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The tax on “nice neighbourhoods” is being planned as part of the council tax revaluation, with proposals expected within weeks.

Secret manuals by the Valuation Office Agency, an arm of HM Revenue and Customs, used in the controversial 2005 council tax revaluation in Wales, reveal that many homes near shops and public transport, with pleasant views and in quiet locations were penalised, with higher council tax bills. There are now plans for the same system to be rolled out across England.
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The handbooks were obtained by the Conservatives using parliamentary questions to force the Government to publish them for the first time.

The plan follows revelations in this newspaper that people who live in areas with good schools, clean streets and low crime rates face big increases in their council tax bills.

Home owners and tenants will be charged hundreds, and possibly thousands, of pounds extra if they live in a locality deemed by ministers and officials to be more desirable than others. The rises could be as great as four times, sending some bills from £1,000 to £4,000.

The living ocean was transformed into a dead zone. Scientists conducted a submarine survey and found only the bodies of crabs and marine worms scattered across the ocean floor. There were no signs of any fish. Nothing had survived the cataclysm.

It’s a feeling shared by many Americans who know that simply working hard isn’t enough anymore. To get ahead, a 70-hour work week is the new standard. What little spare time is left is often divvied up among relationships, kids and sleep.

The findings have been compiled by Dr Aric Sigman, a psychologist who has previously written about the effects of television on the viewer. His report, analysing 35 different scientific studies carried out into television and its effect on the viewer, has identified 15 negative effects he claims can be blamed on watching television.

Among the most disturbing findings are the links he claims to have found between long hours of television viewing and cancer, autism and Alzheimer’s.

The effects on children watching TV have been well publicised in Britain. Fears of a timebomb of obesity have sparked a wave of ministerial initiatives to promote sport and tackle the couch-potato lifestyle.

However, today’s report suggests the consequences of television are far more serious. They range from myopia and attention deficit disorder to diabetes, autism, Alzheimer’s and a generation whose brains are being numbed by on-screen imagery.

His report, published in the respected Biologist magazine, claims the problem with television lies in the length of time we spend in front of the set. For most people, watching television now takes up more time than any other single activity except work and sleep. According to the British Audience Research Bureau, by the age of 75 the average Briton will have spent more than 12 years of their life watching television.

Dr Sigman, an associate fellow of the British Psychological Society and author of Remotely Controlled: How Television Is Damaging Our Lives, said arguments over how educational programmes are were a distraction. He said: “The medical studies I have looked at are about the medium of television, irrespective of the programmes children are watching. It is the number of hours and the age at which they start which produces the biological effects. It is because of the medium, not the message, that these effects are occurring.”

Dr Sigman’s research draws from studies by groups including the American Academy of Paediatrics, Cornell University, Stanford University Medical Centre, the British Market Research Bureau and medical publications such as the Lancet and the Journal of Sleep Research.

Skip Rizzo, a psychologist at the University of Southern California, has helped create a program that simulates life in the war zone for Iraq veterans suffering from conditions such as post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).

The ground-breaking treatment allows soldiers to experience the sights, sounds and even the smells of a war-zone, courtesy of wrap-around goggles linked to a startlingly realistic virtual world.

The idea is to re-introduce veterans to the experiences that have inflicted mental scars until gradually they are no longer haunted by the memories, a long-established therapeutic technique known as “exposure therapy.”

“What we do is put somebody in a virtual Iraq but at a level where initially there will be minimal anxiety,” Rizzo said at the American Association for the Advancement of Science’s annual meeting.

“Say for example their trauma event was being blown up in a Humvee — we might start them off just standing in the desert next to a Humvee.

“Gradually we would put them in the Humvee and have them start driving down a desert road. Eventually over the course of the therapy you introduce elements that increase the realism — bombs going off, things blowing up.

“It’s a gradual exposure to a realistic environment which you can’t really do just through imagination.”

Soldiers undergoing the treatment can be placed in a variety of situations — either as the passenger, driver or gunner in an armored vehicle or as a soldier on a foot patrol walking through an Iraqi city.

“You could be walking down one street and a child will come up to greet you, you could be walking down another street and a car explodes,” Rizzo said.

The virtual Iraq experience is designed to be completely immersive.

Fake aromas — including gunpowder, burning smoke, diesel fuel, body odors, exotic spices and roast mutton — are wafted under the patient’s nose.

The boom of bombs is simulated by giant speakers placed under the patient’s chair. “If you’ve ever stopped at a set of traffic lights and a kid has pulled up next to you playing rap music and you can feel your car shaking — it’s the same principle,” Rizzo said.