Society daily 06.03.13

Iain Duncan Smith's Department for Work and Pensions said it had 'provided £30m to councils to ensure that groups like foster carers and disabled people are protected'. Photograph: Dan Kitwood/Getty Images

Today's top SocietyGuardian stories

• Ministers urged to exempt foster carers from 'bedroom tax'
• Adoption reforms must slow down and give more support to parents, say peers
• Elizabeth Butler-Sloss: Adoption should not just be about speed
• Universal credit benefits system 'in meltdown', claims Labour
• Government to legislate for plain cigarette packaging this year
• New measures to tackle child sex abuse planned
• Clampdown on payday lenders
• Childcare costs rising by more than twice the rate of inflation
• Serco reports 27% rise in profits
• Firm behind Winterbourne View care home goes into administration
All today's SocietyGuardian stories

In today's SocietyGuardian section

• Is this the end of Cameron's big society?
• Food banks are thriving, much to the government's embarrassment
• David Brindle: Telecare could be the future of elderly care – if it works
• Clare Allan: Social rents increases will break up communities
• Jane Young: PIP – the new disability benefit – must be urgently reviewed
• What the government can learn from the Olympics
• New guidelines could reduce wrongful convictions under 'joint enterprise' law
• Stephen Duckworth: 'The new disability benefit is enabling'

Jobs of the week

• Director, Haringey Citizens Advice Bureau
• Press officer, House of Lords
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On the Guardian Professional Networks

• A New Zealand minister's suggestion that middle managers in the public sector should be axed is misguided, says Richard Baum, a manager at an NHS foundation trust
• Why fostering and adoption should not be exclusive to the straight world
• What the NHS can learn from New Zealand's reforms

On my radar ...

• Sir David Nicholson. Following the NHS chief executive's appearance at the health select committee yesterday, a Guardian leader concludes:

The many flaws of Mr Nicholson should not obscure the reality that in the end it is ministers who must carry the can – and for good reason.

But writing for Comment is free, committee member Sarah Wollaston writes that Nicholson is not the right person to guide the future of the NHS. She argues:

No one should dismiss Mid Staffs as an isolated case: there are many more hospitals under the spotlight for alleged failures of care over the same period. How confident can we be that the person at the helm of the NHS will not be conflicted in presenting the full story to the public?
Nicholson blamed the failings at Mid Staffs in large part on the constant cycle of reorganisation and spoke of "management hitting the target but missing the point" as it was held to account for a "whole set of things from the centre". Pressed as to who was responsible for those targets and the organisational churn that contributed to hundreds of deaths at a single hospital, he was silent. The defence of his record by so many of those in government at the time speaks volumes.
As the NHS breaks away from Westminster and relocates its headquarters at a safe distance in Leeds, David Nicholson may be the right person to manage that immediate transition but I doubt he commands the respect and support necessary to guide its long-term future.

• Public sector pay. On the TUC's Touchstone blog, Richard Exell discusses a new Unison report, which asks whether the public sector pay premium is fact or fiction. He writes:

The report shows that private companies have comparatively large proportions of low and high paid workers compared to the public sector, and this difference has got worse in recent years by all the outsourcing of low-paid jobs in the public sector. These figures do not show that public sector workers are getting paid more than they would get for doing the same sort of jobs for a private firm.
... Using IDS's pay database and job evaluation methodology, the authors find that public sector pay tends to be higher at lower levels of responsibility, but that at middle and higher levels private sector pay opens up a growing gap.

(link via Heather Wakefield)

• Just caught up with this piece on the New Statesman blog by George Eaton, on how ministers are scaremongering over "benefit tourism". He writes:

Given the political and media attention devoted to the issue, one might assume that almost no immigrant moves to the UK but to claim benefits. As so often, however, the data tells a different story.

(thanks to Ermintrude for the link)

• The powerful final post on Di Galpin's adoption blog, in which she describes her experiences and mixed emotions after being told her birth mother was alive and had been found, but did not want contact. The "Adoption File" blogs are to be collated as a free Apple ibook next month.