Brazilian butt lift jeans are fashioned to enhance the shapely body you already have. 1 little tidbit is that not all Brazilian jeans are made in Brazil, but rather it’s much more about the actual cut and elegance of the jean than which country they had been manufactured. Whether or not you already have an ample booty and wish to accentuate your assets or you are in search of a shapelier derriere, these jeans are certain to please. So you may well have been wondering how do butt lift jeans work? Butt Lift Jeans

In comparison with your conventional “American” jeans, these are outfitted with a bit a lot more spandex, and intended to hug your curves. What you’ll very first notice is that most of the models in messages have butts that look round, full, and perky. You may well believe that they’ve been basically blessed with a very hot body, but the actual design of these jeans goes a lengthy way towards accentuating curvy figures.

Brazilian butt lift jeans are normally made using original hidden panels within the fabric which flatten the tummy. Unique stitching is employed along the sides for a visual lifting effect noticeable to the naked eye. The wash of the denim features subtle fading that serve to visually improve and manufacture the look of a round, huge, perky booty. The way the jeans are cut make a distinction inside your appearance also – straight leg jeans give the look off lengthy, lean, slender legs, no matter what your height. A few of the Brazilian jeans are really low cut, but if this style isn’t to your taste, search for all those with standard rise that falls just below the navel.

The public purse is pretty threadbare, but it is unfair to suggest Darling left hundreds of skeletons to tumble out of the cupboard – and the former chancellor takes the idea as a personal affront. The figures bear him out: the latest official statistics showed a massive tax windfall at the end of the financial year to April, and as a result the deficit was revised down by 7bn. In fact, it is now 11bn below Darling’s final budget forecast.

Is there no alternative to drastic cuts in public services?

The fact that the deficit figures are not quite so horrific in itself raises questions over macho austerity policies and the 6.2bn of cuts already announced. Yes, we do need to bring the deficit under control, but too much austerity too soon could strangle a fragile recovery.

But won’t my tax bill go up if we don’t cut spending?

There will be a mix of spending cuts and tax rises. One of the big issues is getting the balance right between the two. Concentrating too heavily on cuts could hurt the vulnerable in society, but hefty tax rises, particularly on high earners, can be self-defeating because people avoid paying.

If we don’t tighten our belts enough, won’t our debts run out of control?

People tend to think that the government debt is like a household debt and needs to be managed very tightly. But as Leslie Budd at the Open University Business School says: “This… belongs to the less well known branch of economics called Ignorance Economics.” It is sensible to cut waste, but slashing spending indiscriminately to deal with fiscal crises can do more harm than good. Public spending is an injection into the economy that boosts national income and employment.

Hold on, though, didn’t David Cameron say our debt interest was rising to 70bn a year? That sounds bad.

Yes, it’s certainly not a good place to be. Debt service payments are set to rise from 41.6bn pencilled in this year to about 70bn in five years’ time. It is, as Cameron says, “a terrible, terrible waste of money” and more than the combined budgets for education, climate change and transport. But it is not a new figure and, to put it in perspective, households spend a similar amount of their income servicing their debts and many companies spend far more. Also, it’s not unusual for any country to spend a large part of its revenues on servicing debts.

But I heard that we are in a worse

position than Greece.

Nowhere near. Britain has never defaulted on its national debt. Our debt has a long time to run, with an average of 14 years to maturity, twice as long as most European countries, including Greece. In simple terms, that means the UK government needs to refinance less of its debt in any given year and is less sensitive to rising interest rates.

Hmm. But I also heard Cameron say we are “indebted on an unprecedented scale”.

This is the kind of phrase that enrages economic historians. Some context is needed. On paper, the deficit of 156.1bn for the last financial year is indeed the highest since records began at the end of the second world war. But as any economist will tell you, it’s not hard for any nominal figure to be a record after more than 60 years of inflation.

So that’s all right then?

Debt has been higher than this at many points in wartime and peacetime since the creation of the national debt in 1690, according to Glen O’Hara of Oxford Brookes University. The 18th century saw particularly large increases in the size of the armed services and each successive conflict saw public debt peak at a new high. The level of our debt is a cause for serious concern, but not panic.

I don’t know who to believe now. Who really has the right answers?

Despite what some would have you believe, economics is far from an exact science. Strategies for dealing with the financial crisis are driven as much by ideology as by economics. Sorry, but there are no straightforward “right answers”.

Giving birth in the UK is complicated. Antenatal checks, ultrasounds, blood tests, BMI indices, dating scans and more – and that’s before delivery. Giving birth in sub-Saharan Africa is simple by comparison. You can walk five hours for a basic check-up, if able. Then again, you are far less likely to survive.

Across the developing world there are none of the integrated healthcare services for expectant mothers that are universally available in the west. That means mothers-to-be have to visit up to five different healthcare providers for services that could be provided by one clinic.

And that is after conception. The burning issue on maternal health in the world’s poorest countries is for women to take control of their own bodies and for their choices to be respected: when to have children, how often to have children, if to have children at all. Of course efforts to prevent deaths before, during and after childbirth should be a priority, but so should encouraging and empowering young women to pursue whatever life they choose for themselves. We must provide more career prospects than the baby factory alone.

This view of women as more than childbearers was a call that echoed around last week’s Women Deliver conference in Washington DC, yet the reality is that many countries still continue to care little for a more holistic approach to women’s health. To reduce maternal mortality we must address the unmet needs for family planning and reproductive health alongside the unmet needs of pregnant women. If women aren’t able to plan when they have children, then they have little chance when it comes to life’s other big decisions, including education and job prospects. If they cannot plan when to give new life, how can they plan their own life?

There was little talk too in Washington of the most vulnerable and marginalised adolescent girls, including the hardest to reach groups falling furthest behind when it comes to accessing reproductive and maternal services. Millions of these girls continue to miss out on health services. Whether this inequality is to be addressed or entrenched was unclear from last week’s discussions.

Mothers-to-be with HIV are another vulnerable group. They are up to nine times more likely to die during pregnancy if not provided with the right clinical care. And that is without addressing the stigma and rejection these women often face from health services. Many choose to forgo treatment altogether rather than face the fear this discrimination stirs.

There was insufficient mention, also, of the role to be played by that other marginalised group when debating this subject, men – for they can be hugely underrated drivers of women’s empowerment.

The conference showed the issue of maternal health sits proudly and commendably atop many people’s agendas – from politicians to activists; NGOs to philanthropists. Indeed, the latter’s Melinda Gates announced a $1.5bn fighting fund to help halt the pandemic of mother and child deaths across the developing world. There was talk of a new UN joint initiative that should be adopted by the G8 to fast-track efforts to meet the maternal health Millennium Development Goal – yet tinkering with the bolt as the sound of hooves recedes in the distance should never be proffered as best practice.

So the week’s events were not without merit, but we need a combination of new funding initiatives and political prioritisation, and the G8 summit in Canada later this month is the ideal delivery room for these commitments. Incoming international development secretary Andrew Mitchell has already talked about empowerment and accountability. Do our political leaders have the courage to deliver?

It could have been a scene straight out of a bad British geezer film. A dark-haired young man having a drink on the terrace of a Spanish resort bar on a balmy Mediterranean night. A motorcycle cruises along the street. Suddenly six shots ring out. Bystanders hit the ground. Screams. The motorcyclist speeds off with his gunman accomplice clinging on behind him. The young man lies dying, three shots to the head.

But the shooting at the Lounge Bar in Mijas, near Marbella on the Costa del Sol, last Saturday night belongs in the non-fiction section. The death of Danny Smith, 26, from Billericay in Essex, is the latest murder of a foreigner to be investigated by Spanish police in what has become a world of expat mayhem and one that reinforces the image of this once magical part of the Iberian peninsula as the Costa del Crime, a nickname acquired nearly 30 years ago.

Smith was on borrowed time. He was on the run from British police who were seeking him in connection with the shooting in Stock, near Chelmsford, Essex, of businessman Doug Turner in 2007. That in itself was a bungled hit, with Turner the wrong target. Smith fled, leaving two associates to face the music. Then in December last year Essex police, having received intelligence that he was in Spain or northern Cyprus, issued an appeal for further information.

Working by day in the building trade, drinking by night in the bars, Smith was apparently unworried by the possibility of arrest. Earlier in the evening he was said to have been involved in an argument in the bar with a man who was harassing some of the women customers. The shooting followed. Essex police said yesterday that they were awaiting formal identification from the Spanish authorities. A young Irishman has already been arrested for the murder and is in custody.

But why was Smith there in the first place? The original reason British criminals came to the Costa was the collapse in 1978 of a long-standing extradition agreement, originally drawn up by Benjamin Disraeli, between the UK and Spain. The latter complained that Britain was making it too difficult to retrieve Spanish fugitives and duly ended the arrangement. Suddenly the coast became a magnet for men if not quite on the run then certainly travelling at jogging pace. Up to a hundred major villains settled. Bars with names like Sinatra’s and El Bandito catered to the new arrivals and the stretch of coast became a European Miami: sunny, decadent, dangerous. It was a good place to hide, with 100,000 or so Britons making a first or second home there. By the time the extradition loophole was closed in 1985, the area was established as “the bit of Europe that fell off the back of a lorry”.

In the 1990s a corrupt local mayor, Jess Gil y Gil, happy to stuff his pockets and turn blind eyes to illegal construction, made it all the more attractive. The money slopping around from the drugs trade had to go somewhere, and the booming construction business which saw house prices double in a decade was an obvious place for it. By the time Gil died in 2004 the damage was done.

Now up to a million Britons have homes in Spain, although the number is dwindling as the recession tightens and the pound weakens against the euro. While many are law-abiding retirees, courted in the spring by David Cameron as potential Tory voters, a fair proportion are duckers and divers, with a smattering of serious professional criminals, and they have spread along the coasts. Drive down the Costa Brava and someone will point out where Kenny Noye, now serving life for murder, supposedly ordered bullet-proof glass for his swimming pool.

Last September, Crimestoppers, in association with the UK’s Serious Organised Crime Agency (Soca), issued its latest most wanted list as part of Operation Captura, an attempt to track down British criminals hiding out in Spain. Last month Martin Smith became the 34th name on that list of 50 to have been caught, when he was grabbed in Barcelona.

There have, of course, been more momentous shootings than that of Danny Smith. In April 1990 Charlie Wilson, the great train robber, was slicing cucumbers for a salad at his villa in Llanos de Nageles, near Marbella, when a young man in a baseball cap arrived on a mountain bike, asked Wilson’s wife, Pat, for a word with her husband, and then shot him and Bobo, the family alsatian, before escaping over the back wall.

This was a time when Ronnie Knight, wide-boy former husband of the actress Barbara Windsor, acted as the underworld’s ambassador to the area. He had property in the hills outside Fuengirola which he described in his autobiography, Black Knight, as “paradise found”, missing only a decent Indian restaurant to make it perfection. When he went back to stand trial at the Old Bailey in 1995 on charges of handling stolen money, his barrister, the late Richard Ferguson QC, told the judge that his client’s image as a “swashbuckling figure basking in the sun in Spain” was an exaggeration.

Some criminals seeking safety have long since buckled their swashes and headed to more secure bolt holes. Turkish-occupied northern Cyprus, which is not recognised by the UK and therefore has no extradition treaty, provides sanctuary for some. After Britain’s biggest cash robbery, of the Securitas depot in Tonbridge in Kent in 2006, it was to northern Cyprus that detectives flew in search of suspects and some of the missing 53m. There are only around 5,000 British expats there, so blending in is not such an easy option.

The authorities claim that northern Cyprus does not deserve its reputation. “I would say to people in Britain – don’t believe everything you hear,” said the prime minister’s spokesman when the Tonbridge hunt was on. “This is a democratic country and our legal system is like the British one. It’s very easy for people to say, ‘we can’t find the criminals; they must be in northern Cyprus’.”

Another hideout destination is Thailand, with Pattaya the favoured spot. The attraction here – apart from the obligatory full English breakfast, thriving counterfeit goods market and bar girls – is that bogus IDs are easy to get, the extradition process can be slow and fugitives can slip across the border into Cambodia. But nothing compares with Spain for convenience and comfort.

The Spanish government is concerned about the way the country has become a honeypot for international criminals: there are 27,000 foreigners in jail, more than a third of the prison population, and an increase of 242% in the past decade. A law was introduced in April to close loopholes used in money-laundering and to impose new obligations on lawyers and estate agents when large quantities of cash are involved. Criminals who use casinos to launder money now face a new, if minor, hurdle; more than €2,000 in chips can only be obtained with identification.

British villains have been joined by their Irish counterparts, partly as a result of the Irish authorities’ increased activity in hunting down criminal assets. Last month Christy Kinahan, from Dublin, named by the Garda as a major player in drugs and arms, was arrested at his apartment near Marbella, in a co-ordinated series of raids across Europe that saw 11 properties in Spain turned over. There is also a powerful eastern European criminal presence: Russian, Romanian, Bulgarian, Albanian. Simultaneously, the Galician coast in the north-west of the country became the European gateway for the Latin American cocaine trade. Spain now has the highest percentage of cocaine use in Europe.

The 2001 film Sexy Beast epitomises the tanned and complacent British villain in Spain. It was preceded on the screen in 1984 by Stephen Frears’s The Hit, in which Terence Stamp played a supergrass on the run from his former colleagues, and followed in 2005 by the less celebrated The Business. Danny Smith, remembered now with flowers to “Tall Dan” outside the lounge, may have had only a walk-on part in the latest Costa drama, but he will not be the last young Briton to slump to a barroom floor with a bullet in his head.

Currently the public can use the NHS Choices website to help them choose a hospital for treatment. NHS Choices, and the information used by Dr Foster, is based on “Hospital Episode Statistics” (HES) data, which the NHS says is “authoritative and essential”. However, NHS insiders say the information, usually collected by administrative staff from patient records, is unreliable.

Professor John Williams, director of the health information unit at the Royal College of Physicians, carried out a study into HES data and found a significant number of operations were recorded inaccurately. He has called for a change in the way data is collected, saying flaws in the HES database were exposed as long ago as 1982.

The problem is starkly highlighted by the case of Scarborough hospital in Yorkshire. Data obtained by the Guardian showed that nearly 29% of patients who underwent routine AAA surgery died between 2006 and 2008. The national average was just over 4%. However patients turning to the NHS Choices website are told the survival rate for these operations at this hospital is “as expected” and that the number of people dying in these operations is “similar to the national average”. Scarborough stopped performing AAA operations last year because of the high death rates.

The Guardian investigation lasted more than a year. The paper submitted freedom of information requests to 116 NHS trusts asking for the mortality rates of abdominal aortic aneurysm operations in the three years from 2006 to 2008. The requests asked not for HES data butthe data collected by surgeons themselves.

Three trusts did not provide any data: Doncaster and Bassetlaw, Gloucestershire Hospitals and Kings College Hospital. Four trusts ignored the requests, in defiance of freedom of information rules. They are West Hertfordshire Hospitals, Royal Cornwall Hospitals, the United Lincolnshire Hospitals, and the Royal Devon and Exeter, saying the request had been accidentally overlooked. In all, more than 35 of the trusts did not release all the data that the Guardian requested.

Expert view

Peter McCollum is a professor of vascular surgery at Hull University and a consultant at the Hull and East Yorkshire NHS trust. When the Guardian asked him for three years of mortality data, he sent 10. Collecting information to find out how well you are doing was essential for any doctor, he said, and it was shocking that it was not properly resourced. “I blame successive governments,” he said. “People like me have been shouting ever since I have been a consultant to get resources to collect data.” He employs a data clerk but struggles to find the money.

McCollum set up a database at Hull in 1998. He is a proponent of concentrating AAA operations in large centres such as Hull, which does around 100 a year, and closing smaller units, such as Scarborough, which had four deaths in 14 cases between 2006 and 2008 and stopped last year. “There are too many vascular surgeons doing too much vascular surgery too badly,” he says.

Last year, McCollum had no elective deaths. This year, two of his first three patients died. “If a patient dies with me, I think about it for the next couple of months. I feel terrible about the two patients who died in January,” he said.

AAA surgery is skilled work, he went on. “It is technically exacting and tiring. I have done close to 1,000 of these cases and I’m still learning. It kills people if you don’t do it right.”

The Equality and Human Rights Commission, charged with tackling discrimination and safeguarding human rights, has been ordered to cut 15% from its budget as part of the coalition government’s austerity measures, the Guardian has learned.

The cuts to the equalities watchdog has forced it to review its staffing, marketing and programme of grants to combat discrimination. The cuts amount to 7m from its 60m budget for this year. EHRC sources said the reduction came as the demands on the commission were increasing.

It is the latest confirmation of the cuts sweeping across Whitehall, its agencies and watchdogs after the coalition government announced 6.25bn in cuts, with more to follow in the 22 June budget and the autumn spending review.

The communities secretary, Eric Pickles, announced where the 1.166bn in cuts to local government budgets will fall this year. Every single local authority faces cuts of 1-2% to its 2010-11 budget. Ministers have attempted to soften that blow by removing ringfencing of education budgets to give local decision-makers more control over spending.

The transport secretary, Philip Hammond, also froze plans for dozens of local transport projects, including a 250m trolleybus scheme in Leeds. Large-scale projects such as the multibillion-pound Thameslink and Crossrail schemes in London are already under review. However, local authorities have been told any scheme awaiting Department for Transport approval is effectively frozen.

Hammond said: “Local authorities will also wish to consider carefully whether investing further time and resources in developing such schemes ahead of the spending review is justified.”

The EHRC is among several watchdogs and quangos learning of cuts this week. Neil Kinghan, director general of the commission, said they were conducting a full review. “The commission’s priority remains providing advice and guidance for individuals, business and other organisations, support for strategic legal cases and enforcement activities and ensuring that the most vulnerable in society do not suffer unfairly as the country grapples with the current economic climate,” he said.

Other agencies affected include the Food Standards Agency, whose future is under threat due to confirmed plans to give its responsibilities for nutritional advice to the Department of Health and proposals to return the remainder of its responsibilities for food safety to the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs.

The Electoral Commission is discussing with the Speaker’s committee in the House of Commons, which it reports to, on how best to achieve cuts this year and in future years. The Homes and Communities Agency is to lose 780m it had been promised after coalition ministers claimed the cash had not been properly assigned by the previous Labour government.

When the 6.25bn cuts were announced there were suggestions that all government agencies were being told to make savings of 10%. The spending review framework, published this week, said: “On the administrative spending of central Whitehall and its arm’s length bodies, departments will be asked to reduce their spending by at least one-third.”

A spokesman for the Food Standards Agency said: “The secretary of state for health indicated his intention, before the election, to move the Food Standards Agency nutrition policy area to the Department of Health.”

A Defra spokesman said: “Any machinery of government changes will be announced in due course.”

Dame Margaret Eaton, chair of the Local Government Association, said: “We have to recognise that these cuts will be painful to implement this year and will have a significant effect on services and the people who rely on them.”

As the mother of two sons with autism and a third son without it, do I welcome this news? Yes, if it helps kill the idea that autism is somebody’s “fault”. Autism isn’t caused by neglectful parenting; not only that, but parents passing on autistic genes is less significant than had been thought. Although some of these gene variations are inherited, others are found only in children. This helps explain why in some cases autism “runs in the family”, but in others it comes out of nowhere. If you have an autistic child, strip away those shreds of guilt. Your child is what he or she is. End of story.

The findings will enable some families to get more precise genetic counselling, and that’s good. When I debated whether to have Jake, my third child, doctors could only give me vague advice. I’m delighted I took the risk, but it’s better to make such decisions armed with as much information as possible.

I’m concerned, though, that the information will bolster the idea that autism is a disease that should be cured. Caring for autistic people is hard. Self-harm, destructive outbursts, intense anxiety, sleeplessness … who wouldn’t wish those away? But autism can also mean originality, creativity, an innocence … Do I hope that early interventions can be devised to wipe the human race clean of autism? No, I do not.

What provisions are in place to establish on a case-by-case basis that Afghanistan is a safe environment for these children to be returned to, when the personal circumstances of many young, unaccompanied Afghans in the UK may be complex? Scant detail has been supplied by the UK government on whether adequate measures would be taken to care for vulnerable groups returned, including specialist services to treat survivors of torture. Managing the psychiatric and physical consequences of these individuals’ ordeals is a very long process, lasting years and involving a variety of therapies. As a state party to the UN convention on the rights of the child, the government’s obligations are clear.

Unless it can be established that return to Afghanistan is clearly in each child’s best interests and respects their human rights, the UKBA should take extreme caution in pressing ahead with such a plan and think about investing further in UK services to support them.

Keith Best

Chief executive officer, Medical Foundation for the Care of Victims of Torture

Chancellor George Osborne’s plan to build a consensus behind his cuts agenda by consulting the public, civil society and opposition parties was dismissed today as a PR ploy by the former Conservative chancellor, Lord Lawson.

The public would have wide and conflicting views on where the cuts should fall and it was ultimately a decision for government, Lawson said, warning that any such programme of consultation should not delay or reduce plans to tackle the deficit by cutting spending.

Osborne unveiled plans for the consultation as a centrepiece of the framework for the autumn spending review that will set out the reductions in spending expected of every government department for the next three years.

Government consultations on key policy issues have a chequered history, as do party listening exercises such as Labour’s Big Conversation, or Labour Listens. Those involved often feel used, or ignored.

The chancellor promised over the summer there would be a consultation, via a website and a series of meetings in every region of the country, to engage members of the public, thinktanks, voluntary groups, civil servants and all political parties in the plan to reduce the 156bn fiscal deficit.

The consultation is based on a similar experiment that lasted a year in Canada, but the coalition’s big conversation with the public on the debt crisis will be much more brief, and appears to start after departments are supposed to make their initial submissions to the Treasury.

The idea of the consultation also stems from Nick Clegg’s warning as Liberal Democrat leader that there could Greek-style unrest if cuts were imposed by a government without electoral legitimacy.

Two previous fundamental spending reviews, one led by Michael Portillo as Treasury chief secretary for John Major in 1993, and another entitled the fundamental savings review led from the Cabinet Office in the final years of Tony Blair’s regime, had no element of public consultation, and were characterised by intense secrecy.

This government by contrast has set great store by transparency, and Osborne has also promised to run a more collegiate Treasury relationship with departments, as opposed to the take it or leave it regime run by Gordon Brown.

Osborne also loosened his stranglehold on departments by saying today he was dismantling the entire regime of targets set up by Brown and designed to bind departments into prioritising specific targets agreed with the Treasury.

Osborne told MPs that cutting the deficit was “the great national challenge of our generation. After years of waste and debt and irresponsibility, we’ve got to get Britain to live within its means. It’s time to rethink how government spends our money.”

It was time to show the country “we are all in this together”, he said.

“What we want to do is make sure that all political parties, that the brightest and best brains across Whitehall and the public sector, that voluntary groups, thinktanks, trade unions, members of the public are all engaged in the debate and discussion about how collectively we deal with the problem – after all it is our collective national debt.”

Lawson told the BBC’s World at One: “Public consultation is essentially a PR ploy and it may be a very good PR ploy but we know perfectly well that the public will have a wide range of different views and anyhow it’s the government’s job to decide what is to be done.

“We’re talking about something like a 10% cut across the board and I think there needs to be contributions in every area. There is always scope … in every area.”

Sir Michael Bichard, the former permanent secretary and now director of the respected Institute for Government, said: “One of the problems you face in this country of course is that people are very jaundiced about any kind of consultation exercise.

“[This is] partly because, in the past, governments of all colours have tended to use consultation exercises as a way of getting people to agree what they have already decided to do, in other words a validation exercise.

“I don’t think the government wants to do that – but they start from a base where people are pretty jaundiced.”

In the Commons, Mark Durkan of the SDLP derided the government’s attempts to “popularise” its cuts agenda, and asked: “How is this axe-factor approach to government going to play out?”

The Treasury insisted it wanted to involve the public in discussing the trade-offs the government faces, and denied the public want contradictory things, such as US tax rates and Scandinavian quality public services.

The framework for the autumn spending review, published today, tried to provide a new Whitehall system for making the spending cuts as fair as possible. One Treasury adviser described it as introducing layers of accountability to test the ideas for reductions.

The first layer is a new star chamber, which will scrutinise every department’s budget plans. Osborne will chair it and the chief secretary, Danny Alexander, will deputise. William Hague, the foreign secretary, and the cabinet ministers Francis Maude and Oliver Letwin will also sit on it.

A Spending Review Challenge Group, made up of experts from both within and outside government, including figures such as Lord Browne, will also vet departments’ plans and then the public will be engaged through the series of consultations and websites.

A full public inquiry will be held into “appalling events” at Stafford hospital which resulted in hundreds of patients’ deaths between 2005 and 2008, David Cameron announced today.

The prime minister told parliament that the investigation would examine the many failings at the hospital and was needed so that those affected could “tell their story”.

“I remember going to Stafford and meeting with the families, many of which had lost loved ones, some of whom went into hospital for a routine operation but because the standards of hygiene were not right, because the management was not right, and because, frankly, targets were being pursued rather than clinical outcomes, people died needlessly,” Cameron told MPs at prime minister’s questions.

It will be chaired by Robert Francis QC. He conducted an independent inquiry into events at the hospital for the last government, who had rejected calls for a public inquiry. It will be the third official examination of what has been described as the NHS’s biggest scandal in a decade.

Francis’s report, published in February, was scathing about a catalogue of failings which meant that an unknown number of patients, including many older people, received inadequate care.

Francis found that the hospital “routinely neglected” patients and displayed systemic failings in its approach to care. Mid Staffordshire NHS Foundation Trust, the hospital’s parent body, lost sight of its responsibility to provide safe care after managers became preoccupied with cost-cutting and government targets, his report found.

“The events at Mid Staffordshire were a tragic story of targets being put before clinical judgment and patient care, focusing on the cost and volume of treatment not the quality,” health secretary Andrew Lansley said in a Commons statement today. “That is why I want to move away from targets and replace them with measuring what matter most to patients – their experience of the NHS, the quality of their care and the outcome of their treatment.”

Francis’s previous inquiry was launched after a Healthcare Commission report published in March 2009 revealed a catalogue of failings at the trust, which also runs Cannock Chase hospital. Appalling standards put patients at risk and between 400 and 1,200 more people died than would have been expected in a three-year period from 2005 to 2008, the then NHS watchdog said.

The move honours pledges made by the Tories and Liberal Democrats in opposition, and was welcomed by patient safety campaigners as overdue. “If ever there was a case for a full public inquiry it is Stafford. This should not just be about what happened at that hospital. We need to learn how all the safeguards that are meant to be in place to prevent this sort of thing happening failed,” said Peter Walsh, chief executive of the charity Action against Medical Accidents. “Otherwise, the same could occur in your local hospital or mine. That means looking at the role of all the relevant institutions, right up to the Department of Health itself.”

Walsh had criticised the 1.7m spent on Francis’s investigation, which had too tightly limited terms of reference and too few powers, he said.