Portrait of the week | 14 August 2010

Mrs Anne Milton, the Health Minister, tried to abolish free milk for children under five in nurseries, as it costs £50 million a year and ‘there is no evidence that it improves the health of very young children’, but Downing Street said that Mr David Cameron, the Prime Minister ‘did not like the idea’, so it would not go ahead.

Mrs Anne Milton, the Health Minister, tried to abolish free milk for children under five in nurseries, as it costs £50 million a year and ‘there is no evidence that it improves the health of very young children’, but Downing Street said that Mr David Cameron, the Prime Minister ‘did not like the idea’, so it would not go ahead. Mr Cameron said that credit rating firms could ‘go after’ people fraudulently claiming benefits; one firm, Experian, said it might receive a ‘bounty’ for exposing frauds. A memorandum from Ms Ann Beasley, the director of finance at the Ministry of Justice, warned staff of £2 billion cuts out of a budget of £9 billion, so ‘there will have to be less of us’. Mr Sion Jenkins, cleared of murdering his foster daughter, was refused compensation his time in jail; a spokesman for the Ministry of Justice said that, for compensation, ‘the applicant must be shown to be “clearly innocent”.’ Mr Chris Huhne, the Liberal Democrat Energy Secretary said: ‘We are on course to make sure that the first new nuclear power station opens on time in 2018.’ The British group International Power is to merge with the French utility company GDF Suez. Unemployment fell by 49,000 to 2.46 million in the three months to June. Lord Sassoon, a Treasury spokesman, said that Britain opposed direct taxes by the European Union, for which its budget commissioner, Mr Janusz Lewandowski, is to propose plans in September.