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Downing Street and Treasury aides have often been at odds since the autumn over how to boost economic growth after the deepest recession since the war, say senior Whitehall sources.

The disclosure that Steve Hilton, the prime minister’s policy guru, proposed abolishing maternity leave was the most powerful example of the battles that have been playing out behind the scenes in Whitehall.

“Steve Hilton comes up with lots of ideas – they do not all see the light of day,” said one senior figure who is familiar with Hilton. “Some of his ideas work and some do not.”

Tory sources blamed the Liberal Democrats for leaking Hilton’s thoughts, a view which took hold when Vince Cable dismissed his ideas on the airwaves at lunchtime.

“That most definitely is not government policy,” the business secretary told Radio 4′s The World at One regarding Hilton’s proposal to abolish maternity rights. “Steve is a fine blue skies thinker but this is not part of what we are going to do. We are looking at labour legislation in general but it has got to be sensible and balanced and I think that particular proposal isn’t.”

The leaking of Hilton’s thoughts to the FT appeared to owe more to the investigative powers of the newspaper rather than to an operation by a particular faction in government.

But the fact that a series of Whitehall figures felt free to speak in dismissive terms to the FT about Hilton’s ideas show that he has detractors at the heart of the government.

A number of Lib Dems around Nick Clegg regard Hilton as a refreshing but somewhat wacky thinker. Furthermore, some figures in the Treasury believe that Hilton’s loose thinking was partly to blame for George Osborne‘s failure to create a coherent and compelling message for the Tories’ election campaign.

There was much mirth among these groups when the FT reported that Hilton had suggested that maternity rights and all consumer rights legislation should be abolished to help revive the economy. Hilton even suggested that Britain should ignore EU labour rules on temporary workers, much to the annoyance of the No 10 permanent secretary, Jeremy Heywood.

“Steve asked why the PM had to obey the law,” one Whitehall source told the FT of a meeting in March to discuss the government’s growth strategy. “Jeremy had to explain that if David Cameron breaks the law he could be put in prison.”

Hilton also suggested that Whitehall could do its bit to cut the fiscal deficit by abolishing hundreds of central government press officers and replacing them with a single person in each department who would blog. He also said that Jobcentres should be closed and replaced instead by community groups.

One source who works close to Hilton said that many of David Cameron’s team were startled by his proposal in opposition to buy cloudbursting technology to provide more sunshine.

Hilton’s fans rallied to his defence. One said: “Steve is brilliant. He has such a fresh and lively mind. He makes boring documents sparkle.”

Another said it was important to understand the mindset of one of Cameron’s closest allies who has known the prime minister since their days together at Conservative Central Office in the late 1990s. “You have to realise that Steve is an impatient revolutionary. He really will be furious if, at the end of our five years in government, we have not completely transformed this country and freed people up to run their own lives.”

Hilton has been a central figure as No 10 and 11 have struggled since the autumn to develop a coherent strategy for growth. There were reports earlier this week that Downing Street’s two neighbours and their aides were at odds over the government’s core economic strategy – the elimination of the structural deficit over the course of this parliament. This was wrong.

But there have been tense discussions dating back to the spending review last autumn over how to stimulate growth. Hilton has lined up in the modernisers’ corner as he lobbies for radical deregulation and a focus on innovative new industries. The Treasury welcomes many of Hilton’s ideas but is more cautious and does not want to lose sight of the importance of established industries.

One Whitehall source spoke of “institutional differences” between Hilton’s team at No 10, which was instrumental in the prime minister’s “new economic dynamism” speech to the CBI last October, and the Treasury and the business department. They take what is described as a traditional and “quite corporatist view”.

Hilton prevailed in that speech when the prime minister warned that the traditional model of business, in which goods are shipped around the world, has been “blown apart”.

He was instrumental in writing this into the speech: “There has been a surge in new, young, high-growth, highly innovative firms. It wasn’t long ago that Apple, Cisco and Google didn’t even exist – now each one has a market value of over $100bn … The impact this change is having on our economic landscape is unprecedented. In 1950, the average life of a company in the SP index was 47 years. By 2020, it will fall to just 10 years.”

Treasury sources say there are no differences with No 10. They point out that in the budget in March, the chancellor announced an entrepreneurial investment scheme and tax break for entrepreneurs. “George thinks it is great that Steve agitates and pushes his ideas,” one source said. “Ideas are discussed and challenged in a process by people who all work very well together.”

Article source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2011/jul/28/steve-hilton-policies-coalition-split

The National Trust is incorrect to claim that the government is weakening its commitment to protect our natural environment (Planning rules bonfire sparks green belt alert, 27 June). Preserving the character of our country’s landscape and checking the unrestricted sprawl of built-up areas are key priorities within our new national planning policy framework.

Illustration: Gillian Blease

This new document safeguards valued national protection such as green belt, areas of outstanding natural beauty and sites of special scientific interest, as well as ensuring measures which protect wildlife, biodiversity and cultural heritage, and which tackle light pollution. It also proposes a new designation to protect local green spaces in need of special protection. Far from having the potential to cause environmental degradation, the framework will protect the countryside from encroachment and prohibit development that is clearly in conflict with its powerful environmental safeguards.

Condensing Labour’s confusing and contradictory array of planning guidance is part of a series of broader reforms to promote sustainable development and protect the environment. Planning has become the preserve of lawyers, town hall officials and pressure groups; this government is determined to have a system that truly represents and serves the interests of local communities.

Bob Neill MP

Minister for planning

• A favourite trick of crafty speculator developers is to apply for planning permission during the summer holidays or over Christmas, when people’s attention is elsewhere. Eric Pickles, secretary of state for the environment, is playing the same underhand game with his new white paper on planning regulation.

The thrust of this new policy, slipped out while parliament is on holiday, is to loosen planning rules so that, unless an area is designated a national park or area of outstanding natural beauty, there will be no defence against any developer who wants to develop anything anywhere.

Britain has a good reputation for protecting precious countryside and the ancient built environment. Thanks to reasonably strict planning rules we have, since the second world war, been able to protect our heritage against the worst excesses of urban sprawl and sporadic development in the countryside.

Not any more. The government, under pressure from big business, wants developers to rule unchecked. Local authorities and communities will be powerless to prevent large-scale development on greenfield sites. If you object to this white paper, write to Eric Pickles and your MP.

Tony Foster

Tywardreath, Cornwall

• While correctly concerned about the proposed new planning laws, you record “a decent ambition to involve the people affected by planning decisions in the process of making them” (Editorial, 28 July). But how far will the people affected actually have a say in determining those laws and the resultant processes?

The great bulk of those involved in the consultations, apart from developers, will be national organisations with the resources to become deeply involved. Concerned local residents, alone or in neighbourhood organisations, will struggle with the effort and time required, not to mention the laborious printing of consultation documents available only online and rarely in local libraries.

Bernard Wainewright

Hatch End, Middlesex

• Peter Hetherington (Society, 27 July) bemoans the government’s decision to scrap planning rules to convert commercial properties to residential ones. In Britain the price of residential property has risen substantially more than commercial. Scrapping rules might be a comparatively cheap way of getting more homes. He further criticises the decision to let councils accept payments from developers as this would allow “planning permission to be bought or sold”. Really? Is this any different from what we saw under Labour, where construction of a new supermarket required X number of affordable homes? How costly was this process of negotiation to companies and councils, in time and money? The new system arguably simplifies this and gives councils discretion on what areas they feel need money spent on rather than having it dictated by central government.

Paul Negrotti

Greenford, Middlesex

Article source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2011/jul/28/loosening-green-belt-rules

The subject of TB, cattle and badgers has rightly raised questions to test the science supporting the government’s announcement last week (Letters, 26 July). The government considered this issue very carefully before saying it is minded to go ahead with a badger control policy. The decision was based on experts’ advice, now summarised in a published paper. The government could not have taken that step without being satisfied that the latest science supported its position. That is also why there will be a further consultation on the strict guidelines that would be used to grant licences to control badgers in highly infected areas before a final decision.

The NFU is clear that science unequivocally demonstrates a link between the disease in badgers and cattle. We have never claimed that it is the only means of transmission, and that is why we fully support the strict cattle controls in place in England. The problem is that we are controlling the disease in cattle but not in badgers.

If we do nothing but wait until vaccines are available, the disease will be even further out of control, it will have spread into more areas and take even longer to eradicate. Badger controls were never going to be popular. The NFU supports this tough decision because it is right.

Peter Kendall

President, NFU

• Ben Goldacre’s article on the eradication of bovine TB (July 23) brought sense to an ill-informed debate. But he claimed about half of all cattle infections came from a badger source. The Badger Trust is keen to know his reference for this assertion. Annex G of the coalition government’s briefing for its public consultation on cattle TB eradication, which closed last December, said the exact number of incidents of bovine TB in cattle caused by badgers was not known. In fact, we are not aware of any proven number of cases of transmission in either direction.

David Williams

Chairman, Badger Trust

Article source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2011/jul/28/badger-culls-grey-area-science

With parliament in recess the government this week sneaked out the most astonishing change to the face of England in half a century. A “national planning policy framework” replaces all previous regulation and encourages building wherever the market takes it, crucially in the two-thirds of rural England outside national parks, green belts and areas of outstanding natural beauty. Farms, forests, hills, valleys, estuaries and coasts will be at the mercy of a “presumption in favour of sustainable development”. The “default response” to any planning application is to be “yes”.

The word sustainable should never appear in an act of parliament. It is a weasel word, an adjective not qualifying a noun but lightly dusting it with vague political approval. Sustainability is the sort of Blairism that gave us downsizing for sacking and humanitarian intervention for war. The only sustainable meadow is a meadow. Sustainable development is a contradiction in terms. It means development.

The localism bill now before parliament is a straight developers’ ramp. Drafted by the local government secretary, Eric Pickles, and the business secretary, Vince Cable, it stresses business and “national economic policy” over conservation at every turn. It is the outcome of intense lobbying by the construction industry. Pickles and Cable are mere purveyors of building plots to the capitalist classes. The words development and business occur in the bill 340 times, the word countryside just four.

The bill and addendum breach the core principle of planning, that the long-term use of land, the scarcest of resources, should take precedence over an owner’s right to profit. That is why there are no bungalows on the white cliffs of Dover and no wind farms on the Chilterns. It is why, when you look out over the Severn valley, you do not see Bristol merged with Gloucester.

Great champions of the countryside, such as Octavia Hill, Oliver Rackham, Clough Williams-Ellis and Marion Shoard, sought a regime in which rural England kept its head above the tide of urbanisation. Protection was embodied in the 1947 Town and Country Planning Act and a presumption, given the irreversibility of urbanisation, against building on green land.

I have read parliamentary bills all my life, but the localism one is the most wretched capitulation to a single lobby I know. It is a junk heap of cliche. It asserts that building must be allowable “for prosperity … for people … and for places”. It need only be economically, socially or environmentally sustainable – “components to be pursued in an integrated way, looking for solutions which deliver multiple goals”, whatever that means. Development need only show it is “planned and undertaken responsibly”. There is no definition of “responsibly”. Such vagueness puts every rural acre in play as “worth a try”.

Planning, once proudly independent, is now effectively an arm of Cable’s department. It is told that it “must not act as an impediment to growth”. This stands on its head the purpose of planning, which is to guard the public interest irrespective of market forces. Its whole point is to be an impediment.

Under the bill the old upper-tier regional targets and spatial strategies are scrapped, with local authorities to write new ones based on what “local people” want. These are to be guided by parish councils and “business forums”. The latter can be any group of 21 people who “live or work” locally. These shadowy, self-selected people are charged not with ascertaining local opinion, but with allocating plots for building and even promoting “more development than is set out in the local plan”. In particular they must help “deliver” a 20% increase in land available for housing.

Should a neighbourhood be so reckless as to want to protect its environment, the planning authority is obligated to “meet local development needs” with “sufficient flexibility to respond to rapid shifts in demand”. This confusion of need and demand is an elementary economic howler.

Worse follows. Half the councils in England have no strategy plans at all. In this case, planning approval is to be assumed. It is also to be assumed “wherever the plan is silent, indeterminate or where relevant policies are out of date”, a stunning Orwellian phrase.

This bill is philistine, an abuse of local democracy and an invitation to corruption. Its impact statement accepts that local electors may “resist development proposals that are not in line with their aspirations”, in other words they may opt for conservation. Yet when developers appeal, inspectors are told that their duty is to concede on grounds of overriding national policy. The bias is shameless.

Two groups, apart from developers, will benefit. One is planning lawyers, who will be rubbing their hands in glee and saluting St Eric and St Vincent. The other will be a new army of “Swampies”, who will defend rural England with the same anarchy as Pickles is attacking it. With the countryside facing a return to the ribbon-and-sprawl of the 1930s, litigation and direct action will be conservation’s only defence.

There is no argument that planning is too slow. That does not justify throwing out baby, bath water and all. There is no evidence that a shortage of green land is impeding growth. House-builders and hypermarkets already hold large land banks. There is no “need” to build on green-field sites anywhere in Britain. There is merely a “demand” from those wishing to profit from it.

There is now probably more developable land left over from manufacture and lying unused in England than ever in history. It is mostly serviced, with infrastructure, housing, schools and a working population to hand. By definition it is more sustainable than virgin countryside. It is there that planning should direct development.

Countryside needs no sentimental defence. Most Britons find it beautiful and want it preserved. When the Chipping Norton set see what they have unleashed on their rolling acres they will doubtless be appalled. But we are back to the NHS, forests and student fees, to ministers in a hurry being exploited by lobbyists on the make.

This time it really matters. For the unprotected countryside to become the lasting victim of the credit crunch is tragic. Vince Cable last week patronised America for being in thrall to “a few rightwing nutters”. So is he.

Article source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/jul/28/localism-bill-sacrifice-countryside-market

David Cameron can at least head off on holiday confident that he has finally produced a comprehensive governmental response to the phone-hacking furore that so dominated the last three weeks of the parliamentary sitting. Lord Justice Leveson, to whose inquiry the bulk of that response has been entrusted, is therefore likely to have a much busier summer than the prime minister. Setting out his initial plans for his examination of the tangled web of issues highlighted by the hacking scandal on Thursday, Lord Justice Leveson did his best to impose some order on his multiple tasks. But he left a lot of questions unanswered, even so.

The scale of the inquiry’s terms of reference, which were significantly widened last week, is already daunting. The problems involved in sequencing the various issues which it covers are particularly acute because of so many continuing investigations. This inquiry is supposed to report back in a year’s time. Yet it will have its work cut out to do so. Lord Justice Leveson gave a broad hint that his timetable may be difficult to meet, given what he called the length, width and depth of the issues. This needs to be acknowledged more widely.

In Plato’s republic, all the evidence of abuse would be collected first and dealt with. Then all the issues raised by that evidence would be examined. Finally a set of conclusions and new measures would be drawn up and enacted. If this were an old-style royal commission, that is how the sequence of events would unfold – though the experience of previous royal commissions on the press is that nothing would then happen. But Lord Justice Leveson is conducting a judge-led inquiry which is taking place under great political and media pressure. Government and parliament rightly want solutions to the abuses revealed by the Guardian and others. The 12-month timetable, though politically understandable, imposes immense pressure. So one of the most urgent priorities for Lord Justice Leveson and his colleagues is to spend the coming weeks establishing a much clearer timetable than has yet been done.

No one should deny the importance of this. Many of the most egregious aspects of the phone-hacking saga, not least the scale of the abuse, will remain unclear until the police investigation is completed and until any criminal proceedings have been completed too. The fresh allegations that we report on today were timely reminders that these matters are not within Lord Justice Leveson’s control. Yet without full knowledge, there is a danger that the solutions and new structures which the inquiry is now starting to examine will not address the hardest examples of abuse. This potential traffic jam of activity is not Lord Justice Leveson’s fault. If anyone, ministers have created it. But Lord Justice Leveson nevertheless has to solve it as best he can. Above all, he needs to prevent the inquiry becoming bogged down in detail and procedural issues, as the Saville inquiry into Bloody Sunday did. This may mean being very strict about the number of lawyers who are required for an effective and fair inquiry.

Lord Justice Leveson laid out some sensible ideas on Thursday. The balance between seminars, written evidence and oral hearings is encouraging. He seems to want as sensibly brisk an inquiry as he can manage. In the end, however, the goal of this whole process ought to be that any necessary statutory or other changes should be enacted during the lifetime of this parliament. This points to legislation in the 2013-14 session. On that basis, the Leveson panel has until the end of 2012 to complete its work. Lord Justice Leveson should therefore return in September with a clearer inventory of the issues he plans to address on this demanding journey, and a list of what must be left for another day. He will not have much time for a holiday like Mr Cameron’s. But the timetable and procedures must be sorted out more convincingly by September than they are now.

Article source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/jul/28/hacking-inquiry-leveson-editorial

This August there will be dark clouds of bloodsucking creatures in Scotland. Swarms of the Scottish biting midge are enjoying a big upsurge in numbers this summer thanks to ideal weather, as rains and sunshine have led to perfect breeding conditions.

It all started in the bitterly cold winter, when the midge larvae survived underground under a blanket of snow. The birds that feed on them fared less well, though, and so by spring the midges had far fewer predators to worry about. The warm spring and plentiful rain brought the larvae out of the ground, flying around as adults. And with lots more rain this summer, conditions are ripe for an explosion in midge numbers, well-timed for the school holidays. The signs are already ominous, because earlier this summer midge traps collected two to three times the numbers of midges that have been seen in the past two years.

The black swarms of midges descend on unwary tourists daring to venture outside at dusk. Only the female midges bite, however, as they pierce the skin and suck the blood. And it is traditionally the western side of Scotland that is plagued, because the midges need lots of rain, more than 120cm per year, humid air and an acid, peaty soil, which is what the Highlands and islands provide in abundance.

The best advice is to avoid going out at dusk, or else cover up from head to toe, and use insect repellent.

Article source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/2011/jul/28/weatherwatch-insects-summer-scotland

The Guardian’s social affairs correspondent discusses the impact of the news that Payne was targeted by Glenn Mulcaire

Article source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/video/2011/jul/28/amelia-hill-sara-payne

The Ministry of Defence is to axe a further 7,000 civilian jobs as part of the department’s desperate efforts to bring its soaring budget under control, the Guardian has learned.

A letter signed by the permanent secretary, Ursula Brennan, will be sent to all staff explaining that cuts are necessary and conceding that the move “will raise questions which cannot be answered immediately”.

The decision has infuriated union leaders and defence officials who say they were not consulted. They accused the department of acting in a cavalier fashion without thinking through the consequences.

The move means the defence civil service, which is responsible for scrutinising contracts to ensure they do not run over budget, will have been cut by a third within nine years.

Last week, the defence secretary, Liam Fox, outlined proposals to cut a further 7,000 military jobs from the army between 2015 and 2020. His statement to the Commons made no reference to civilian posts at the MoD, which are already being cut as part of last year’s strategic defence and security review (SDSR).

The review outlined plans to get rid of 25,000 civil servants between now and 2015, and the fresh announcement, which could come on Friday, will add a further 7,000 to that total by 2020.

The letter from Brennan, which is being circulated around Whitehall, says that the department needs to “bear down further on non-frontline costs”.

“In the SDSR we planned for … a 25% reduction in the cost of civilian personnel by 2015, bringing the size of the MoD civil service down to a total of some 60,000 civilian posts,” the letter says.

“As part of the package announced last week we need to make further reductions in … civilian manpower. For civilians, we will be extending the earlier planned reductions, coming down to a total of 53,000 civilians by 2020.”

Brennan says she hopes that many of the job losses will be “achieved by natural wastage” and that “compulsory redundancy will only be used as a last resort”.

However, the letter concludes: “We recognise that news of further staff reductions … will raise questions which cannot be answered immediately. We will let you have more news on this … over the coming months.”

Union leaders said the announcement reflected “what the MoD can afford, not what it needs”. They believe the cuts could backfire with poor quality equipment being commissioned that could put the armed forces at greater risk.

Steve Jary, national secretary of Prospect, the union which represents MoD civil servants, said: “A defence civil service of just 53,000 will be just half the size it was in 2005. The further cuts in civilian numbers were not mentioned in Liam Fox’s statement last week and have not been the subject of any consultation.”

He added: “The MoD has consistently avoided open and detailed consultation on the changes since the SDSR was published. This is leading to a breakdown in trust; 53,000 is a totally arbitrary figure.”

The saga over the MoD’s runaway budget has become one of the most difficult and enduring issues facing the coalition government.

Despite all the cost cutting announced in the SDSR, there was still a substantial overspend in last year’s defence budget – estimated at more than £1bn.

Officials at the MoD blamed this on the speed in which the review was undertaken, and also privately raised concerns that the government had not properly funded the reforms it wanted to make to the armed forces between now and 2020.

This led to demands from the Treasury for further cost cutting. Last week Fox said the army will shrink from its present size of about 101,000 to 82,000 by 2020.

The SDSR had already cut the army by 7,000 by 2015 – when troops will no longer have a combat role in Afghanistan. In return, the Treasury has promised that the armed forces will get a 1% real terms budget increase from 2015 to 2020 to help pay for the reforms.

However, the Guardian has been told that this is far short of what the MoD believes it needs if it is to build the promised hi-tech Future Force 2020.

Article source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2011/jul/29/ministry-defence-axe-more-civilian-jobs

Leaders of teachers, nurses, civil servants, firefighters and other public sector workers claimed they were being “frogmarched” into co-ordinated strike action after the Treasury took the surprise step of setting out in detail how much individuals will have to pay in contributions to their pension schemes from next April.

The overall cost of £1.2bn is broadly as expected, but senior union sources said “we had no warning of this co-ordinated announcement for each scheme, or that it would be leaked to the Telegraph and the Sun laced with the usual rhetoric about ‘gold-plated pensions‘.”

Union leaders said they were convinced some ministers, including Cabinet Office minister Francis Maude and health secretary Andrew Lansley, remain committed to a negotiated settlement before the new regime is introduced next April, but they questioned whether Treasury ministers were only interested in cash savings.

There was frustration at a recent Liberal Democrat away day for MPs that the party, including Treasury chief secretary Danny Alexander, had found themselves cast in the role of bearer of bad news to the public.

Brian Strutton, national secretary for public services at the GMB union, and one of the negotiators in recent talks, said Alexander had “spiked” the discussions for the second time in two months. “Is the government trying to negotiate or frogmarch us into a dispute?”

He added: “In the past, if somebody had asked me, it was 50/50 whether we solved this through negotiation or not. That balance has now significantly changed and it is 60/40 against us being able to reach a negotiated outcome, which makes the prospect of industrial action in the autumn much more likely.”

Alexander said the proposals protected low-paid workers, and ensured a better balance between what taxpayers and workers contributed. Around 750,000 workers should pay nothing extra and another one million should pay no more than 1.5% extra. Talks on specific schemes, such as those in local government and the NHS, will lead to more proposals by the end of October on how further savings of £2.3bn in 2013/14 and £2.8bn in 2014/15 can be made.

Under the proposed changes to be introduced next year, nurses and classroom teachers earning £25,700 will pay an extra £10 a month for their pension, an NHS consultant on £130,000 will pay an extra £152 a month, while civil servants will see their contributions rise by between £20 and £140 a month.

Teachers in the most typical pay band – £32,000 to £39,999 a year – will see their contributions rise from 6.4% to 7.6%.

“It has nothing to do with the affordability or sustainability of teachers’ pensions, it is a tax on teachers to pay for the mistakes of others,” said Russell Hobby, general secretary of the National Association of Head Teachers.

Higher up the income scale, teachers earning £50,000 would be expected to pay an additional £696 a year, civil servants £684 and those working in the NHS would be set for a £768 hike.

Highest earners would face increases of up to £284 a month – £3,400 a year more.

In the £100,000 bracket, civil servants would pay an extra £2,100 annually, doctors almost £2,000 and teachers £1,752.

In the main firefighter pension scheme members would face rises from 11% to 14%, and to 17% for fire officers. The pension age will also rise to 60. The Fire Brigades Union general secretary Matt Wrack said preliminary arrangements for a strike ballot were being prepared. He said: “This pensions robbery is a crude smash-and-grab raid on firefighter pension rights to help pay for the budget deficit. It is nothing to do with long-term sustainability or affordability.”

The greatest savings for the taxpayer will come from the NHS scheme (£530m), followed by the teachers’ scheme (£300m) and the civil service (£180m).

Unison leader Dave Prentis accused Alexander of “crude and naive tactics”, urging ministers to “stop treating these talks like some kind of playground game”.

Cabinet Office minister Francis Maude said: “The unions have absolutely known that this process was going on. The idea that anyone is taken by surprise by this is nonsense.”

He said strikes would be “very disappointing” because the government was committed to ensuring that public sector pensions were “among the very best available”, adding: “There’s still a lot to talk about for the future long-term design of the scheme but there will continue to be, unlike most pension schemes, defined benefit with a guaranteed pension level so no investment risk and they’ll be good pensions.”

Article source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2011/jul/28/public-sector-pensions-strikes

The News of the World‘s publisher may be forced to pay legal fees for the private investigator at the centre of the phone-hacking scandal, despite announcing it was ceasing payments “with immediate effect”.

Solicitors for Glenn Mulcaire have written to Rupert Murdoch’s News Group publishers to put them on notice that the company is still legally liable to indemnify the investigator in a high court appeal he is taking. The law firm Payne Hicks Beach warns: “We have had no written confirmation that NGN is going to cease funding our client.”

Last week, News International announced it had terminated “with immediate effect” its arrangement to pay the legal fees of Mulcaire in his case. The decision came after James Murdoch told the Commons culture, media and sport select committee he was “as surprised as you are” when he discovered “certain legal fees were paid to Mr Mulcaire”.

Sources at News International said it had verbally notified Mulcaire’s representatives that it was ceasing funding Mulcaire, and had written to Payne Hicks Beach to confirm this. “If they haven’t already received this letter, they will do so shortly,” said the source.

Mulcaire is appealing against a high court order requiring him to identify the News of the World journalists involved in phone-hacking. Up to now this case was being funded by News International.

The firm tone of the Payne Hicks Beach letter, dated 26 July and which the Guardian has seen, suggests Mulcaire will not give up on his funding without a fight.

The letter says the appeal was “brought to protect Mulcaire’s legal interests with the full knowledge and support, from the outset of News Group Newspapers they provided an indemnity in respect of costs to cover that appeal.”

It goes on to say: “We consider that the contract of indemnity is for the whole of the appeal” and considers that its client “continues to be indemnified in respect of his costs … until the matter is resolved”.

Article source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2011/jul/28/glenn-mulcaire-solicitors-legal-fees