Portrait of the Week – 4 January 2003

A third of families entitled to working family tax credits are not claiming them; 604,000 low-income families are missing out on £1.4 billion, an average of £42 a week each. The Tories are looking for ways to cut taxes, according to Mr Howard Flight, the shadow chief secretary to the Treasury; ‘It could be up to 20 per cent,’ he said. Mr Tony Blair, the Prime Minister, and his family returned to Sharm el Sheikh, in Egypt, for an end-of-year holiday; they are paying for the holiday instead of letting the Egyptian government do so, as it did last year. There was an argument about who should decide if the England cricket team should play in Zimbabwe. Miss Nina Bawden, whose husband Austen Kark was killed in the rail crash at Potters Bar last May, called for the ‘guilty men to be prosecuted for corporate manslaughter’. A passenger set fire to a train from Banbury to Paddington, destroying a carriage.