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A case for the paperless office

The latest security gaffe at the Cabinet Office poses two key questions: why were the documents printed and why did they leave the building?

Government still underestimates the consequences of human error. Giving staff the ability to print confidential material means IT departments are unnecessarily fighting a battle on two fronts; internal and external.

It's a grand life in academia

Academics have a shorter working week, more annual leave and better parental benefits, pensions and sick pay than the rest of us

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Government staff are clearly incapable of handling confidential printed documentation. Has it come to the stage where printers should be banned from the public sector completely and a paperless office enforced as a rule? IT could then focus their efforts solely on protecting electronic files. If any attempts were made to breach security, cyber crime investigators could use computer forensics to trace the attack back to the source.

“This will never happen again” is not good enough. Unless the public sector takes practical and dramatic steps to change its data protection policies, the risk of human error will continue to threaten national security.

Robert Chapman, chief executive, Firebrand Training, London

The high price of poverty

While child poverty figures rose for the second consecutive year (The top stories, June 17), it would be a mistake to believe that the target of halving child poverty by 2010 cannot be achieved.

We're now moving to a critical point. Investment by the Government in the last Budget will lift a further 250,000 children out of poverty, but it still leaves a million children in need of help. It's therefore critical that the Government invests £3 billion in tax credits and benefits to keep the promise to end child poverty.

Poverty affects every aspect of a child's life. Children from poorer homes leave school earlier with fewer qualifications, have shorter lives, and are more likely to suffer health problems.

The UK cannot afford the social and economic costs of continuing to fail our children.

Hilary Fisher, director, End Child Poverty

Who controls academies?

We have a number of concerns about universities sponsoring academies (Professional Press, June 7).

Academies are no guarantee of success. When Ed Balls named 638 schools as “failing” (20 per cent of English secondary schools), he failed to mention that 26 of these are academies. Some 31 per cent of Academies are “failing”.

In many instances universities have teamed up with businesses to run the academies. In Nottingham the university is working with David Samworth, owner of Pukka Pies, to set up an academy. Who will make the critical decisions over curriculum, selection, exclusions and staff terms and conditions - the academic or the businessman?

The claim that universities sponsoring academies will “raise aspirations for students in general” has to be doubted. Will the university not be committed primarily to its academy, instead of equally to all the schools in the area?

Whoever sponsors an aca-demy, the decision about its future is no longer in the hands of parents or elected councils. The sponsor has complete control.

Pete Jackson, campaigns and office worker, Anti Academies Alliance

Why NHS reforms have failed

Spending on the NHS has tripled in the past decade, but is it three times better? No, because reforms have faltered. Competition is the key.

Last week's Audit Commission report (The top stories, June 17) is critical not of reform but of its partial introduction. The Independent Sector Treatment Centre (ISTC) programme was flawed from the start. “Take or pay” contracts negotiated by inexperienced managers led to vast sums being squandered but, as the report states, where ISTCs were established the NHS services improved.

Tomorrow I will be making the argument that value can be equated to access plus quality divided by cost in a debate on the future of the NHS on its 60th anniversary at the Royal Institute. Unfortunately, in the monopolistic NHS, this value proposition has been lost.

Professor Karol Sikora, medical director, CancerPartnersUK

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