Green Man is proud and delighted to support such a respected organization such as the Bevan Foundation who have worked tirelessly since 2001 to build a society where people should expect to have quality, equality and opportunities in their lives.

Named after Wales’ own national political hero and humanitarian Aneurin Bevan, the Founder of the NHS, The Bevan Foundation is a social enterprise independent of any political party.

Its innovative ideas, cutting edge analysis and insightful commentary have help shape government policy, inform public opinion and inspire others into action to tackle poverty and social exclusion in Wales.

Victoria Winckler, Bevan Foundation Director said “The Bevan Foundation are really excited to be working with Green Man this year. As a small charity Green Man’s support is hugely important to us and will help to strengthen our impact on the social justice agenda in Wales. With its commitment to sustainability and its active commitment to Welsh culture Green Man is a great partner.  On a personal note, I have been going to the Green Man Festival with my family for over 6 years so I am looking forward to introducing festival goers to Wales and the work of the Bevan Foundation.”

Fiona Stewart Green Man Director said “Anerin Bevan is one of my hero’s who’s actions in life and social observations seem particularly relevant at this time. The Bevan Foundation has these at its core and the large number of organisations and individuals it supports is incredible.”

“The Bevan Foundation is funded entirely by subscriptions, donations, grants and commissions, and Green Man 2012 is proud to help raise awareness of its invaluable work towards building a better, fairer Wales.”

Find out more information about the Bevan Foundation HERE

Get your Green Man 2012 tickets here

JRF and Bevan Foundation seminar on ‘the role of aspirations, attitudes and behaviour in closing the educational attainment gap’ was on 2nd May 2012. this is a summary of the presentations and discussion.

The impact of poverty on educational attainment and participation is well documented.  It has often been said that parental expectations and involvement in their child’s education is a means of addressing this issue.  But what can we learn from existing research evidence about the relationship between the attitudes and aspirations of parents and subsequent attainment of the child?  Our recent conference organized on behalf of the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, explored these issues by drawing on a recent wide ranging reviews of evidence, and also from hearing more from those on the ground about these issues.

Professor Stephen Gorard presented research, supported by the JRF, which reviewed past studies into the relationships between parents and children’s attitudes, aspirations and behaviours and educational outcomes.  From close examination of past research they identified 13 distinct attitudes, aspirations and behaviours which might be relevant – four of these concern parents, and the remaining 9 concern the individual child.  Significantly, the study found that parental involvement was the only factor which had sufficient evidence for a causal effect on attainment.  The researchers found that other factors indicated some evidence of a causal model, but often due to a lack of available and robust evidence, it was difficult to make claims of causality.

At this event we also heard from Professor Liz Todd, who presented evidence from a study conducted by herself and colleagues, which looked at whether interventions aimed at changing attitudes might go some way to addressing the attainment gap for those from disadvantaged backgrounds.  They found that rather than changing attitudes, interventions focusing on changing actions or behaviours may be more worthwhile.

Delegates also heard responses from schools and projects across Wales.  There are a great many  schools and community projects in Wales which seek to engage parents in their childs education.  We heard about the work of Goetre Junior School in Methyr Tydfil which works closely with parents to get them more involved in their child’s education.  We also heard about the many project organised by Glynoch Communities First, and the successes this community has realised in reducing the number of disengaged young people and decreasing levels of truancy.

The seminar raises a number of issues about how parents might mediate attainment, and what kind of parental interventions might go some way to making a difference.  In particular, further research is needed to understand what kind of interventions might work best at reducing the gap between rich and poor in education.

Michael Donnelly is Policy and Research Officer at the Bevan Foundation

Poverty in Wales is set to increase dramatically.  Already at high levels, a vicious combination of static wages, cuts to benefits and shortage of jobs could see the numbers of people on low incomes soar. But as cuts bite it’s not clear if Wales’s third sector will be able to rise to the challenge.

People in Wales already suffer from unacceptably high levels of poverty. Between one in four and one in five of the population live on an income below 60 per cent of the UK median for their household type, with the proportion of children living in low income households being considerably higher.

The outlook for the next few years is bleak.  Forecasters see very little economic growth for the UK on the horizon, and with forecasts being repeatedly revised downwards no-one can be confident that even a modest upturn will be achieved. Wales is hardly at the forefront of economic dynamism, so the prospects will be if anything even worse.

Into this static or even contracting economy and labour market are pouring thousands more job-seekers.  Thousands of people are being moved from benefits such as Income Support and Incapacity Benefit in expectation that they will find work. Thousands more older people (initially all women) will be in or seeking work because of the increases in state pension age.  To this must be added Wales’s mini baby-bulge of young people aged 16-24 coming into the workforce.  All looking for work.

Those who find a job are hardly facing a life of luxury. The quarter of earners with the lowest incomes earned just £308 a week for men and £170 a week for women in 2011. Even worse, unlike any other group of workers, the poorest paid have seen their weekly earnings fall over the last two years.  And this at a time when rising prices, particularly of basis such as gas and electricity and food, have most affected those on low incomes.

On top of all this is welfare reform.  Expected, by the Welsh Government’s own analysis, to result in an average loss of income of 4.1 per cent, the effect on those who are already poor is truly appalling.  Lone parents and workless families could lose about 12 per cent of their income – up to £50 a week. Most people would find reductions in income on this scale tough to cope with.  The impact on people who are already on the edge of managing financially could be devastating.

One doesn’t have to be a pessimist to foresee very difficult times ahead for Wales’s least well off.

So what to do? Well, there’s little indication that the UK Government has concern about poverty or Wales at the top of its agenda.  The Welsh Government’s overdue ‘Tackling Poverty Action Plan’ is expected soon, but Cabinet statements made to date don’t inspire confidence that anything new or different is about to be announced.  Local authorities are hamstrung by their legal obligations and tough settlements.

Which leaves charities.  Without coming over all ‘Big Society’, Wales’s third sector can, and indeed should, have a pivotal role to play in “tackling poverty”.  But the third sector, too, faces pressures from cuts in public funding and rising demand for services.  And with relatively few large charities and a very small home-grown philanthropic sector, it’s far from clear if the third sector is going to be able to step up to the challenge.  Yet this is something they can and must do, for the sake of Wales’s most vulnerable people and communities.

The Wales Council for Voluntary Action and Bevan Foundation conference on the third sector and poverty is on 30^th May 2012. to find out more and book your place visit WCVA online

Victoria Winckler is Director of the Bevan Foundation. 

International Nurses Day is always celebrated on May 12 – the birth date of Florence Nightingale.

The RCN in Wales participate in celebrating the life time work of Florence Nightingale by attending an annual dedication service in Westminster Abbey.

This year the RCN in Wales will also take this special opportunity to celebrate the life of Hettie C Hopkins, OBE, RCN Welsh Board Secretary between 1963 and 1978 by holding a memorial service for Hettie who recently passed away after a short illness.  Hettie was an extraordinary nursing leader and campaigner who received an OBE for her services to nursing and personified leadership in action. Hettie led the fundraising campaign to build the RCN Welsh Board Headquarters, Ty Maeth in Cardiff and created surplus funds which were invested for the continuing maintenance of Ty Maeth.

Nurses day is an internationally recognised day which gives us the chance to take a short break and acknowledge nurses and nursing, people like Florence and Hettie but also every nurse who works tirelessly to provide quality patient care every day.

It allows us to celebrate all that is good about our profession and just what exceptional things nurses do each day. Today more than ever nurses play a pivotal role in healthcare, making critical decisions that affect and improve patient care. Nurses are central to ensuring a satisfactory and safe patient’s experience.

We don’t hear often enough how nurses make such a great impact on the patients they treat every day. We don’t hear enough about the nurses who work above and beyond their contracted hours, the nurses who support patient’s families, who continue working in the nursing profession through difficult times, who provide outstanding care day in day out. Let’s celebrate our nurses and tell people if we have experienced great care. We can do this on the RCN’s Nurses Day website. http://nursesday.rcn.org.uk/   which is somewhere to share the value of nursing, whatever your position in health care.

Peter Meredith-Smith is Associate Director (Employment Relations) t RCN Wales

Punished by results: the dementia care home punished for excellence

In my last posting, I talked about understanding the cost in the flow of work, rather than just in the transactions.  In this article is an example of how focusing on transactional costs can have a potentially devastating effect on people’s lives.

Janet Bell and Jackie Smith have been running Spring Mount, a home for people living with dementia, for 24 years.  In that time Janet, Jackie and their team have delivered unparalleled performance.  Outcomes for residents stretch belief (when we visited, 4 residents were playing air guitar to Status Quo in the hallway!) and total system costs are unspeakably low.  The morale of those at Spring Mount is beyond compare.

This is all being achieved because Janet, Jackie and the team have rejected the myths governing dementia care:

Myths Governing Dementia Care

Dementia makes people…

- Less sociable & unable to enjoy new relationships;

- Sexually uninhibited & unable to understand sexual responsibility;

- Unable to make a positive contribution to group living;

- Unable to self-determine & make choices;

- Wander aimlessly;

- Unable to learn new things;

- Violent & aggressive;

- Lose their personality;

- Dependent on medication for control.

Their work has impressed the teams behind these Panorama reports and, years earlier, the team behind a similar programme for World in Action.  Back in 1999 the Nursing Times had been pretty blown away too.  Which begs the question, “Why aren’t others seeking to ‘do dementia’ the Spring Mount way?”

The answer is illuminating…Spring Mount’s unit cost to their local commissioner is £575 per week.  Other residential homes in the area charge £460 per week.  The commissioner thinks that Spring Mount is expensive.

However, the commissioner’s comparison doesn’t acknowledge that in its 24 years of operation Spring Mount:

- Has never had a placement break down;

- Has only once required the use of agency staff;

- Has never used anti-psychotic drugs for any of its residents;

- Has earned such confidence from the social workers who place there that they do not feel the need to review their placements;

- Has enabled such full and active lives for residents that their consumption of other health and care resource is demonstrably different and vastly reduced compared to other care settings (yes, that does mean that Spring Mount residents don’t turn up in hospital with Urinary Tract Infections).

Perhaps most striking of all though is that the commissioner’s comparison is to residential settings which would be utterly inappropriate to the needs of Spring Mount’s residents.  To a person, if Spring Mount were to close tomorrow its residents would all be moved to nursing care at a cost of at least £650 per week.

Spring Mount is cheap (that is, cost effective) but the commissioner cannot see it because of their frame of reference.  The consequence: the commissioner is now making it increasingly difficult for social workers to place there.  For the first time in 24 years Spring Mount has empty beds and no waiting list.

This is borne out of a particular way of thinking about the design and management of work:

Conventional Thinking:

- We must manage residents behaviour, cost & risk

- Cost and risk lie in activity and in residents behaviour;

- We must manage activity to control cost, leading to:

- Targets, functions, roles and responsibilities, focus on transactional and unit cost.

We must manage activity to control risk, leading to:

- Inspection, procedures, protocols, specifications, standardisation, policy, schedules, benchmarking, etc.

- We must manage residents behaviour to control risk, leading to:

- Managed spaces, visiting hours, anti-psychotic drugs, etc.

Resulting Ethos:

- Overt structures for control

- Extrinsic motivation – carrots and sticks.

Spring Mounts Thinking:

- We must provide a community in which our residents and their families can live well with dementia.

- Cost lies in any failure to provide and enable this community to thrive (if we get it wrong, costs are borne by us and other parts of the health and wellbeing system);

- Overt methods of control will destroy this community;

Providing this community means:

- Acknowledging and enabling the contribution which every resident, family member and staff member can make;

- Enabling risk taking and a positive attitude to risk.

Resulting Ethos:

- Control is implicit, discrete, purposeful, control as a consequence of solving problems which impede the community.

- Intrinsic motivation – pride in a job well done.

It is as Einstein said, “We cannot solve the problems we have created with the thinking that created them”.

As you can see from Spring Mount, people are thinking differently about the design of our health and wellbeing systems.  There is an alternative.  As a leader the place to start is by explicitly understanding how you currently think about the design and management of work.  From this, you can decide if you want to challenge that thinking before you start redesigning anything.  If you do challenge that thinking, the results can be extraordinary!

Change thinking.  Change Lives.

This article is an taken from: http://vanguardinhealth.blogspot.co.uk/ where more articles on Health and Wellbeing can be found.

Simon Pickthall worked in the public sector in Wales for many years before forming Vanguard Consulting Wales.  He has been fortunate to have worked with many leaders in Wales to help them understand their organizations from a Systems Thinking perspective -  and improve them as a consequence.  Simon was privileged enough to work on the Munro Review of Child Protection, and is committed to helping the public, private and third sectors deliver social justice.  simon.pickthall@vanguardwales.co.uk

Image originally from BBC

This week Welsh children, working with Save the Children, launch a national campaign to secure a Living Wage of £7.20 an hour for Welsh workers.

You can sign our young campaigners petition here and I would urge you do so. Our aim is to keep this issue firmly on the agenda of our political leaders and demonstrating that the public cares and the public is watching is an excellent way to do that, so please if you do support us, go to the site and sign up.

We are asking that Carwyn Jones and his government deliver on the spirit and the substance of Labour’s manifesto commitments on the Living Wage by launching a national movement to end poverty pay. We are asking today that the National Assembly Commission and the Welsh Government both pledge to become Living Wage employers in their own right and that the journey to bring the NHS, public authorities and the private sector into the fold is begun in earnest.

This will need leadership from all parts of Welsh life but most importantly it needs impetus from the very top, from Carwyn and his government. We are challenging them today to take up this task and to negotiate, persuade and influence their way to a Living Wage for Wales.

It is a call, which we believe is based on sound economics and good politics as well as being ambitious for Wales. Because while establishing Wales as a nation leading the way in working to improve the pay of its poorest paid workers sends important messages about social solidarity and the value of work but it also says a great deal about the way we intend to grow as a nation. It says we refuse to engage in a race to the bottom on salaries, its says that we believe investing in our people, nurturing and developing them in the workplace is more important than piling them high and hiring them cheap.
And it also can do a great deal to help tackle the generation-spanning blight of child poverty.

In Wales today 200,000 children live in poverty and in the majority of those households at least one parent is in work. There are parts of Wales where nearly 30% of employees are paid less than £7 an hour and with the cost of living rising faster in Wales that the rest of the UK those low wage rates are becoming harder and harder to get by on. If we are going to ask our young people to buy into the idea that working hard at school and getting a job is the way to improve their lives and their prospects, we have to meet them halfway. We have to send a clear, unambiguous message that paid employment will provide them with a decent level of income and a decent standard of living. We have to answer the call of aspiration and we have to listen to the voices of our children.

What we are calling for is a campaign, a commitment, a movement towards change for the better. This requires no great legislative acts from the Senedd, no laws, no top-down directives from ministerial desks. A Living Wage campaign in Wales would not be a matter of imposing wage rates on struggling employers or budget–tightening public authorities, it would instead be about making the case for better wages in a positive way. It would engage employers across Wales in a conversation about how by paying a little more an hour they would be investing not only in the individual, but in their communities and economy.

The time has come for us to listen to the voices of the next generation of Welsh men and women, a generation concerned about their friends and their futures. The time has come for Wales to turn its back on low pay and the race to the bottom and to say we will gladly pay a Living Wage, because it is good for our children, our families, our communities and our economy.
Now is time for leadership and action, please help us demand that from the Welsh Government, please sign our petition.

James Pritchard is Head of Wales for Save the Children

About the Petition (from Save the Children):

Young people working with Save the Children in Wales are campaigning for a Living Wage by asking the Welsh Government to STEP UP and stand by their promise to work towards a living wage for every worker in Wales. We know that no matter how hard they try the minimum wage simply is not enough for some parents to make ends meet and give children the best chance in life. Our petition asks the government to help families and children in Wales have a fairer future. Watch our great new film at and sign up to our petition to show your support. If you don’t already follow us on twitter we are @savechildrencym the hashtag for the campaign is #livingwage

We are looking to get the link distributed as widely as possible and lots of people to sign up to the petition so please spread the word and sign up to show your support!

That there is gap of 18 per cent between pay in the public and private sectors in Wales has been repeated often and by such respected authorities as the Treasury and Institute for Fiscal Studies.  Yet the evidence on which this claim is made is slim, to say the least, and is definitely not sufficient to change the way in which hundreds of thousands of workers are rewarded.

Comparing pay between public and private sector employees is notoriously difficult because they include very different types of jobs and different kinds of worker. The public sector has more skilled jobs, and its employees have higher qualifications and are on average older, all of which are associated with higher pay.  These factors partly explain why median hourly earnings of all public sector workers in the UK were 29.2 per cent higher than those of private sector workers in 2011.

A number of organisations have adjusted the figures to take account of these differences, producing estimates that the public sector pay premium in the UK is 7.8 per cent (ONS), 8.3 per cent (Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS)) and 8.8 per cent (Policy Exchange).  In Wales, IFS estimated that the pay premium was even higher at a whopping 18 per cent.

But something strange seems to be going on.

Unadjusted figures show that the public-private pay gap in Wales was similar to that in several other parts of the UK, being only 1 percentage point higher than in the South West, 1.2  percentage points higher than in the North West and 2.2 percentage points higher than in the North East.

It is the adjustments that generate a yawning gap between Wales and these regions – in the case of the IFS estimates, a difference of more than 6 percentage points (Table 1).  The Treasury’s estimates are slightly different and show a smaller gap and Wales no longer that the top of the league table.

Table 1  Public Sector Pay Premium Estimate, median gross hourly pay

Note: The public sector pay premium is the difference between median gross hourly earnings in the public and private sectors, divided by median gross hourly private sector earnings.

There is simply not enough information on how the Treasury and IFS generated their estimates to say whether or not their figures are wrong, but there certainly are enough discrepancies to question whether they are right.

Even if the IFS and Treasury calculations are correct, their analysis is not sufficiently refined to reflect the differences between types of job in the public and private sectors. For example, a specific occupation such as “primary and nursery education professionals” includes a wide range of different jobs, from nursery teachers  to head teachers, regular teachers, and even monks and nuns attached to religious primary schools.[i]  Some roles such as primary teachers are mainly in the public sector whereas others, such as nursery teachers, are mainly in the private sector, making comparisons meaningless. When job-for-job comparisons are carried out, there is often little if any evidence of a public sector premium.

The pay premium is also sensitive to the dates used to measure it.  The gap between public and private sector median hourly earnings in the UK has increased markedly since 2009 – before this date, the premium was about six percentage points less than the pay premium being quoted by IFS and the Treasury, much of which was attributable to differences in the age, qualifications and occupations of workers.

Last, despite the impression created that Wales’s public sector workers enjoy a bonanza, the unadjusted earnings figures show that they had the lowest median gross hourly pay in the UK.  The gap between median hourly earnings of a public sector employee in Wales was 90 per cent of the UK figure and a mere 78 per cent of London public sector workers.  Similarly, median hourly earnings of private sector workers in Wales are 87 per cent of the UK median and 69 per cent of London’s private sector employees.

Far from Wales’s public sector workers being paid a premium, it appears that Wales’s employees in the public AND private sectors are penalized by low pay.  By using statistics from a period the recession, using broad-brush categories of jobs and making opaque adjustments to the data, the IFS and Treasury have created a damaging myth that could jeopardise the livelihoods of hundreds of thousands of workers in the public AND private sectors.

Victoria Winckler is Director of the Bevan Foundation.

It is a very busy few weeks for Ramblers, 24 April marked the 80th anniversary of the Kinder Scout Mass Trespass which was pivotal to securing the right to roam in open countryside in England and Wales.  Without this event it is very unlikely we would be celebrating the opening of the Wales Coast Path on 5^th May.  At 870 miles, the Wales Coast Path will be the longest continual path covering the whole of a country’s coastline.  Linking up with Offa’s Dyke Path National Trail, walkers will be able to walk right round the whole of Wales in a mere 1047miles.

Ramblers Cymru has been working closely with Welsh Government, led by Countryside Council for Wales, funded by the European Union convergence fund to reach this point and we couldn’t let the opening pass without trying to walk as much of the path as possible in one go.  The Big Welsh Coastal Walk will take place over the weekend of the 5^th May and offers people the chance to celebrate the coastline all round Wales by joining any of the 100 or so walks we have planned.  You don’t have to be a seasoned walker or even own a bobble hat to join in, we have walks for everyone and there are also celebration events to mark the opening in Cardiff, Aberystwyth and Flint organised by Welsh Government.

With the support of Sport Wales we have also produced an iPhone app to help the public build up confidence and stamina over a twelve week training plan.  Starting from very little walking the user aims for more than 30 minutes every day.  The app is free from iTunes.  We are hoping this will show people that walking is one of the healthiest and greenest activities. Anyone, anywhere, can open their door and get walking.

Not only will our members be celebrating the fact that we can now walk round Wales, they will also be inspecting their handy work as many of them have been helping to create and clear paths with the Local Authorities along the coast.  I walked over one of their excellent bridges a couple of weeks ago on the Ceredigion Coast Path and the standard of work is remarkable.  Ramblers Volunteers are very active in their local areas and as well as offering a varied walk programme they also ensure the network of paths remain open and accessible.

The Wales Coast Path connects Chepstow in south with Deeside in the North and offers a spectacular range of views and experiences from the stunning Gower Peninsula to the whistling sand of the Llyn.  You can visit Castles, Islands and spot wildlife along the way.  The 5^th of May is not the end of the process it is a step along the way, the route still needs improving in places so that we can show our beautiful Nation in the best possible light and offer visitors the longest sea view they have ever seen.  Come rain or hopefully shine on the 5^th we will be out walking the path and encouraging as many people as possible to discover it for themselves.  Come and join us.

 Ceri Thomas is Operations Manager at Rambler Cymru

Last week the London branch of the Bevan Foundation hosted a discussion at Westminster on The Changing Face of Welfare in Wales. Dr Peter Kenway, Director of the New Policy Institute and Dr Victoria Winckler, Director of the Bevan Foundation spoke to a gathering of MPs, peers and Bevan Foundation members and supporters with their analysis of the impact of the UK government’s welfare reforms on Wales.

The reforms are designed, in Peter’s words to compel people to be economically active again, sooner and for longer. The reforms to date have been piecemeal and often based on untried systems, threatening potential disaster for those most dependent on benefits.

His contention was that the goal of governments over the last decade was to reduce worklessness, not to reduce poverty. The high levels of in-work poverty in Wales are evidence of the limitations of this approach.  Most couples with children need at least to be working one and a half jobs (60 hours a week) to make work pay and affordable childcare and other support to enable them to access the jobs that are available, is simply inadequate.  

Could the government be heading for a return to local poor support not seen for centuries? Peter called attention to the devolution of council tax benefit to local authorities – largely unnoticed but potentially significant. The changes to this benefit, received by more people than any other, makes modest savings in expenditure but potentially paves the way for a local rather than universal benefit system. It is apparent from a number of the changes that this is reform driven by the Treasury, not the Department of Work and Pensions.

For Victoria Winckler, the high levels of benefit recipients in Wales mean that the effects of the government’s reforms could be massive with 25% of the working age  population in receipt of some form of benefit and almost 50% in some communities, coupled with a depressed jobs market.

One of the marked effects of the welfare reforms is the effective transfer of responsibility from Westminster to Cardiff Bay for the impact of the cuts – perhaps not by devolving benefits but through the hidden costs to public services of such deep cuts in welfare support. The burden of the extra demand will fall on the Welsh Government, through pressure on housing, care services, emergency support and other services.

Victoria highlighted the challenges facing advice services in coping with the changes – both in guiding claimants through highly complex changes to benefit and support but crucially also in ensuring an urgent take-up of benefits so that recipients do not fall foul of future tightening of eligibility criteria. 

There is also very high risk of injustice where neighbours in identical circumstances could be receiving different levels of benefit support due to the complexity of implementation and the variable take up.

Peter concluded his remarks with an aspiration which we should all share:  that Wales, as the only part of the UK governed by a progressive government and with a majority of progressive MPs, should lead the way in developing policies for a truly empowering welfare system – helping people into work with decent pay and prospects, as the route out of dependency on benefits.  

Jeremy Miles

Yesterday, The Commons culture, media and sport select committee submitted a report which concluded that Rupert Murdoch , Chairman and CEO of News Corporation was, ‘ not a fit person to exercise the stewardship of major international company.’ Moreover, it stated that Les Hinton, former executive chairman of News Corporation, Colin Myler, the final editor of the News of the World and Tom Crone, the newspaper’s head of legal affairs, deliberately misled and withheld truth from the parliamentary enquiry into phone hacking.

So how did we arrive at this extraordinary state of affairs? What series of events led to the closure of the News of the World and the public humiliation of the world’s (previously) most powerful media baron?

Events occurred at breathtaking speed.  In July this year it was claimed by the Guardian that journalists on the News of the World had hacked into the phone messages of murdered schoolgirl, Milly Dowler. Not only this, messages were removed to make room for more. This was followed by the news that Scotland Yard detectives had contacted the families of Soham victims, Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman as part of their investigation into Private Investigator Glenn Mulcaire, who was previously employed by the paper. Then came news that families of the victims of the 7/7 terrorist atrocities may also have had their messages monitored by Mulcaire. The father of one of the victims, Graham Foulkes, said the prospect of these allegations being true ‘fills me with horror’.  There was understandable public and political outrage at these allegations and Sunday 11^th July saw the last ever edition of the News of the World.

We must understand that, shocking and disturbing though these revelations were the tabloid press has always indulged in shady practices and subversion in order to get at a story. It is of great significance that on the day that these stories began to emerge, both the Sun and the Mirror were being accused of contempt in the high court over their coverage of the arrest of Jo Yates landlord in the high profile murder case before Christmas 2011. This was an innocent man subjected to trial by media – with not a shred of evidence to implicate him.  In an even more high profile case in 2008, Express newspapers paid out substantial damages for printing false accusations about the disappearance of Madeleine McCann. For the right wing tabloid press the greatest threat to the social fabric of Britain is the continual influx into the country of asylum seekers and illegal immigrants. On too many occasions, over too many years, have untruths and lies been peddled about the most vulnerable members of society.

We must also consider the power of the press and its relationship with government. Rupert Murdoch, head of News International and proprietor of the News of the World, has long enjoyed a special relationship with successive Prime Ministers.  Mrs Thatcher depended on the support of his newspapers whilst with her help Murdoch was able to build an information network that today stretches across the world and stands unprecedented and unchallenged as a global media power. In 1995, the future Prime Minister Blair assured Murdoch that the laws on cross media ownership would not affect his interests. We know that David Cameron until recently employed Andy Coulson, former deputy editor of the News of the World, as his Director of Communications. The same Andy Coulson who, according to his former colleague, Sean Hoare, actively encouraged phone hacking.

So the publication of this report coinciding as it does with the  Leveson enquiry into the practices and ethics of the press, represents a welcome sea change in the relationship between the media and politics in Britain. What is important now is that News Corporation does not become the fall guy for the entire press. It is clear that it was not only the News of the World that resorted to underhand and dishonest tactics with alarming frequency. After all, in 2006 a league table of newspapers and magazines who paid private investigators to obtain illegal information was published – and the Daily Mail came top.

But it is the Murdoch press that will take the flak and be subject to criminal investigations which could well see senior figures prosecuted and ultimately imprisoned. There is every reason to think that the fabric and structure of the traditional press will be altered irrevocably by what will happen in the next few months and years.

Dr John Jewell is Director of Undergraduate Studies in the School of Journalism, Media and Cultural Studies at Cardiff University

Photo: RII SCHROER/Getty Images