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Today's top SocietyGuardian stories
• George Osborne: austerity may last until 2018
• George Osborne seals deal for £10bn welfare cuts
• Hoax and ludicrous 999 calls put pressure on overstretched staff
• Mother challenges Virgin Care takeover of mental health service
• Signs of the times: deaf community minds its language
• Teenager undergoes surgery after drinking liquid nitrogen in cocktail
• Can drug services cope with an influx of the 'Trainspotting generation'?
• Wendy Savage: Where's the evidence, Jeremy Hunt?
• Hideously Diverse Britain: A level playing field? If Only
• Life after cancer
All today's SocietyGuardian stories
The pick of the weekend's SocietyGuardian news and comment
• Ben Goldacre on the pharmaceutical industry
• Nick Cohen: The shameful history of silence on child abuse
• Conservatives still party of the rich, says No 10's top thinktank
All Sunday's SocietyGuardian news and comment
All Saturday's SocietyGuardian news and comment
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On the Guardian Professional Networks
• Live discussion from noon: developing alternative housing models
• Could the Health and Social Care Act be repealed, asks Bob Hudson
• How charities can make the most of their reserves
On my radar ...
• The Conservative party conference, which will be hearing from George Osborne today. The chancellor did the media rounds this morning to preview his speech, and welfare will dominate. Follow all the day's events with Andrew Sparrow's politics live blog.
The chancellor has outlined plans for a fresh round of £10bn of welfare cuts in 2015-16, and said the government will be proposing new policies on housing benefit soon. On the New Statesman's Staggers blog, George Eaton says the Liberal Democrats have caved in to the chancellor over welfare policy:
Nick Clegg previously insisted that the Lib Dems would not sign up to further welfare cuts without the introduction of some form of wealth or property tax. But with the Chancellor having already ruled out a "mansion tax" or higher council tax bands, it remains unclear what Clegg's party will receive in return for consenting to another attack on the poorest. One possibility is that the coalition will again increase the top rate of capital gains tax and raise stamp duty on multi-million properties.
The move will also put further pressure on Labour to say whether, if elected, it would stick to Osborne's spending plans for 2015-16 or adopt its own alternative proposals.
On the TUC's Touchstone blog, Richard Exell says Osbourne has conflated two mistakes about housing benefit – that it is only for people on the dole, and it is easy for young unemployed people to get housing benefit to pay their rent. He adds:
The assumption that Housing Benefit is a special perk for unemployed people is wrong. So is the notion that young people getting HB are ne'er do wells. I'm worried that we're gearing up for a repeat of what happened in the 1980s, when the Fowler reforms took away 16 and 17 year olds' independent rights to benefit. It's a quarter of a century ago, so some readers may not realise that, before those reforms, you almost never saw young people begging or sleeping in the streets.
Those of us who campaigned against the 1986 Social Security Act repeatedly warned that it would force 16 and 17 year-olds into destitution. This was simply ignored by the government of the day, backed up by the same sort of media campaign that we're seeing now. The Act came into effect in 1988, and within a year there were young people sleeping in shop doorways.
I fear we're on the verge of repeating that mistake.
Meanwhile, on his blog, Camden councillor Theo Blackwell looks at the projected impact of the proposals on young people in his borough. The proposals, he writes, will disproportionately hit young people in the social housing sector – that they seem to impact young people in social housing three times more than young people in private rented accommodation. And he adds:
For young people who have lost parents, but remain in the area, the changes may well uproot them from their neighbourhood, for vulnerable people getting settled after trauma, this is another unwelcome change.
(thanks to Jules Birch for the link)
See also three archive pieces on housing benefit cuts for under-25s. On the Guardian's Reality check blog earlier in the year, Patrick Butler asked whether scrapping housing benefit for under-25s was a good idea, Kate Webb wrote on the Shelter blog that the state must step in when family isn't there, and for Comment is free, Penny Anderson described it as a policy with more holes than a sieve.
• Tory health policy. Looking ahead to later in the week, former Labour adviser Paul Corrigan asks what might the Conservatives say about NHS policy at their conference? He writes:
David Cameron's long term strategy for the Conservatives and the NHS was, in the words of some, to 'detoxify' the Conservative brand. Up until the 2010 election this went very well and he must wake up some mornings and wonder what happened to that strategy.
Of course we know that Andrew Lansley is what happened to it…
…and for reasons that I will never ever understand the Prime Minister agreed to completely undermine his own careful 3 year-long strategy to quieten down the NHS by agreeing, in the summer of 2010, to Andrew Lansley's plans to shake it all up.
And he predicts:
They will say they are proud of the NHS. They will point to all of the good stories about the NHS that Andrew Lansley had to be ambivalent about. (He couldn't celebrate too many good stories about the NHS as good stories undermined the case for having to reform it.).
They will point out how they have frequently given preferential funding to the NHS when compared to all other services.
This will only be a sub subtext at the Conference.
• Fascinating figure of the day, from affordable housing campaign group PricedOut: more than a quarter of Tory MPs are private landlords. The FT [£] reports that the group is calling for tougher tax treatment for buy-to-let landlords. If found that 83 of the Conservative party's 305 elected representatives are making money from private tenants living in properties they own – one owns 26 – while a quarter of Labour MPs and 15% of Lib Dems do.
• Charity the National Youth Agency, which is calling for a "youth premium". The charity was at the Conservative conference today to explain its campaign, which calls for the premium to ensure all young people from disadvantaged backgrounds get access to free, high quality youth work. It warns that the Government risks costly damage to future generations if young people aren't given the resources and attention they need.
• A post looking back over the Labour party conference on the Community Links blog. Will Horwitz says he noticed throughout the conference "increasingly encouraging references to prevention, to the long term consequences of decisions made today, to the calamity of cutting now to spend more later". He writes:
There seemed to be an awareness not just of the benefits of early action but also the barriers to it, as we have been urging. But weary experience has taught us that rhetoric does not necessarily lead to change – witness Tony Blair's stirring 1997 speech on the importance of prevention, calling for "departments to draw up plans for shifting energy and resources from cure to prevention, from clearing problems up to anticipating them." Guess which other phrase crops up in the speech: "one nation Britain." Can Labour, this time round, make it One Early Action Nation?
Other news
• BBC: RPI changes 'may hit pensioners'
• CivilSociety.co.uk: Breast Cancer Care falls short of fundraising targets
• Independent: Health Lottery raises only half of its £50m charitable fund target
• Inside Housing: Under 25s face further cuts to housing benefit
• LocalGov.co.uk: Pickles' troubled family programme on target
• Public Finance: Private firms should take over roads, says CBI
• Telegraph: Maternity leave should be scrapped as it 'holds back women'
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