Daily Roundup 22 February: Unaccompanied asylum seekers, child obesity and Boris Johnson

Councils in Scotland have offered to take more unaccompanied child refugees from camps in Europe, the children's commissioner for Scotland will tell MPs today. The Scotsman reports that Tam Baillie will tell the home affairs select committee that Scottish local authorities "want to play their part", but said more funding is needed, as well as better co-ordination between the Home Office, the Scottish government and councils.


The government's plan to prevent child obesity is "severely limited", a team of medical experts has claimed. The Huffington Post reports that Neena Modi, president of the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health, is among a number of experts arguing that the government has "missed an opportunity" to take global leadership of child health following the publication of its child obesity strategy. 


Schoolchildren have written to Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson asking him to try to ensure Britain does not go to war. The Grimsby Telegraph reports pupils from a Lincolnshire school were so inspired by a talk given by a 93-year-old Second World War veteran to commemorate Remembrance Day that they penned the powerful letter, pleading with the former Mayor of London to keep Britain out of another world war.


A third senior figure on the Scottish Child Abuse Inquiry has resigned. The BBC reports that Glenn Houston, who was the only original panel member, cited personal reasons for his departure. One survivors' group said it was "indicative of a crisis" in the inquiry which is examining allegations of child abuse in residential accommodation.


British prisons are holding child inmates in solitary confinement in an alleged breach of UN torture rules and British law, an investigation by the Independent has found. Lawyers in one case have launched legal action against the government in the High Court. More than a dozen examples include a teenage prisoner with a serious mental health condition who, it is claimed, was placed in solitary confinement inside a number of different British jails over a period of six months, causing distress and psychological damage.


Children reporting sexual and violent crimes are not being taken seriously, the government's victims tsar has warned. The Times reports that Baroness Newlove said lessons of recent sex abuse scandals have not been learned, because young people are still being made to feel like criminals or being accused of wasting police time when they report serious crimes.