NICHOLAS TIMMINS

Public Policy Editor
A district council has called a halt to its rural housing programme in the face of Government proposals to give housing association tenants a new right to buy.The Liberal Democrat- controlled New Forest council has decided to approve no new low-rent housing in green belt or other parts of the New Forest where it would not normally approve new houses, for fear that new homes would be sold as holiday lets, or to commuters, once the planned voluntary purchase grant of pounds 16,000 takes effect.The decision comes as housing experts are warning that the low-rent housing association homes may prove impossible to replace in key rural areas once the right-to-buy comes in.Richard Best, director of the Joseph Rowntree Foundation and a rural development commissioner, said: “In future, landowners may well be unwilling to make available sites on favourable terms, and planners less willing to provide consent, if there is a chance that the homes will be lost.”He said limited safeguards over resale of the homes which the Government proposed do not go far enough, and suggests that schemes of up to a dozen homes in settlements of fewer than 3,000 people should be exempted from the right to buy.Patrick Hughes, New Forest’s planning officer, said two existing small schemes in the village of Sway and the town of New Milton – both on land for which planning permission would not be granted for private housing – would go ahead because the council can still impose conditions preventing resale.The houses will thus remain as low-rent accommodation for local people. Mr Patten’s crime was to talk about the “social market”, an ambiguous ideological concept borrowed from the German Christian Democrats.The Social Market Foundation (SMF), set up in 1989, just before Baroness Thatcher’s fall, by Tory-minded elements of the former Social Democratic Party, quickly became the ideological test-bed of the new Major administration, although it lacked the coherence of its free-market precursors.Now the process has come full circle, as the SMF’s director and former David Owen aide, Danny Finkelstein, is expected shortly to take over as head of the research department at Tory Central Office. The IEA accused Chris Patten when he was Tory chairman of being a “socialist”. But think-tanks – the term originated with the official Central Policy Review Staff set up in 1970 by Edward Heath – still tend to be on the right.As the Thatcherite revolution ran its course, the IEA and ASI retreated to the wilderness. The left-leaning Institute for Public Policy Research was set up by Kinnockites, including Neil Kinnock’s former press secretary Patricia Hewitt, with money from the tax inspectors’ trade union in 1988.Demos, which refuses left-right categorisation, but whose director, Geoff Mulgan, is close both to Tony Blair, the Labour leader, and Gordon Brown, the shadow Chancellor, was set up after the general election in 1992. The Institute for Economic Affairs (IEA), derided by journalists as cranky, came in from the wilderness and the Adam Smith Institute (ASI), whose founder Dr Madsen Pirie was pilloried as “Dr Mad”, was set up in 1978.It took a long time for liberal and left-wing derision to turn into imitation.

JOHN RENTOUL

Political Correspondent
John Redwood’s new think-tank pushes itself on to a crowded Westminster scene.The Centre for Policy Studies, on which the Conservative 2000 Foundation is modelled, triggered a vogue for free- market think-tanks when it was set up by Keith Joseph and Margaret Thatcher in 1974. “The peat is cracking, and the level of soil moisture is very low well into the peat layer,” Rob Ackrel, a dales National Park officer. The North York Moors National Park has closed the 42-mile Lyke Wake Walk footpath In 1976, fire swept through moorland in nearby Glaisdale. “It spread across several hundred acres, burned until after Christmas, and has still not recovered,” David Brewster, of the National Park, said

Photograph: Joan Russell/Guzelian. The fire service yesterday put out a fire which destroyed 250 acres of moorland near Grinton. Heather moors provide habitat for a wide range of wildlife, including merlin, grouse, lizards and adders. Five fire engines had saturated the moors above Walden, near Wensleydale, to halt the spread since Saturday of combustion seated deep in the peat.

“The difficulty is that the fire can appear to have been put out, only to break out again because it is burning deep down,” a spokesman for North Yorkshire fire service said. Firefighters were damping down fires last night that have been burning deep in peat upland in Yorkshire as officials in three national parks said tinder-dry heather moorlands were at greater risk of ecological disaster than at any time since 1976. He told Radio 4’s Today programme yesterday that “if there were a vacancy, several of us, including myself, might like to apply again”.Mr Portillo’s supporters will not allow Mr Redwood to emerge as the sole standard-bearer for the right.The foundation’s first publication – available in full on the Internet from tomorrow – takes the form of suggested answers to Our Nation’s Future, the Tory party consultation exercise recently set in train by Mr Major.. Newt Gingrich showed them the way to do it.”The foundation’s key policy principles will be Mr Redwood’s way of, as he put it, helping Mr Major in a “friendly spirit”.Mr Redwood briefed the Prime Minister on the plans for the foundation before MPs rose for the summer recess.As far as his leadership ambitions are concerned, a contest against Michael Portillo, his right-wing rival and Secretary of State for Defence, is likely to be uppermost in the former Welsh Secretary’s mind. A company is being formed to market and collect subscriptions.Baroness Thatcher is believed to be sympathetic to the new body, and Lord Tebbit is expected to offer his endorsement after supporting Mr Redwood in his attempt to unseat Mr Major.But Mr Redwood and Hywel Williams, the foundation’s policy director, have an even grander hope – a summit with Newt Gingrich, Republican Speaker of the House of Representatives, when they visit the US next month.John O’Sullivan, a former speechwriter for Lady Thatcher and editor of the National Review in the US, has been enlisted to arrange a meeting with Mr Gingrich.Mr Williams, the former ministerial adviser to Mr Redwood, said: “The great Gingrich experiment has been responsible for re-establishing the link between Conservative taxation and Conservative beliefs and values.”Mr Redwood said the Republicans “needed to rekindle their enthusiasm for conservative beliefs. PATRICIA WYNN DAVIES

Political Correspondent
John Redwood yesterday launched his new think-tank – the Conservative 2000 Foundation – indicating that he had not abandoned his long-term ambition to lead the party.Insisting that its aim and objective would be making the task of winning the next election easier, Mr Redwood declared the foundation an “open house, rooted in and working for” the Conservative Party.However, its policy principles bore strong similarities to those used by Mr Redwood to fight John Major for the party leadership last month.Yesterday’s event, moreover, proved to be only a foretaste of plans for a grander “formal” launch in the run-up to the Conservative party conference in October, following a fact- finding visit to Republican leaders in the United States with the aim of promoting an American-style revival of right-wing thinking.Key ideas that the foundation will pursue include scrapping one tax in every Budget, reducing public spending plans for next year by pounds 5,000m, replacing capital gains by taxing “short-term” gains and creating a tax and benefits system geared to help prudent pensioners and home owners and keep families together.In the meantime, the quest is on for influential patrons, a board of trustees and, not least, additional funds. It’s a monstrous waste of public money.”The Prison Service has been working towards eliminating the use of police cells for remand prisoners.

The cost and number of people kept in police cells has plummeted since its height in 1991 when there were 352,000 “prisoner nights”. However, in the past few years there has been a gradual rise. The number of “prisoner nights” in 1993 was 9,796, rising to 54,277 in 1994. In the first six months of this year there were more than 34,000.The cost of holding prisoners in police cells was pounds 11m in 1993-94, and pounds 16m in 1994-95.A Prison Service spokesman said that the opening of new jails in the coming year should end the use of police cells.Mary Honeyball, general secretary of the Association of Chief Officers of Probation, said millions were being wasted while the probation service was having its finances cut.. The problem is the facilities have not been used to full capacity.”A North Wales Police spokesman said the Prison Service had got its sums wrong; the average cost of housing a prisoner in their cells was pounds 314 a night.Stephen Shaw, Director of the Prison Reform Trust, said: “It’s very difficult to understand how these amounts can ever be justified. “It costs almost the same to keep one person under guard than it does 20. Officers get paid an extra 50 per cent for guarding people awaiting trial.Sgt Andy Brookes, of South Yorkshire Police, said yesterday that the high costs where due to the low number of people who were being held in police cells at any one time.

Their average cost per night is pounds 277 for each prisoner.The costs are almost entirely made up of police wages plus a flat fee of pounds 3 a night for each prisoner. They reveal that Greater Manchester Police, which had to house prisoners following the Strangeways riots, charged nearly pounds 12m in 1994-95. Both the police and the Ritz provide televisions and 24-hour room service.Details of the charges were issued in a written reply by Derek Lewis, the director general of the Prison Service, to a parliamentary question. The price of pounds 305.50 will pay for a night in the executive room at the Ritz in London.Instead of bare walls and bars the room features a marble bathroom, a large seating area and double bed, all decorated in the style of Louis XVI with gold leaf edge. The Home Office refunds most of the expenses incurred by the police.Compared to the cost of housing a remand prisoner at Sheffield’s police headquarters, Britain’s plushest hotels are a snip. In most cases, this was because of overcrowding in jails.Police charges for the service, which vary from an average of pounds 251 per person per night in Merseyside to pounds 1,746 in South Yorkshire, were yesterday described as a “monstrous” waste of public money by a penal reform group. JASON BENNETTO

Crime Correspondent
Police are charging up to pounds 1,746 a night to keep a prisoner awaiting trial in cells – five times more than a stay in the executive mini suite at the Ritz hotel – it emerged yesterday.The costliest cells in England and Wales are in Sheffield, with North Wales the second most expensive at an average of pounds 1,272 a day for each inmate, according to Prison Service figures.About pounds 16m was spent in the year to 15 June on keeping prisoners on remand in police cells.