Attempts to cut back sharply on the amount of benefit paid to people unable to work through disability or illness have proved much harder than expected, with only half the expected number of claimants being disqualified from benefits, according to a report by the National Audit Office. The Government had hoped to make savings of pounds 415m, out of spending of around pounds 7.5bn, through introducing the incapacity benefit in April 1995 to replace sickness and invalidity benefits, because the new system had tighter rules designed to bar many people from the benefit. However, savings were pounds 135m less than forecast because the Benefits Agency was unable to process as many cases as planned and was unable to disallow as many claims as expected.. The FT Index rose by 2.9 per cent last year. This may not be good news for investors, for this FT Index is not the usual economic indicator, but the “weirdness index” calculated by the Fortean Times, the journal of strange and inexplicable phenomena. For the past few years, it has published an index based on the number of weird stories spotted by their readers in the pages of the world’s press And the figures show that 1996 was 2.9 per cent up on 1995.

The magazine’s publishers add the reassuring information that the figures reflect an interest in weirdness rather than weirdness itself. Indeed, were it not for the attacks on farm animals by the Puerto Rican goatsucker and the discovery of possible life on Mars, the index would scarcely be higher than in the previous year. With spontaneous human combustion going through a relatively damp patch and swarmings considerably down, the evidence of a general upward trend in weirdness is weak.. The Irish Republic’s suicide rate is the fastest-rising in Europe, according to a report published yesterday. But Ireland is still near the bottom of Europe’s suicide “league table”, according to the Irish Medical Journal, which gave depression and alcoholism as the chief reasons for Irish people killing themselves.

The journal’s report, Psychiatric and Social Background to Suicide, said the people most at risk from taking their own lives in Ireland were those under the age of 30.The survey indicated that until the early 1980s, 90 per cent of Irish suicides were attributed to mental illness, but since that time crime, drugs problems and changes in family structures had led to a range of new causes.. An increasing proportion of council and housing association tenants are former home owners who have fallen into arrears on their mortgages and had to sell up. Nearly two-thirds of householders offered accommodation by councils or housing associations after being homeowners were classified as homeless after defaulting on their mortgages. A new survey of tenants by the University of York shows that those moving out of council housing are most often younger, better-off couples. They are being replaced by poor households, often headed by single parents. More than 70 per cent of households accepted as tenants by local authorities or housing associations were headed by people aged between 16 and 29.