General Reports and Other Publications
WAG: Police forces in Wales should consider the need for more full time wildlife crime officers according to a new review of the prevention & investigation of Wildlife Crime in Wales published last recently.
The report recommends that each of the Welsh police forces identifies a biodiversity ‘champion’ of supervisory rank to ensure that wildlife incidents are dealt with in a proportionate, professional and effective manner.
The report recommends that each of the Welsh police forces identifies a biodiversity ‘champion’ of supervisory rank to ensure that wildlife incidents are dealt with in a proportionate, professional and effective manner.
The report also stresses the importance of effective training for wildlife crime officers and recommends that each force has at least 1 officer trained to carry out the investigation of crimes relating to the illegal trade in endangered species. Student police officers & other staff should also receive training on wildlife crime.
Press release ~ Review of the prevention and investigation of Wildlife Crime in Wales (scroll down) ~ WAG: Animal health and welfare ~ Wales Biodiversity Partnership
CRC: Rural England is making a major contribution to the nation’s economic recovery and stands ready to play its part in the UK’s drive to achieve full economic potential. Since the beginning of 2009 the Commission for Rural Communities (CRC) has led discussions with rural entrepreneurs, communities and their representatives about how to release this potential. From these discussions, they have drawn up ‘Agenda for change: releasing the economic potential of England’s rural areas’.
ScotGov: A new study concludes that adopting blanket 'one-size fits all' policies on gangs and knife-carrying are largely ineffective and recommends instead deploying targeted intervention strategies - like those seen in the successful Community Initiative to Reduce Violence (CIRV) in Glasgow.
The CIRV initiative (which is modelled on similar projects from the US) has seen gang-related violence drop by 46% in the first 18 months. It is due to be evaluated at the end of the 2 year pilot.
Press release ~ Troublesome Youth Groups, Gangs and Knife Carrying in Scotland ~ Research Findings ~ Information on the CIRV scheme ~ Scottish Centre for Crime and Justice Research
NAO: The National Audit Office has reported that many academies are performing impressively in delivering the Academies Programme's intended improvements. Most are achieving greater rates of improvement in academic attainment than their predecessor schools.
The NAO warns in the report that academies' performance to date cannot be assumed to be an accurate predictor of how the model will perform when generalized over many more schools, given that the future number is likely to include schools with a much wider range of attainment, and operating in very different community settings.
Press release ~ Full report & links to related documents - Department for Education: The Academies Programme
BIS: The Government has published Richard Hooper’s update to his December 2008 Report on the maintenance of the universal postal service in the UK. Since June 2010, Hooper has been analysing developments in the postal sector in the last 18 months.
He has found that the underlying issues that threatened the universal postal service (the same price goes anywhere and a collection & delivery of letters 6 days a week) remain and that urgent action has to be taken.
He has found that the underlying issues that threatened the universal postal service (the same price goes anywhere and a collection & delivery of letters 6 days a week) remain and that urgent action has to be taken.
ESRC: According to research funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC), renewable energy policies should encourage more community-owned projects to avoid a concentration of commercial power plants in poorer areas. The current trend shows that many technically suitable locations may remain unused because of the threat of effective local resistance by people who are relatively privileged.
Planning delays & rejections encourage commercial developers to instead focus on remote or deprived communities as sites for new power plants. In areas of economic fragility, commercial plants are more easily established without having to provide many benefits for the local community.
Newswire – PE: A report from think tank Policy Exchange published recently calls for a radical overhaul of housing policy, ‘saving taxpayers around £20bn a year’. It calls for a big increase in the number of new homes being built for sale or rent in areas of high demand, with social housing tenants given new ways to get onto the first rung of the housing ladder.
Britain is ‘stuck’ with an expensive social housing sector which traps residents by providing disincentives to work, holding down aspirations, while at the same time costing taxpayers around £32bn a year.
