And despite his strong oil industry links, President George Bush announced a $1.2bn (£755m), five-year programme to build hydrogen-fuelled cars this year.Ms Foley said: “This challenge isn’t terribly challenging It won’t pay for innovative fuel cells. The latest small cars, such as the Audi A2, the Smart or Citro?C3, have emissions as low as 110g.Julie Foley, an environment and transport expert at the Institute for Public Policy Research, pointed out that Japan and Germany have major green fuel research programmes. Critics point out that European car makers have already volunteered to cut the average carbon emissions in normal petrol cars to 140g by 2008. Some experts predict it could take until 2020 before hydrogen and fuel cell technology will dominate the car market. They also fear it could take many years before these cars will be attractive to a mass market and enough refuelling stations will be ready, and they want to accelerate this process. They claim the competition’s fuel efficiency targets and financial rewards are too low, since the world’s largest car makers, such as Ford, General Motors, BMW, Toyota and Honda, are investing hundreds of millions of dollars in designing zero-emission cars that run on hydrogen.Several hydrogen-powered and hydrogen fuel cell cars are already being road tested by BMW, Ford, Honda and Mercedes, and should be on sale within three to four years, albeit at very low levels.Ministers want the prize to help British engineers close the rapidly growing gap on their US and Japanese competitors. If the car uses petrol or electricity, the efficiency figure must include the global warming gases given off by refining and transporting the petrol or by generating the electricity – which can be as high as 15-20g per km.But experts are accusing the Government of being too timid.

Britain’s car makers and back-street inventors are being offered £10m in prize money in a race to design a new ultra-clean, planet-friendly car. The government-funded competition will be unveiled by the Transport Secretary, Alistair Darling, on Tuesday in the hope that it will lead to the discovery of a “green” car so cheap and popular it will rival sales of the Vauxhall Astra and Ford Fiesta. Earlier this month, a report by the Chief Inspector of Prisons found that asylum-seekers in detention centres were subjected to routine strip searches and received little help for mental health problems.Half of Yarl’s Wood has been closed since February last year after a riot by detainees.. Refugee support groups also called on the Government to investigate existing vetting procedures for detention centre staff.Group 4 said it would be discriminatory to inquire into applicants’ political affiliations.Emma Ginn, a spokeswoman for the Campaign to Stop Arbitrary Detentions at Yarl’s Wood, said: “It’s appalling that he was allowed to work with people who have already experienced persecution in their own families.”The treatment of asylum-seekers in detention centres has attracted fierce criticism. “Membership of the BNP would seem to most people to indicate a political view of immigrants and the immigrant process,” Mr Burt said.

At his interview, he was not asked by Group 4 if he had any links with racist groups.Alastair Burt, the Conservative MP for North-east Bedfordshire, has written to Beverley Hughes, the immigration minister, to demand an investigation. Mr Green was employed there between April and November 2001, when he was not a paid-up member of the BNP. The security firm Group 4 employed a British National Party member to work with asylum-seekers at a detention centre despite the party’s views on immigration.
Richard Green, who is standing as a BNP candidate in this week’s local elections, passed Group 4’s vetting procedure to become a custody officer and physical training instructor at Yarl’s Wood in Bedfordshire, Europe’s largest immigration detention facility. Now, Sedgefield and Newark and Sherwood take that unwanted title jointly, at £1,294 for a Band D property in 2003/04.. The average in Wales has gone up 155 per cent, more than other parts of Britain, but it remains lower than in England or Scotland.In England in 1993, Newcastle upon Tyne and Greenwich had the highest charges, at £792 and £783 respectively. And, as council tax is an element in the price index, it has itself helped to push even that figure up higher than it would otherwise have been.The average area tax bill for a band D property in Scotland has risen from £556 a decade ago to £1,009 in 2003/04, an increase of 81 per cent.

This compares with a 29 per cent rise in retail price inflation over that period. However, Havering, Harrow, Kingston upon Thames and Richmond upon Thames in Greater London are among the 30 authorities with the highest charges.Over the last 10 years the average area council tax bill in England for a band D property has increased by 94 per cent to £1,102, making this the first year in which the figure has been above £1,000. Westminster’s low band D rate is also partly due to its high incidence of high-priced houses in bands G and H. These have both been run by Tory councils elected on the basis of keeping costs low, and Westminster has the benefit of collecting more revenue than other boroughs from parking and other tourist-related charges. Birmingham, Leeds, Liverpool, Manchester and Newcastle upon Tyne do well on this score.”Not only have parts of London enjoyed the lowest increases in the past decade, a number of other councils in the capital have the lowest charges, led by Wandsworth and Westminster.