Virgin Care wins
£700m contract to run 200 NHS and social care services
The contract, which was approved on Thursday, has sparked
new fears about private health firms expanding their role in the provision of
publicly funded health services. Virgin Care has been handed the contract by
both Bath and North East Somerset NHS clinical commissioning group and
Conservative-led Bath and North East Somerset council. It is worth £70m a year
for seven years and the contract includes an option to extend it by another
three years at the same price. It means that from 1 April Virgin Care will
become the prime provider of a wide range of care for adults and children. That
will include everything from services for those with diabetes, dementia or who
have suffered a stroke, as well as people with mental health conditions. It
will also cover care of children with learning disabilities and frail, elderly
people who are undergoing rehabilitation to enable them to go back to living at
home safely after an operation. NHS campaigners warned that the history of
previous privatisations of NHS services in other parts of England may mean the
quality of care patients receive drops once Virgin takes over. “In too many
instances outsourced healthcare has resulted in care being compromised to cuts
costs. Patients need secure services that they can trust and rely on,” said Paul
Evans, co-ordinator of the NHS Support Federation, which monitors NHS contracts
being awarded to firms such as Virgin. The collapse of the £725m UnitingCare
contract in Cambridgeshire meant Virgin’s newly acquired contract would be the
most lucrative ongoing deal for providing NHS care, he said. GUARDIAN
90% of appeals upheld
against Concentrix, hired by HMRC to cut tax-credit payments
Concentrix was hired to help cut tax-credit fraud and
overpayment, but has been accused in recent months of incorrectly withdrawing
tax credits from hundreds of claimants. The BBC's Victoria Derbyshire programme
has previously reported the case of Nicola McKenzie, a teenage mother who had
her child tax credits stopped by the company after she was wrongly accused of
being married to a 74-year-old dead man. Between 14 September and 15 November
2016, 24,219 claimants have now had their tax credits reinstated. Tax credits -
the child tax credit and the working tax credit - are government payments made
to households on low incomes. Catherine Smart Ekpenyong said she had been
"elated" to learn her tax credits would be reinstated after they had
been cut in August. "I cried, I shook, I was pinching myself," she
said, adding that she would now be able to "do a normal food shop"
and afford to travel to hospital to receive post-cancer treatment and
check-ups. SNP MP Tasmina Ahmed-Sheikh called on the Chancellor to ensure
compensation was available for all those affected. "Some are receiving it,
but some aren't," she said. "There are paltry sums like £20 in some
cases... it doesn't even cost the cover of the phone calls or the postage of
sending documents again and again to be reviewed by Concentrix." HMRC has already
announced the US company, Concentrix, will not have its contract renewed. In
October, HMRC announced it would take on the work being done by Concentrix. BBC NEWS
Want affordable
housing? Then force property developers who are sat on land to build homes or
get out, say estate agents
Property developers who cling on to sites with planning
permission for housing should be forced to construct homes within three years
or sell up, a group says. 'Speculators who are sitting on land only to sell at
a profit' are clogging up much-needed space for new homes, the Royal
Institution of Chartered Surveyors said. More brownfield sites and unused land
should be freed up to create affordable homes and councils need to speed up
planning applications, the findings added. The government's Department for
Communities and Local Government recently revealed that the number of
affordable homes built in England in the past year fell to its lowest level for
24 years. There were 32,110 built, compared to 66,600 in the previous year,
according to the government body's figures. With optimism in the market
falling, over 80 per cent of respondents to RICS' latest survey said they were
not expecting to market any starter homes in the next year. Jeremy Blackburn,
head of policy at Rics, said: 'However, we must be clear that not all starter
homes will be affordable homes... Building more starter homes is a help, but it
is only one way to tackle the huge social problem of the lack of affordable
housing.' DAILY MAIL
Three arrested amid
Panama Papers insider trade inquiry
More arrests are planned in the joint-investigation by the
Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) and the National Crime Agency (NCA),
Bloomberg News reported. The Chancellor told the Commons that HMRC’s Panama
Papers Taskforce had “identified a number of leads relevant to a major insider
trading operation”. A team of HMRC officials has been combing through the
millions of documents leaked earlier this year from the Panamanian law firm
Mossack Fonseca. Their collaboration on the investigation recalls Operation
Tabernula, Britain’s biggest insider dealing investigation yet, in which the
NCA carried out covert surveillance. Among five Operation Tabernula convictions
to date, earlier this year Martyn Dodgson, a former Deutsche Bank corporate
broker received a four-and-a-half-year prison sentence. In a separate case,
last week Mark Lyttleton, a former BlackRock fund manager, pleaded guilty to
two charges of insider dealing. As well as leads on insider dealing, Philip
Hammond said the Mossack Fonseca trove had prompted criminal investigations of
22 suspected tax evaders and identified the hidden owners of 26 suspicious
offshore companies used to hold UK property, among other breakthroughs for
investigators. TELEGRAPH
Big Six energy firms
'making six times more profit than they say', according to leaked PWC report
The suggestion is based on a report for Energy UK by
respected accountancy firm PWC, according to the Sun newspaper. The paper said
it obtained an original copy of the report which is said to show that the cost
of supplying a home with gas and electricity "falls well below" what
families pay with the Big Six energy firms. Energy UK cites on its website
calculations by industry regulator Ofgem that operating margins in 2015 were
equal to around 4% of a bill. It says that the Sun's figure does not accurately
reflect costs across all tariffs, as to calculate actual profit margins across
all deals offered by every supplier wouldn't be possible. But the paper accused
Energy UK of cherry-picking parts of the report to put on its website which
failed to include details of the profits. Energy Secretary Greg Clark said he
would summon Energy UK for a meeting "to discuss the report's
findings". "This report appears to confirm my concern that the big
energy firms are punishing their customers' loyalty rather than respecting
it," he said. SKY NEWS
Energy bills mislead
with phantom savings offers
People have been told of savings of up to £200 that never
materialise. Up to a third of households could be affected. One EDF customer in
Norwich found such an offer on the front of her November bill, under the
heading "Our cheapest overall tariff". "Over the next year you
could save £42.08 by choosing Blue+Price Protection Nov17 with Direct Debit,
our cheapest fixed electricity and gas tariff available for your meters,"
the message on her bill said. But if this customer took the offer up and
switched tariffs, the BBC’s Money Box calculated her true saving would be just
£4. Phantom savings can even turn into real losses. In one example analysed by
Money Box, a £47 projected saving with Npower would actually lead to the
customer paying £147 a year more than they now do. How does it happen? A
methodology stipulated by Ofgem and known as the personal projection lies at
the heart of the problem. The personal projection is a forecast of the amount a
customer would spend on energy in the year ahead if they fail to switch when
their current fixed term tariff expires. A failure to switch means customers
are automatically put on their supplier's usually much more expensive standard
variable tariff (SVT) reserved for people who rarely or never change suppliers
or tariffs. So a customer nine months into a cheaper one-year tariff will have
a personal projection made up from the remaining three months on their current
tariff plus nine months on their supplier's SVT. This is stated, in part, on
the bill. The result is a personal projection which is usually much higher than
the amount someone on a fixed tariff is actually paying. Voltz and
MoneySavingsExpert are among a handful of energy price comparison sites which,
along with TheEnergyShop.com, have found ways to stop using Ofgem's personal
projection methodology. They now simply compare the cost of proposed tariffs
with what customers currently pay. BBC NEWS
Taxpayers may be
liable for £75bn North Sea decommissioning bill, says GMB
The GMB's Scotland secretary, Gary Smith, told BBC Radio
Scotland that the costs of decommissioning were "far more than was
originally projected". He said the total bill could be "north"
of £100bn and taxpayers may have to fund between 50 and 75% of that. He said:
"The reality is we have got foreign owned oil and gas companies that are
going to enjoy huge tax breaks at our expense and they are taking vital
decommissioning work abroad... That's what's happened with the Janice platform,
the Maersk platform which is going to Norway, and of course we had the rig
which washed up on Lewis on its way to be decommissioned in Turkey... So
Scotland is losing out on this vital work because of a lack of investment and
because of a failure and dishonesty and dithering on the part of the UK and
Scottish governments." Lang Banks, director of environmental group WWF
Scotland, backed the union's report. He said: "Having made hundreds of
millions of pounds in profits over the past few decades, the costs for
decommissioning old rigs and restoring the marine environment should be being
fully covered by the companies themselves." BBC NEWS
Lettings agent fees
will be banned
Lettings agents in England will be banned from charging fees
to tenants "as soon as possible" under plans announced in the Autumn
Statement. Tenants can be charged fees for a range of administration, including
reference, credit and immigration checks. Chancellor Philip Hammond said
shifting the cost to landlords will save 4.3 million households hundreds of
pounds. The worry is that agents will simply charge the landlord, who will pass
the full cost onto the tenant. But the new law should spur competition as
landlords, unlike tenants, can shop around for the cheapest agent. In Scotland,
lettings agency fees to tenants have already been banned. Fees vary widely,
with costs in some big cities much higher than elsewhere. The latest English
Housing Survey shows fees typically cost £223. However, Shelter research in
2012 found that one in seven tenants pays more than £500. The charity said
renters had no choice over the agent they dealt with after finding a house or
flat. Landlords, on the other hand, were able to choose between agencies to act
for them when renting out their property. Overall, along with rent in advance
and a deposit, the average upfront costs faced by renters using a letting
agency are more than £1,000 nationally and over £2,000 in London, according to
Shelter. BBC NEWS
