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A Department of Health study in 1995 found that 91 per cent

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A Department of Health study in 1995 found that 91 per cent of children had been hit, and almost one in six had experienced "severe punishment" by a parent. When you come home, you don't want to give your children punishments, you want a bit of love and care. One father came because he knew he had a big problem with it and was lashing out at his children He doesn't hit them any more. In a letter from prison to a journalist friend last week, Mr Bonnet said he was going to create "national sport" with revelations concerning the role of "two former ministers" in the obscurely related saga of the illegal beach restaurants.He has offered the names of Francois Leotard, former head of the centre-right UDF and a former defence minister, and Jose Rossi, president of the Corsican regional assembly, head of the right-wing Democratie Liberale MPs in the National Assembly and a former industry minister.The burning of the beach restaurants had, at first, seemed a serious political blow to the "clean hands" reputation of the Socialist Prime Minister, Lionel Jospin.

Quite apart from the tip-off, received by Mr Bonnet from an informer, the government and the Corsican police have redoubled efforts to solve the Erignac murder since the scandal of the pyromaniac gendarmes broke four weeks ago.Mr Bonnet's lawyer has suggested that he is ready to expose new facts about the criminal-political interference and police laxity in the murder inquiry. They have told investigators that frustration at the failure of the murder inquiry drove the prefect, literally, to fight fire with fire.The sudden leap forward in the murder investigation is no coincidence. Several senior officers in the gendarmerie have admitted setting fire to the restaurants at the new prefect's request. When all those energetic young couples embarked on their attempts to create a Millennium baby, the last thing which probably crossed their minds was how much it was going to cost them to bring up their New Year sprog.

Yet the sums are substantial and quite probably getting even more substantial as we enter a new century. Most of the work on the costs of children has been done in the context of discovering how much is "enough" to raise a child. The question has not been how much can you spend - which is as infinite as mummy and daddy's wallets - but how much must you spend, which can be very little, depending on whether the DSS or someone a little more generous is the one doing the sums. Nina Oldfield was responsible for a major study for the Child Poverty Action Group in the early Nineties. This took a "basket" of goods and services to assess two budget standards for children: a modest-but-adequate standard, which represented the costs of the average child, and a low- cost standard, which represented the bare necessities. The conclusion was that a child in a two-child family of modest income would cost its parents just under pounds 60 a week to raise. The more stringent budget would come in at pounds 30.37.By the end of the decade, Nina Oldfield says, costs have rocketed even higher.

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