Charities worry they could break the proposed election campaign laws by accident, through their work with MPs. Photograph: Alamy
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Today's top SocietyGuardian stories
• Online trolling of women is linked to domestic violence, say campaigners
• How domestic violence spreads online: 'I felt like he was watching me'
• James Bulger killer reportedly freed from prison again
• NHS England to publish quarterly lists of 'never events'
• Large retail chains urged to pay levy to help revive high streets
• Bus test case looms as Tyne & Wear seeks to wrestle back routes
• Is Britain a nation of addicts?
• Lucy Powell: Childcare can help drive the economy – forget the big boys' toys
• 'Watching the girls develop in confidence is amazing'
All today's SocietyGuardian stories
In tomorrow's SocietyGuardian section
• Edinburgh council's decision to inspect how much a person drinks and smokes when awarding discretionary housing payments, sadly, comes as no surprise, says Frances Ryan
• The personal element in transacting public business is vital - many public services cannot be digitised or rationalised, writes David Walker
• Anne Perkins argues that fairness commissions are easy to sign up to but harder to make agents of real change
• The Conservative MP Charles Walker, who came out as an obsessive compulsive, tells Hélène Mulholland that he won't rest until mental health discrimination ends
• If the NHS had targets to meet that made patients better informed about end-of-life care services, perhaps my mum would have had a 'good' death, writes Alison Benjamin
• The best healthcare assistants do a remarkable job on psychiatric wards. What they lack is professional recognition and adequate pay, says Clare Allen
• Claudia Cahalane reports on safe houses which offer sanctuary to young gay people who are rejected by their families and face threats of physical abuse
• Arne Kvernvik Nilsen, the departing governor of a Norwegian prison with a reoffending rate of just 16%, tells Erwin James the secrets of his success
Jobs of the week
• Programme policy manager, Action Aid: "You will have worked on shared advocacy and research projects, effectively lobbied civil servants and government officials and gained an understanding of UK policy institutions."
• Assistant director, policy and research, Barnardo's
• Cumbria safeguarding adults board, independent chair, Cumbria county council
• Senior practitioner, information and assessment, London Borough of Hackney
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• It's touted as an easier way onto the housing ladder, but shared ownership is mired in worrying legal flaws for buyers, warns Giles Peaker
• Christine Tomkins asks, should we change our attitude towards 'never events'?
• Adoptive parents who take on children with disabilities or behavioural difficulties can now access extra training, writes Louise Tickle
• Debbie Andalo has top tips for applying for the new-look civil service fast stream programme
On my radar ...
• The lobbying bill. Andrew Sparrow is providing rolling coverage in his Politics live blog as MPs debate the bill. Ed Miliband says it will put charities in jeopardy, reports Rowena Mason and Kevin Barron, chairman of the Commons standards committee has suggested MPs could fall foul of lobbying bill.
Writing for Comment is free, Polly Toynbee says the proposed legislation will save corporate PRs but silence the protesters:
The government says charities are over-reacting, but that view is punctured by a lethal analysis from the Electoral Commission sent to every MP. Though it will have to enforce the law, the commission was not consulted on the bill that landed as a bolt from the blue. It says it has been given far too much discretion in interpreting "political campaigning", so its decisions are bound to be challenged in law. The controls "will be impossible to enforce", and the commission warns the bill greatly widens the range of activities that count as electoral costs – to include rallies, events, media work, polling research, transport and staff costs for groups never previously regulated. One big danger for risk-averse charities: it will not be an organisation's "intent" but the "effect of the expenditure" that sweeps them into electoral law, so they can never know what might be challenged. The commission's warning should alarm every MP.
A Guardian editorial described it as "an inadequate and dangerous bill that reflects the worst and most partisan instincts of the governing parties and has inevitably encouraged the worst and most partisan responses of the opposition in return – while doing nothing effective about lobbying."
Elsewhere Mark Wallace, executive editor of the ConservativeHome blog, says it poses a threat to the independence of blogs like ConservativeHome. He writes:
This isn't just about blogs - though for obvious reasons we believe the blogosphere should not be strangled by regulatory red tape. The Bill is so loose in its language and so vague in its drafting that anyone who spends over £5,000 on anything that can be in any way said to potentially affect an election will be caught up in the rules it lays out.
Remarkably, it takes no account of the intention of the organisation when judging whether its actions are regulated. If you print posters and organise public meetings on a local issue, with the result that one or more local candidates in an electon picks your issue up - even if you never asked them to - that victory could be interpreted as meaning your campaign might influence an election result. Overnight, you would become subject to a strict and complex system of red tape, with serious sanctions for breaching it.
• In a piece for the New Statesman, Ryan Shorthouse, a researcher for the Social Market Foundation, argues that it is worth exploring how a person's wider family can help improve family incomes:
Already, a significant minority of households receive regular financial support from their wider family, predominantly their parents. It is estimated that about 1 in 6 households regularly receive financial help from their parents with the average received in one year about £1,400. The national annual flow of such transfers is estimated to be about £1.2bn. But this undervalues the scale of transfers taking place: it misses out those who receive money through inheritance, which is estimated to be about £30bn a year.
• An interesting post on the Long Finance blog by Chris Yapp asking when is a property bubble not a bubble:
The main argument in the media against the notion that we are in a property bubble is that volumes of transactions remain historically low. That is certainly the case. However, bubbles are driven by value and volume. The top of the bubble is when volumes and values are both out of kilter with the real economy. I would argue that we are in a value bubble, but not yet a volume bubble.
• The College of Occupational Therapists has launched a free online toolkit which gives expert advice to help care home residents do the activities they enjoy. More than 1,200 care home managers, staff, commissioners, occupational therapists and relatives and carers have signed up to support more activity in care homes and pledge to use the toolkit.
Other news
• Independent: Payday lender Wonga rakes in over £1m a week
• Independent: Property prices rise at fastest rate since 2007
• Independent: NHS hospitals to be offered 'gold standard' mark on care for elderly patients
• BBC: Call for rare conditions drugs fund
• BBC: Loneliness of dementia revealed
• Telegraph: NSPCC - 'Girls think they have to act like porn stars to be liked by boys'
• Public Finance: Aleos accused of siphoning funds intended for charities
• Inside Housing: Housing group staff to strike this week
• LocalGov.co.uk: Bedroom tax 'breaks communities'
• Civil Society: Top charity earners work at healthcare organisations, finds new survey
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