Colnbrook removal centre after being deemed unfit for detention

The Home Office has launched an investigation into the case of an asylum seeker who died within hours of being discharged from an immigration removal centre (IRC) where he had been held for three months.

The day before Khalid Shahzad, 52, was released he had collapsed and was judged unfit to be detained because of his poor health, but officials at Colnbrook IRC decided to let him travel unaccompanied. He died en route from Euston station to Manchester on 30 March.

The Pakistani national had been held at the centre, which is near Heathrow airport and operated by Serco. He had been issued with removal directions to Pakistan.

The Guardian has learned Shahzad suffered cardiac problems and had an artificial heart valve fitted prior to his arrest. He collapsed twice at the centre and was taken to hospital. Detainees at Colnbrook say he was told he did not have long to live.

On the day of his death he was discharged from custody after being deemed unfit for detention. He was given a travel warrant and travelled alone to Euston station where he boarded a train for Manchester. British transport police were called to the train at Wilmslow, Cheshire, where he was pronounced dead.

The Guardian has spoken to detainees at Colnbrook. One said Shahzad suffered from constant breathing difficulties during his time at the centre.

Deborah Coles, co-director of the Inquest campaign group said the death of a critically ill man, alone on a train, only hours after being discharged as unfit to be detained, suggested an abdication of Serco’s responsibility for his welfare.

“The circumstances of this death and the wider concerns about the quality and standards of healthcare for immigration detainees at Colnbrook – criticised by an inquest jury only last year – must be thoroughly scrutinised, both by the prisons and probation ombudsman and an inquest jury,” she said.

The Home Office said: “We will provide specialist support to individuals being released from detention if recommended by healthcare professionals. An investigation into this case is under way and it would be inappropriate to comment further.”

Serco said: “Mr Shahzad was discharged on Saturday March 30 from Colnbrook immigration removal centre. Tragically, he was found dead later that day on a train to Manchester and our thoughts are with his family. An investigation is being carried out and there will be an inquest into his death.”

UK Border Agency abolition is another sign of politicians spooked by Ukip

Decision prompts Westminster speculation that announcement was brought forward to boost PM’s immigration initiative

For more than 20 years the single issue of immigration has had the power to spook serving British politicians of all parties, especially when they have to face up to their prospects for re-election.

David Cameron is no exception. When he delivered his “get tough” immigration speech on Monday there is no doubt that he had the surge in the Ukip vote at the Eastleigh byelection firmly in his sights. But the problem was that his claims of immigrant benefit claimants and social housing queue-jumpers were seen to unravel within hours.

Senior Home Office officials say the plan to abolish the UK Border Agency has been under consideration “for several months”, but Cameron and Nick Clegg only signed off the final decision to scrap the five-year-old organisation on the morning of its announcement.

As the home secretary, Theresa May, was on her feet in the Commons announcing the agency’s death – having sent the prime minister an overnight note to that effect on Monday – her permanent secretary, Mark Sedwill, was busy reassuring Home Office staff in an internal memo: “Most of us will still be doing the same job in the same place with the same colleagues for the same boss and with the same mission.”

The timing of the announcement angered MPs, who had been told in a written ministerial statement only last Thursday – when May was finalising the details of the abolition plan in the Home Office – by her immigration minister, Mark Harper, that UKBA had “already shown signs of significant improvement” and was on a “sure footing”.

Harper gave no hint that in reality that UKBA was already officially regarded within the Home Office as a “closed, secretive and defensive” organisation that was so incapable of reform that it deserved to be scrapped.

It is little wonder therefore that the circumstances around its death immediately prompted Westminster speculation that the announcement had simply been rushed forward from after the Easter recess in order to put some political punch back into the prime minister’s tarnished anti-Ukip immigration initiative.

It will not be the first time in the recent history of immigration and asylum policy that prime ministers and home secretaries have only focused on the crisis-hit immigration service when they felt their electoral prospects were directly threatened.

Tony Blair once surprised the Home Office by announcing a target to halve the number of asylum seekers before the 2005 general election live on BBC Newsnight.

As the Commons home affairs committee and many hundreds of thousands of asylum seekers and migrants have repeatedly testified, the British immigration and asylum system has been permanently in crisis since the late 1990s.

The stunning thing is that some people still stuck in the backlog of 310,000 cases that sealed UKBA’s death warrant are actually a direct legacy from that breakdown in the system. It was triggered by a botched computerisation that left thousands of paper files rotting in the asbestos-infected basements of its Croydon headquarters and saw the asylum backlog first soar to 119,000 with only 33,000 decisions being made each year.

The organisation has never really recovered from that fundamental breakdown. The “legacy” cases involving more than 450,000 claims – some of whom have already left the country – were repeatedly parked just to enable immigration staff to deal with the annual toll of new applications. As the legacy cases have been dealt with so fresh backlogs have arisen. As the home secretary put it on Tuesday: “It too often focuses on the crisis in hand at the expense of its structures and systems to get on top of its workload.” Its computer systems are still woeful, with paper files still used more often than the tools of modern electronic case management.

For more than 50 years in the 20th century the Home Office had dealt with the issue through its oddly named aliens department. In 1962 it was quietly changed to the immigration and nationality department or IND. After John Reid infamously declared it “not fit for purpose” in May 2006, it was first relaunched as an “arms-length” Borders and Immigration Agency in April 2007 and then, after a merger with UK visas and customs staff, it was renamed the UK Borders Agency.

The detail of Reid’s “not fit for purpose” statement bears uncomfortable echoes of this week’s statement by May. It had been preceded two weeks before by the resignation of Charles Clarke as home secretary for failing to get a grip on the deportation of released foreign prisoners. Reid talked of “inadequate” leadership and management systems and described the immigration system as “dysfunctional” and said a “wholesale transformation” was probably needed. As May did on Tuesday, he said it was “still in a state of transition from a paper-based system to a technology-based one”.

For Labour the most corrosive charge was that they had lost control of the border. Reid’s response was to put the staff into uniform and put up big notices saying “UK Border” at every airport. It didn’t work if only because the Home Office had little role in what proved to be the largest wave of migration to Britain in the 20th century: the arrival of the Poles and other east Europeans, who as EU citizens had no need to get a Home Office visa to work in Britain. All they had to do was register that they were here to work.

“Arms-length agencies” have had a troubled history in Whitehall ever since Michael Howard sparred with the prison service director general, Derek Lewis, over whether he had the right to dismiss the governor of Parkhurst prison after a top security breakout.

This time May has rightly concluded that making the immigration service an “arms-length agency” only managed to create a “closed, secretive and defensive” culture.

One important political feature of agency status was that it was UKBA’s chief executive, Lin Homer, whose “catastrophic leadership failure” was castigated on Monday, and her successor, Rob Whiteman, who had to take the flak when things went wrong.

Now the home secretary and her immigration minister will again be directly in the firing line with nobody else to blame. May, not for the first time, has taken a bold political gamble in order to put a flash of steel into Cameron’s blunted political initiative.

Low turnout at police commissioner elections blamed on lack of information

Electoral Commission report finds Home Office inexperience also contributed to turnout of just 15.1%

Lack of information, last-minute legislation and Home Office inexperience all contributed to the first police commissioner elections recording the lowest turnout in peacetime, the official inquest into the polls has concluded.

The Electoral Commission report into the £100m police and crime commissioner elections says that only one in five people had enough information to make an informed decision about whom to vote for as their police watchdog.

Just 15.1% of registered voters took part in the elections held across England and Wales for all police force areas outside of London. The elections watchdog said this was the lowest recorded level of participation at a peacetime non-local-government election in Britain.

The official report to the home secretary, Theresa May, concludes that the government wrongly assumed that “simply holding” an election was enough on its own to inspire participation and says that significant changes need to be made before they are held again in three years’ time.

The commission found that the most common reason for not voting was lack of awareness about the polls (37%) with over a quarter (28%) of people saying they knew “nothing at all” and 48% “not very much” about what the policing elections were about. More than half (55%) said they found it difficult to access information about the candidates standing in their area.

Jenny Watson, the Electoral Commission chair, said: “It’s not enough to think that simply holding an election will inspire participation. That’s why at the 2016 PCC elections a candidate information booklet will be sent to every household.”

The Home Office decided against sending information about the candidates to every household on cost grounds and instead set up a central website containing details about the candidates. More than 122,000 people took up the option of ordering a printed booklet in preference to using the website.

The official inquiry also found that key pieces of legislation were finalised too close to polling day. An order specifying a bilingual ballot paper for use in Wales only came into force 14 days before the election, leading to English-only ballot papers being destroyed at a £135,000 cost to the taxpayer. Detailed guidance on funding from the Home Office for the elections arrived only four days before polling day.

The report says the Home Office needs to set out by May 2014 how it will manage changes to the PCC election legislation well ahead of the next set of polls in 2016. It adds that in future the Home Office needs to consult the Cabinet Office and other parts of government that have more experience of running elections.

The Electoral Commission also carried out a survey of candidates who stood in the elections, which showed that nearly half said it was difficult to get the 100 signatures they needed to be nominated and two-fifths said they found it difficult to raise the £5,000 deposit. Parliamentary candidates need only 10 signatures and a £500 deposit.

Watson said: “Elections are the cornerstone of our democracy. It’s vital that the rules surrounding them are clear. The rules for these elections were confirmed unacceptably late causing confusion for candidates and electoral administrators. The Home Office doesn’t have experience in preparing for elections and they need to be better supported in future by parts of government that do.”

Purchase and Installation of CCTV at the Port of Dover – PIN

Richard O’Dwyer’s two-year extradition ordeal ends in New York

TVShack founder avoids prosecution under copyright laws and says: ‘It is a pity the UK government didn’t try and resolve this’

A British student’s two-year fight to avoid extradition to the US ended in less than five minutes on Thursday, when Richard O’Dwyer signed an agreement in a New York court to avoid prosecution and a potential 10-year jail term for breaking copyright laws with the file-sharing website he set up as a teenager.

The 24-year-old spoke only to confirm his name and his understanding of the three-page agreement, which was reached last week by his legal team and US prosecutors.

The brief hearing in lower Manhattan marked the end of an ordeal that dates back to October 2010, when O’Dwyer was arrested by City of London police, accompanied by US customs officials, in his student room in Sheffield.

Outside court, O’Dwyer and his family criticised the British government’s response to the case, saying they had received little support from the Home Office. Theresa May, the home secretary, approved O’Dwyer’s extradition to the US despite opposition from the public, press and some politicians.

“I’m very happy it’s finally over with,” O’Dwyer told the Guardian, outside the court in lower Manhattan. “I still believe I never committed any crime. I’m very happy the US government has decided to drop the case against me. It just really is a pity the UK government didn’t try and resolve this without us having to come all the way over.”

The hearing, in New York’s southern district court, lasted only a few minutes. O’Dwyer, wearing a blue hooded top and denim jeans, with union-jack boxer shorts visible above the waistband, signed the document as his mother, Julia O’Dwyer, looked on from the back of the small courtroom.

Under the terms of the “deferred prosecution agreement”, which was agreed last week, the student pledged that he would not break any laws and would remain in contact with a US correctional officer over the next six months.

He was also ordered to pay the US dollar equivalent of £20,000, which represents profits earned by his website between December 2007 and November 2010. The money will be used to “repay victims whose copyrights were infringed by TVShack”, according to the agreement.

O’Dwyer set up TVShack, which linked to programmes and films available for free online, in 2007. He was arrested on allegations of copyright infringement three years later, but a criminal investigation in the UK was dropped. The US Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency shut down the website and accused O’Dwyer of breaking US copyright laws, prompting his two-year fight to avoid extradition.

Julia O’Dwyer, who campaigned hard on her son’s behalf, told the Guardian outside court that she had been frustrated by the British government’s handling of the case.

She said: “We’re really pleased to have been here and to sort this matter out without needing for Richard to be subjected to extradition and incarceration and criminalisation. It’s just a pity that the British authorities couldn’t have allowed us to sort this out in the UK.”

She praised supporters of her son, but was critical of the British authorities. “That doesn’t feel very nice that your own government gives you no support. We’ve had tremendous support from the public, from the press, from our legal team, other victims. But the Home Office, the CPS [Crown Prosecution Service], the politicians – no support at all.”

The case has had a high profile in Britain. The Wikipedia founder, Jimmy Wales, launched a campaign in June, with an article in the Guardian in defence of O’Dwyer. Wales described the student as the “human face” of a global battle between film and TV industries and the wider public.

More than 253,000 people signed a petition set up by Wales which called upon the home secretary to block O’Dwyer’s extradition to the US. May insisted she would not back down on her approval of the extradition. The decision proved highly unpopular among the British public – a YouGov poll found that 46% of respondents believed O’Dwyer should not be prosecuted at all, and that only 9% thought he should be sent to the US for trial.

Public expenditure crisis: no cash for decrepit schools, jails – or NHS

As pensions soak up ever larger sums, other areas of the budget face harsh cuts. Our specialist correspondents analyse the impact on some specific areas

The Guardian has trawled government data on public expenditure to build a comprehensive picture of what taxpayers’ money is spent on.

It reveals huge cuts taking place across departments as austerity measures take effect, even in supposedly protected areas such as health. Public spending in 2011-12 was £694.89bn – compared with £689.63bn in 2010-11. That may look like an increase but once inflation is taken into account, it works out as a real-terms cut of 1.58%, or £10.8bn.

Education

Given that Michael Gove is among the most cuts-friendly cabinet ministers and has already promised to slash a quarter of the jobs in his own empire, it is little wonder to see the Department for Education (DfE) reducing spending £58.28bn to £56.27bn – a real-terms cut of 5.7%.

Within this are some notably severe figures, particularly a trenchant 81% cut to schools infrastructure, the continued result of Gove’s decision to scrap Labour’s Building Schools for Future (BSF) programme, while curbing Sure Start plays its part in a 17% reduction to the children, young people and families budget. Reductions in schools spending are partly offset by the transfer of huge sums into the academies programme, with a budget 191% higher at £5.3bn.

While school infrastructure spending cuts were widely touted – not least when Gove, new to the job, was criticised for botching the initial list of schools affected by ending BSF – some argue that such a severe reduction condemns thousands of children to learn in outdated, leaky or ill-heated classrooms.

The Times Educational Supplement’s survey in September of more than 2,000 teachers found about 20% considered their classrooms unsuitable to teach in, with two-thirds saying their school’s infrastructure was outdated, while an Observer study of headteachers in May found almost 40% saying their buildings were not fit for purpose.

In July last year the DfE launched its own programme, called Priority School Building, aimed at the most desperate examples. Any new work will face strict curbs on costs, revealed in October, such as smaller corridors, cheaper materials and no curves, glazed areas or atriums.

Teaching groups are clear in their views. Chris Keates, general secretary of the NASUWT union, said: “There is now gross unfairness in the distribution of money for capital repairs and refurbishment of schools. Rather than prioritising schools badly in need of work to make them fit for the 21st century, the secretary of state appears to be using capital funding as a slush fund to bribe and reward those who embrace his academisation and free schools project.”

Other groups such as the British Council for School Environments, argue that classroom and school design have a big impact on learning and have warned that excessively cheap buildings could prove a false economy. Sharon Wright, chief executive of the group, said: “It’s inevitable that we’ve seen a sharp drop in funding with the end of the Building Schools for the Future programme, and some schools have lost out hugely. Good buildings improve teaching and learning, so it’s good to see that funding from the Priority Schools Building Programme is coming through.”

A DfE spokeswoman said: “As part of this we have made £2.8 billion available for the maintenance of school buildings, and are rebuilding or refurbishing 261 schools under the Priority School Building Programme. We are also carrying out condition surveys across the entire education estate so future funding is targeted at those schools in the greatest need.”

Welfare

The benefits bill for the country reflects demographic change, political decisions and economic reality. There is no surprise that the amount paid to the jobless rose by 7.6% last year with the budget for jobseekers’ allowance up to £4.9bn. Similarly, the falls in incapacity benefit are balanced by rises in the payment designed to replace it, employment support allowance. But the Department for Work and Pensions’ big-ticket items are pensions, housing benefit and disability living allowance. Rising rents and stagnating wages are pushing up housing benefit.

The politics is not about tackling fraudsters and scroungers, which are widely paraded as reasons for benefit reform, but about diverting attention from the elderly. State pensions are the largest item in welfare – costing the taxpayer £74bn a year. Prying eyes might note that the old get by far the largest slice of the benefits budget.

Social fund expenditure, which is at present system is a series of loans and payments considered a lifeline for the utterly destitute, . It’s about to be reformed but not because of its huge cost. Although the “expenditure incurred by the social fund” is in the accounts as £2.4bn, this includes winter fuel payments for the old.

It’s worth noting that pensioners’ average income has grown by almost 50% over the past decade – more than three times earnings – and almost three-quarters of over-65s now own their home. Carl Emmerson, of the Institute for Fiscal Studies, points out that if tax credits, housing benefits and other welfare payments are added to pensions, the elderly account for more than 65% of benefit spending.

Home Office

The detailed spending figures published on Tuesday underline how, unlike in Margaret Thatcher’s Britain, the criminal justice services, especially the police, have not been exempted from the spending squeeze.

A House of Commons analysis of police force figures shows that 6,800 frontline police officers had gone by March 2012 over the previous two years as a result of the coalition’s public spending cuts.

This was about 1,000 higher than the original estimate by the Inspectorate of Constabulary and shows the impact of the 6.64% reduction in the single year of 2011-12 in the Home Office budget for crime and policing. The reductions have been “frontloaded” in the first two of the four-year spending review, which will see a cumulative 20% cut in Whitehall grants to the police.

Against this background, the 37% rise in the cost of police pensions to £1.1bn in just one year shows why ministers regard reform as overdue and urgent in this area.

The frontloaded nature of criminal justice cuts is also reflected in the 21%, or £1.5bn, reduction in the budget of the UK Border Agency. It has since been split into two, with the new Border Force rising out of the ashes of the Brodie Clark affair and UKBA dealing with immigration and asylum casework.

The 21% cut was met through a mix of efficiency measures, savings in overheads and the loss of 1,000 in staff numbers, with many taking voluntary redundancy. Immigration is due to shed 5,200 posts by 2015 but started at 700 below strength at the last election. Total job losses are expected to be 4,500 in immigration by the next election.

Health

At first glance it is a major surprise that the budget of the Department of Health (DH), of all departments, fell in 2011-12 from the previous year. It was always supposed to be a rare special case, enjoying exemption from the government’s cuts across Whitehall in recognition of the political importance of the NHS. In the financial year to March 2012, the DH actually received £106.66bn from the Treasury, up by 1.15% in cash terms (ie, not allowing for inflation) from the £105.45bn in 2010-11.

However, once you factor in the Treasury’s calculation that inflation between the two financial years was 2.38%, we find that so the DH saw a real-terms decrease.

The NHS budget in England last year was £97.46bn, down 1.2% in real terms on what it got in 2010-11, despite David Cameron’s high-profile promise during the 2010 election campaign that “I’ll cut the deficit, not the NHS.”

The vast majority of the DH’s budget is classed as “departmental expenditure limit spending”. That means that it is set out in advance in a three-year plan agreed with the Treasury. By that measure, the DH’s income fell in real terms by 1.43% year on year.

The rest of the DH’s total spending is called annually managed expenditure (AME). This is money that is given to the department to cope with changing levels of demand and as such it goes up and down. It is also not something that the DH can be expected to control.

Labour and unions representing the 1.5 million-strong NHS workforce may seize on these figures as proof that the coalition has broken a key pledge.

Ministry of Justice

The MoJ faced an even deeper early cut of 11% in the first full year of the coalition with big real-term cuts in spending on courts (down 23%), prisons (down 15%) and criminal injuries compensation (down 45%).

The deep cut in the prisons budget has been met by freezing jail-building, closing four prisons and doubling up prisoners in cells. Severe cuts in the Criminal Injuries Compensation Scheme came into effect last week when violent crime victims who suffer “minor” injuries, such as a broken nose or mild concussion, were excluded in a package designed to take £50m out of the annual £200m bill.

The reduction in spending on courts may partially reflect the programme of magistrate and county court closures. More than 140 have shut down around England and Wales in a plan aimed at saving £41m from the department’s budget.

Although the legal aid bill appears to be rising in the latest MoJ figures, projected cuts in civil legal aid come into effect in April 2013. That reduction will slice £350m off the department’s annual £2.1bn spent on legal aid. The impact is already being felt in law centres and citizen advice centres across the country.

Tender for Provision of Visa Services to UK Border Agency (Including Courier and Document Management)