The unions are to meet department officials on Monday week, when “tough questions” about the implications would be asked.Chris Smith, Labour’s social security spokesman, said the benefit system would be “pushed past breaking point” with “fewer people, longer delays, more mistakes and a worse service” when last year had already seen the highest error rate ever in income support. With staff accounting for half of running costs he predicted that “at worst” 20,000 of the 88,000 DSS jobs could go.There were rumours of more self-assessment for benefit, he said, which could increase fraud, while attempts to simplify benefit payments could prove a false economy. The scale of change now demanded had been achieved in the private sector.Barry Reamsbottom, general secretary of the Civil and Public Services Association, said managers were “stunned” at the scale of what was demanded. Yesterday he argued that related only to the first-year cuts the Treasury had sought. We want to ensure that benefits are maintained to those in need”.Before the Budget, he told William Waldegrave, Chief Secretary to the Treasury, that the scale of cuts in running costs being sought “fills me with despair The impact on operations will be devastating”. NICHOLAS TIMMINS

Public Policy Editor
Plans to slash the Department of Social Security’s running costs by hundreds of millions of pounds over the next three years will increase the risk of fraud and hit genuine claimants, opposition MPs and trade unions claimed yesterday.The scale of the change – an efficiency increase of at least a quarter in a budget of pounds 3.2bn – highlights the mounting impact of the dramatic cuts in Whitehall spending that Kenneth Clarke, the Chancellor, ordered in the Budget.Peter Lilley, Secretary of State for Social Security, vigorously defended a programme which he admitted was “challenging”, saying the alternative was “obviously to take the money away from benefits, which we don’t want to do.

Mr Hattersley, a passionate advocate of comprehensive education who wants to abolish public schools, has said he should be succeeded by someone of Asian origin.Mr Godsiff told the Independent yesterday: “I support overall Labour’s education policy, and think that Tony Blair is very effectively addressing the wishes and aspirations of parents in this country.” And he denied Tory charges of hypocrisy: “I haven’t told anybody they must not exercise their right to do the best for their children.”Mr Blair’s office would not comment on Mr Godsiff yesterday.. He pointed to this week’s report by Chris Woodhead, the Chief Inspector of Schools, which said that teaching in half of primary schools was unsatisfactory.Mr Godsiff, 49, is engaged in a struggle to succeed Roy Hattersley as MP for the new Birmingham Sparkbrook constituency after boundary changes. I tried to find an alternative state school for both, but it proved very difficult to find a gap in a suitable one.”He said he was keen to move his children back into the state sector under a future Labour government if schools were given more resources and standards raised. “My son was doing all right for a time, but then things went downhill The same was true of my daughter They weren’t progressing as fast as they should have been. Yes, I am fortunate to be able to afford that, but I also pay high taxes under this Tory government supposedly to ensure there is decent education in the state sector.”Both his children had been at a local state primary school, Rushey Green, in Lewisham. Two Tory backbenchers also targeted the Labour leader’s own private education on the day the Sun published an attack on Mr Blair for seeking to deny others the privileges he himself enjoyed by Richard Gibbon, one of his contemporaries at Fettes College, the Edinburgh boarding school.Mr Godsiff said yesterday: “My children do not have assisted places I pay full fees out of my own pocket.

Paul Boateng, Labour spokesman on legal affairs, sends a son, 10, to Devonshire House preparatory school in north London.Although Mr Godsiff is not a frontbench spokesman, his use of the private sector takes Tory charges of Labour double standards a step further than the choice of a selective school by Harriet Harman, Labour’shealth spokeswoman.John Major mocked Mr Blair in the Commons, claiming Mr Godsiff was “in the vanguard of Labour’s education policy”. His son attends Colfes boys’ school and his daughter is at the girls’ Blackheath High The fees for both schools are around pounds 4,500 a year. JOHN RENTOUL

Political Correspondent
Tony Blair’s difficulties over education deepened yesterday when it emerged that another Labour MP sends his two children to private schools.Roger Godsiff, the MP for Birmingham Small Heath since 1992, confirmed that he sent his son, 13, and his daughter, 12, to private schools in south-east London, near his home in Labour-controlled Lewisham.Mr Godsiff is believed to be one of only two Labour MPs with children at present in private schools. The identity of this component – if it exists – remains unclear.Scientists at Cern, the European particle physics laboratory in Switzerland, reacted cautiously to the results.

But Brenna Flaugher, one of the physicists who performed the experiment said: “This is where the fun begins.”Fate of the Universe, page 6. But when the scientists at Fermilab smashed the protons and anti-protons together, the results suggested that quarks may occupy some space after all. If that is the case, they say, then quarks must have some kind of internal structure, which may be constructed from even more fundamental building blocks of matter. Outside the nucleus are negatively charged electrons.Quarks, according to the theory, occupy no space. It starts by suggesting that atoms are built from neutrons, which have no charge, and protons, which together form the nucleus.

But when the outcomes were studied, a few had produced odd results which could lead to a revolution in thinking.The present theory of matter, known as the Standard Model, has been built up since 1930 as physicists have been able to conduct advanced experiments like this, and explains most of the present knowledge on how matter is constructed. Present theory suggests that the two should always eliminate each other completely. And, says the prevailing theory, quarks are indivisible.The experiments consisted of crashing protons – the nuclei of hydrogen atoms – into their mirror images, known as anti- protons, at almost the speed of light. At present, most scientists think that quarks are the building blocks of the protons and neutrons in atomic nuclei, which make up all matter. DANNY PENMAN

and CHARLES ARTHUR
Scientists in the US think they have found evidence that the basic constituent of matter – long thought to be particles called “quarks” – is itself made of something smaller.Experiments carried out in Chicago suggest that quarks – whose mass is a million, billion billion, times less than that of a grain of sand – are not the tiniest things the Universe has to offer. In virtually all the 25 train operating companies due to be franchised, management buy-out teams are expected to put in bids.However, outside bidders have already been angered by the advantageous position of management teams who are in sole possession of large amounts of data and may be able to manipulate the figures in the same kind of ways as occurred at LTS.The misery line, Section Two. They have to continue running the railway, negotiate the contractual agreements with Railtrack and other parts of the new structure and develop their management buy out bid.Mr Kinchin-Smith was also hampered by having broken his leg in a skating accident late last year which immobilised him for several weeks.