Approval of a £1.15bn PFI scheme to develop St Bartholomew’s and the Royal London Hospital has been delayed as a result. The Government also appears to have scrapped an incentive scheme to encourage female GPs to return to work after childbirth, on the ground of expense – despite the fact that there is a chronic shortage of working GPs

The situation is about to get worse. The Government was wrong to dismiss such a scheme out of hand.. Each day brings more evidence that the National Health Service is slipping into a financial crisis.

But yesterday’s proposals fell disappointingly short of what might have been. Establishing a nationwide series of “managed zones” – in which prostitution would be legal and where brothels would be licensed – was being seriously considered by the Home Office at one stage. This would have represented a significant step forward in dealing with prostitution. Encouraging prostitutes to work in groups, and getting them off the streets, undoubtedly makes them safer.

In the end, only a minor liberalisation of the laws governing prostitution was unveiled yesterday. The Home Office minister, Fiona Mactaggart, proposed that prostitutes should be permitted under the law to work in small groups, of two or three, from a flat We would welcome this. Still very much at home in the classroom during her many school visits and devoted to her own children, she was an excellent speaker and a perceptive, at times stringent, critic.As a writer able to produce a succession of brilliant, stand-alone novels, each one perfect in itself, she is irreplaceable.Nicholas Tucker. A few years later, after the collapse of her marriage, she made Oxford her home.