The number of people and vehicles stopped and searched by police has soared in the past year, official figures have revealed.

Statistics released by the Home Office confirm a 66 per cent rise in stop and searches in 2008/09.

Almost 95 per cent of searches were carried out by officers in London, where there was an 83 per cent increase in the same period, the Home Office figures show.

However, despite the steep rise in the use of the intrusive powers, hardly anybody searched was charged or even arrested as a result.

The statistics follow warnings that police are making unjustified stops to give the figures ‘racial balance’ and that suspects are being searched even though there is no evidence against them.

The biggest rise was in searches carried out because an officer believed a suspect may be about to commit an act of violence - up 182 per cent in a year, to 150,174.

Use of the controversial Section 44 anti-terrorism power - which allows police to search people without any reasonable grounds they suspect wrongdoing - leapt by 66 per cent, to 210,013 cases.

The police’s long-standing stop and search power, which dates back to 1984 and requires an officer to at least suspect a person could be involved in crime, was up ten per cent, to 1,153,572 cases.

In total some 1,513,759 people were interrogated on the streets or in their car by an officer in 2008/09 - an overall increase of 24 per cent.

Only 0.6 per cent of the searches led to an arrest and only nine of the arrests were for an alleged terrorist offence.

The extent of the use of Section 44 has led to concern that it is being abused by officers, with photographers and protesters claiming the powers are used excessively against them.

Chris Grayling, the Shadow Home Secretary, promised a full review of the UK’s counter-terrorism laws, which he said would end police abuse of stop and search powers.

He said: “Gordon Brown and Labour have trampled our civil liberties for far too long.
“Whether they’re trying to impose ID cards, or allowing hundreds of thousands of innocent people to be stopped and searched under Terrorism powers, they always seem to think the State knows best.”

The Home Office said the increase use of the stop and search power in ‘anticipation of violence’ was a result of the tackling knives action plan.

Removing trans-fats from food could save thousands of lives a year, according to medical experts who are now calling for a UK-wide ban.

Trans-fats - solid fats found in margarines, cakes and fast food – are already banned in some countries, including Switzerland, Denmark, Austria and some areas of the US.

An editorial in the British Medical Journal said 7,000 deaths a year could be prevented by a 1 per cent reduction in consumption.

But the Food Standards Agency said the UK’s low average consumption made a complete ban unnecessary.

Writing in the British Medical Journal, Dariush Mozaffarian, assistant professor of medicine, and Meir Stampfer, professor of epidemiology at Harvard, say removing industrial trans-fats is “one of the most straightforward public health strategies for rapid improvements in health”.

A ban would save lives, be easy to implement yet have no impact on the price, sales, taste or availability of the affected foods, they say.

Many studies have shown harmful effects of trans-fats on heart health.

They are used to extend shelf-life but have no nutritional value and, like saturated fats, they raise blood cholesterol levels which increase the risk of coronary heart disease.

Several British supermarket chains, including Marks and Spencer and Waitrose, have phased out trans-fats, as have some food manufacturers. The New England Journal of Medicine published a scientific review of trans-fats in 2007 which said that “from a nutritional standpoint, the consumption of trans-fatty acids results in considerable potential harm but no apparent benefit”.

In 2007, the Food Standards Agency carried out a review of trans-fats and concluded UK consumption was lower than countries such as the US and that voluntary action from food manufacturers had been highly successful.

Victoria Taylor, senior heart health dietician at the British Heart Foundation, said UK voluntary measures by the food industry had achieved significant reductions in the amount of trans-fats in food.

“This is good progress but we still need to do more to make sure that the industrially produced trans-fats don’t creep back into our nation’s diets.”

The previously legal high mephedrone has become a class B substance from today, with police forces saying they are to concentrate their efforts on cracking down on dealers.

The Association of Chief Police Officers (Acpo) has urged forces around the country to concentrate efforts on those selling the drug, adding that it had ”no intention” of criminalising young people in possession.

But it said that users of mephedrone still run the risk of arrest and prosecution after its reclassification as a class B drug, with the decision being made on a case-to-case basis.

Legal distributors of mephedrone, which was usually advertised as plant feed or bath salt, have known about the impending ban for two weeks since it was announced by the Home Secretary, Alan Johnson.

The ban was brought in following a string of deaths of young people believed to have used the drug, although no direct link to cause of death has been established.

The Local Government Association has been asking retailers to voluntarily hand over stocks of the white powder to avoid prosecution, but many distributors chose to sell off their stock instead.

There are fears that much of the mephedrone currently in Britain will have entered into the hands of drug dealers who will continue to peddle it illegally on the streets, often cut with other chemicals to reduce purity and cost.

The move to ban the drug came despite the resignation of two Government drugs advisers over the issue.

Earlier this month, Eric Carlin followed Dr Polly Taylor in stepping down from the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs (ACMD).

In a letter of resignation, Mr Carlin said the decision to ban the drug was made despite there being ”little or no discussion about how our recommendation to classify this drug would be likely to impact on young people’s behaviour”.

He added: ”Our decision was unduly based on media and political pressure.”

The NHS has been accused of wasting millions of pound of silver wound dressings designed to kill off bacterial infections after experts questioned the effectiveness.

Silver is known to have anti-microbial properties and is used in many types of dressings for wounds, ulcers and burns.

How it exactly works is unknown, but silver is thought to stop microbes from being able to spread.

However, experts have now said that the £25 million annual cost of the special bandages is unjustifiable as research now suggests they may be no more effective in stopping infections than traditional bandages.

The research, published in an editorial in the Drug and Therapeutics Bulletin, said the evidence backing the use of silver dressings was not robust enough.

The Bulletin report said: “Silver dressings are expensive and there have been few high-quality clinical trials to establish whether they have advantages over other, cheaper alternatives.

“Most of the studies that have been conducted have had considerable methodological limitations. With these factors in mind, we believe the routine use of silver dressings is not justified on clinical or cost-effectiveness grounds as treatment for uncomplicated leg ulcers, when simple dressings and compression bandaging are more appropriate.”

Cancer drugs sold abroad by an NHS hospital for a profit are now in short supply, it has emerged.

The Royal Surrey County Hospital Foundation Trust was criticised in February for selling more than £4 million of drugs abroad.

It confirmed it had made £300,000 profit from the trade during the previous year, but said there was “absolutely no evidence” to suggest its practices had contributed to any shortages.

The list of drugs being sold on the export market by the trust was revealed in the Health Service Journal (HSJ) after a freedom of information request.

Of 33 products sold by the trust, 13 were cancer drugs and four were for HIV.
Four of these drugs were listed in November as being in short supply, including Glivec and Imatinib, both used for cancer patients.

A spokeswoman for the trust said it was “misleading” to suggest it had sold drugs on the short-supply list.

She added: “The trust constantly ensured that drugs were readily available and ceased trading the drug in question before the drug was put on the short supply list in November.

“In the two months prior to that only small quantities were sold.

“There is also absolutely no evidence to suggest that the trust has played a part in creating a shortage of drugs.”

The practice of buying drugs in Britain at a lower price, due to government deals and the weak pound, and then selling them in Europe for profit is not technically illegal but has been criticised by the Department of Health and ministers have said it is ‘wholly unacceptable’.

Retailers have been asked by police to hand over any stocks of the party drug mephedrone before it becomes a classified substance tomorrow.

It will be classified as a Class B drug, the possession of which could carry a five-year prison sentence.

Police have visited so-called “head shops” – which sell drug paraphernalia, herbal stimulants and plant cultivation equipment – to remind staff that the substance, known as Mcat, Miaow Miaow and Bubbles, is being reclassified across the UK.

The Local Government Association said council staff are working to ensure the “potentially damaging drug is cleared from shelves as quickly as possible”.

The drug, which gives a similar high to cocaine, amphetamines and ecstasy, has been linked to at least 25 deaths in the UK.

The move to ban the drug has come despite the resignation of two of the government’s expert drug advisors over the decision.

Dr Polly Taylor and her colleague at the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs (ACMD) Eric Carlin both resigned after complaining that the decision to ban mephedrone had been taken with”little or no discussion about how our recommendation to classify this drug would be likely to impact on young people’s behaviour”.

Mr Carlin added that the decision to ban the drug was “unduly based on media and political pressure”.

The Criminal records Bureau is labelling innocent people as criminals in blunders that have so far seen the organisation pay out nearly £300,000 in compensation.

The CRB issued 3,855,881 certificates in 2008/2009. In the same year there were 2,522 disputes handled, and upheld.

And over the past six years, the Bureau has been forced to admit making mistakes in almost 15,000 cases. It is now paying compensation at a rate of £290,000 a year.

These claims were brought by the registered body or by the applicant because they believed the information either related to someone else or was in some other way incorrect.

Campaigners warned last night that the situation is likely to worsen once the Independent Safeguarding Authority begins vetting up to nine million people as part of a government initiative to stop sex offenders gaining access to children and vulnerable adults.

A spokesman for privacy campaigners NO2ID told The Sun newspaper: “You only need to look at the laid-back approach the Government has to its own data to realise it is hardly going to take more care in looking after other people’s - even when an incorrect record can ruin someone’s life.”

Police chiefs have backed calls by the Child Exploitation and Online Protection (Ceop) centre to add a ‘panic button’ to every page on Facebook that will allow users to report abuse directly to the organisation.

In response, Facebook have said that a link allowing users to report abuse to the website will in future also offer the opportunity to send a report directly to Ceop.

However, in a letter that was yesterday signed by chief constables from 43 police forces across Britain, senior police officers said that the steps taken by the social-networking giant are not good enough.

Facebook’s announcement came after Jim Gamble, the chief executive of CEOP, travelled to Washington DC to discuss the implementation of the “button” on each page of the website, allowing Facebook users to report suspicions of sexual grooming directly to the authorities.

After the four-hour meeting, which both sides said was “constructive”, Facebook said that it would introduce a link to CEOP’s reporting system which would appear when users decided to report abuse via the site’s own measures. It also said it would invest £5m in education about how to stay safe online – a relatively tiny amount for a company valued at more than £9bn.

Last week, Mr Gamble said that in the first quarter of this year CEOP had received 253 reports concerning grooming activity on Facebook, yet only one came from the Facebook team operating its own internal reporting mechanism.

Richard Allen, Facebook’s head of policy in Europe, said the social networking site and Ceop had a “common agenda” on child safety on the internet.

He said the site had showed Mr Gamble “a series of measures which we think will meet the requirements that he has”.

He added: “We’re going to build into our reporting structure an ability for people who are in the United Kingdom with relevant reports to go directly to Ceop.

“There are some issues around the design and the way in which we do that that Jim put to us very forcefully but… in order to change a website as fundamentally as he wishes us to do then that takes some time to work through.”

Maternity services in the UK are worse than those in Slovakia, Poland and Albania, according to a new study.

Just as many women are dying in pregnancy and childbirth in the UK as they were 20 years ago, leaving Britain trailing behind Eastern European nations, the study in The Lancet found.

The UK lies 23rd in the study of 181 countries and has twice the death rate of Italy, which has the lowest in the world.

Researchers calculated that eight out of every 100,000 pregnant women die in the UK.

It is thought a large immigrant population, who tend to present to antenatal services late, and the rise in obesity, which causes complications, are to blame for the UK’s poor record on maternity care.

A spokesman for the Department of Health said: “The NHS is committed to helping all women have the best pregnancy experience possible, by providing safe, high quality maternity care tailored to a person’s individual needs. The UK remains one of the safest countries in which to give birth.

“The fact that there are so few deaths is a tribute to the skills of all maternity health professionals in this country.”

Globally, the number of deaths dropped from more than 500,000 a year in 1980 to 343,000 a year in 2008. In the last 20 years, deaths have been declining at a rate of about 1.4 per cent a year.

Preventable ailments such as tooth decay and obesity are reaching epidemic proportions among children, doctors at one of the country’s leading children’s hospitals have warned.

Medical staff from Liverpool’s Alder Hey Children’s Hospital said the huge growth in the number of avoidable health complaints could lead to a generation dying before their parents.

Dr Steve Ryan, medical director at Alder Hey, told the BBC: “It just shouldn’t be happening.

“These children should not be suffering from these problems and they should not be here at this hospital.

“People are starting to say maybe this is a generation where children will be dying before their parents.”

Alder Hey is one of the largest specialist children’s hospital’s in Europe and cares for around 200,000 patients a year.

BBC’s Panorama programme claimed around £1m and hundreds of hours of treatment time were being spent treating obesity, tooth decay, alcohol abuse and health complaints associated with passive smoking.

The programme, ‘Spoiled Rotten’ is due to be broadcast on BBC 1 at 9pm tonight.