ROOF Blog

Information from a survey of local authorities by the Care Leavers’ Association has found as many as 389 young people have gone missing from care since 2000. The majority of them are believed to be asylum seekers targeted by traffickers after arriving in the UK who were in the South of England. While the survey indicated that some local authorities could account for all the young people in their care, as many as 41 LAs have seen young people go missing without a trace. The charity is calling on local authorities to do as much as they can to find the children and said that an urgent inquiry was needed.

Housing minister Margaret Beckett announced a £605 million allocation to 163 local authorities with long-term plans to increase house building to meet the needs of their communities. During the next two years the money will enable LAs with plans for growth to invest in the essential services that need to accompany the building of new homes, including transport links, schools, and the provision of parks. The 163 LAs singled out have signed up to deliver 1.3 million new homes by 2016.

The town of Corby in Northamptonshire is least likely to suffer job losses during a recession, according to consultancy Oxford Economics which looked at the proportion of people employed in the most vulnerable sectors such as financial services, retail and property. Corby had ‘only’ 64 per cent of its workforce employed in these vulnerable sectors. The City of London and Tower Hamlets came out as the most vulnerable of the 408 local authorities measured.