It can cost as much as £600 a day to keep a young offender in a secure unit designed for children. Most youth justice resources are concentrated on the incarceration stage but, when released, children – often returning to neglectful, chaotic or addicted families – frequently revert to old behaviours because of a lack of support.

Robbie is one of these children. By age 12 he was addicted to heroin and his crimes to support his habit were legion. What better recipient for the disgust and hatred aimed at “our feral youth” than Robbie? Now 16, his crimes have landed him more than once in secure units as well as a hostel for adult offenders. His incarceration offered the perfect opportunity to get him drugs-free. What better place for freeing children from addiction? Safe, well staffed and highly resourced, secure units could do the job for kids that residential rehabilitation does for adults.

Except they don’t. A skills’ deficit when it comes to understanding drugs, plus bureaucracy and an opaque legal system mean that, despite the fact that Robbie has begged for detox, units feel more comfortable managing children’s addictions instead of treating them. Management, whatever your age, usually means one thing: methadone. This synthetic opioid is widely prescribed to keep addictions legal and drug crime under control. The problem for methadone users is that they are still drug addicts and, far from dealing with dependency, methadone fosters it.

Robbie may be a kid but, like all serious addicts, to leave heroin behind he needs intensive residential treatment, starting with detox and then moving on to the various stages of rehabilitation. Addicts need long-term counselling from specialists, help with learning to live a normal life and the love and support of other recovering addicts. Unfortunately, this treatment is not available to anyone under 18. The secure units cost a lot but they can only hold the children – they can’t help them deal with their drug problems or support them on release. There was one treatment centre for children in the UK. It closed last year.

Robbie doesn’t come from a part of the UK where there are even adult residential treatment centres for addictions, so last week I took him and his social worker around the south coast, where there are lots. He was amazed to meet professionals and addicts who understood his problems. He learned that rehabilitation is a tough option that forces the user to confront the pain that heroin has been helping him ignore. Nevertheless, he asked, with a sense of urgency, for a place in treatment. But the answer is always the same: it is illegal for adult services to treat a child.

After a remarkable display of resilience and shape-shifting in the face of bureaucracy, one centre is hoping to find Robbie a compromise programme that might not break the law. He knows that without it he will at age 18 still be drugs dependent, in jail or dead. Let’s hope the financial buck-passing ends happily for him. But what about the small but significant number of other drug-addicted kids who cost society so much?

Robbie was brought up by adults in an addicted household, he learned his addiction and criminality from adults, adults sold him drugs, he was incarcerated by adults and was sent to a hostel where he was surrounded by drug-using adults. Yet he is being denied adult treatment for his adult problem. Instead, he is given methadone like candy. Our feral youth? We made him that way and seem determined to keep him that way.

• Mark Johnson, a rehabilitated offender and former drug user, is an author and the founder of the charity User Voice.

Nearly three-quarters of family doctors surveyed by the Royal College of General Practitioners want the government to withdraw the coalition’s health and social care bill, it has emerged.

In an online poll of doctors, 1,900 out of 2,600 respondents said it was appropriate to pull the legislation even as it wends its way through the House of Lords. When asked if the college, which represents 44,000 doctors, should call for the bill to be withdrawn jointly with other medical royal colleges, more than 98% of respondents said they “strongly supported” or “supported” such an action.

The figures strengthen the hand of the RCGP chair, Clare Gerada, who wanted to assess the views of the college membership before pushing forward with her own line, which has been consistently critical of the bill.

Although the poll was self-selecting, those who answered were largely negative about the legislation. Nearly 60% said the reforms would not result in more cost-effective delivery of care and almost 90% said the reforms would increase the involvement of the private sector.

The college wants the bill to be amended so the secretary of state is explicitly responsible for the health service and the private sector cannot cherry pick services.

Gerada said: “The report stage of the bill is expected to be held in the House of Lords at the end of January, so it is timely for us to reiterate our concerns and show the government that we want to continue working with them to bring about positive change for the benefit of our patients.”

Andy Burnham, the shadow health secretary, said: “These results are devastating for Andrew Lansley. It is hard to see how he can possibly carry on with his bill in the face such overwhelming professional opposition. As we approach the first-year anniversary of the introduction of this bill into parliament, it is clear that the government’s attempts to build a professional consensus behind it have abjectly failed.

“People will ask how can plans that were meant to be based around GPs can possibly succeed when only two out of a hundred support them.”

A source close to Lansley, the health secretary, dismissed the survey, saying it was not an opinion poll and therefore “had little credibility”. The source pointed out that 6% of the doctors who replied were from Scotland, and therefore unaffected by the NHS reforms

My Cottage Kitchen Rich fruit cake with brandy

900g, £22.50. Best classic cake
I still firmly believe that the best Christmas cakes are homemade – especially if that home happens to belong to Ursula Evans of My Cottage Kitchen. The joyful smell of brandy hits me as soon as I open the tin, and the simple topping of figs, prunes and pecans sends my own festive spirits soaring after all that sugary icing. Dark, sticky and very moreish, this is the one cake I’m keeping for myself.
★★★★★

Bettys soft iced Christmas parcel cake

2.4kg, £50
From the neat, grandmotherly handwriting on the tasteful icing to the discreet spicing and delicate flavour of the cake itself, this is a brilliantly executed Christmas classic – no surprises here, but then, do you really want surprises at this time of year?
★★★★

Peyton and Byrne Christmas cake

750g, £15. Best unusual cake
This cake, by contrast, would stop sleighbound traffic with its flashy topping of redcurrants, nuts and candied orange slices. More lightly fruited sponge than dense dark fruit cake, it’s unlikely to keep as well as a traditional version, but frankly, it’s so delicious that you’re unlikely to need it to.
★★★★

Aldi luxury all over iced Christmas cake

1.2kg, £6.99. Best value cake
The mushy-pea green holly motif on top has a certain retro-chic appeal, but thankfully the cake beneath has none of the dusty desiccation of Christmas past. Generous with the mixed peel and cherries for the price too, but could do with more marzipan to really please me.
★★★

Carved Angel luxury Christmas cake

1.3kg, £20
Given my fractious relationship with cling film, this one had me at the free tin. The dome of icing on top is oddly reminiscent of a Super Mario mushroom, but the cake beneath is definitely for grown ups – rich, dark, almost bitter in flavour, it’s the festive equivalent of a double espresso.
★★★

Daylesford organic fruit and nut topped Christmas cake

1.2kg, £22.99
Oddly enough, given Daylesford’s usual dauntingly stylish standards, their un-iced cake (they also do a more elegant marzipan version) comes topped with a slightly haphazard, almost homemade jumble of fruit and nuts. So moist it crumbles beneath the knife, the cake is tangy with citrus and morello cherries – a good choice for those sugar-Scrooges who usually grumble these things are too sweet. (But seriously, it’s a cake: what do they expect?)
★★★

M&S, Collection Hand Decorated Poinsettia Cake

2.8kg, £25
If Pat Butcher made Christmas cakes, she’d be proud to put this enormous white floral number on the bar of the Queen Vic. Beneath all that glitzy icing, if you can bear to cut into it, lies a buttery, generously fruited cake richer than Pat’s own jeweller: a true festive statement piece.
★★★

Lewis and Cooper luxury fruit cake piece

250g, £3.10
This little slab, thank goodness, is an icing-free zone – and the lack of fondant isn’t the only unusual touch. Peppery with nutmeg and with a citrussy flavour that balances the sugary fruit nicely, it’s also so very small that there’s no danger you’ll have to guiltily bin the leftovers to make way for the Easter eggs. One for faint-hearted Christmas cake eaters.
★★★

The Co-operative Fully Iced Christmas Cake

907g, £8
Christmas is a time to throw normal rules of taste out the window, so I’m happy to admit the glorious gold decorations on this cake gladden my gaudy heart – although said icing could definitely do with being a bit thinner. They lose points in my book for not using a mix of vine fruits (what’s a Christmas cake without currants?), but the heat of the nutmeg is a nice change from the usual generic mixed spice blend.
★★

Lewis and Cooper gluten-free luxury fruit cake slab

500g, £6.15
I really want to like this one more than I do – on the positive side, it’s got a lovely rich flavour, and the ground almonds provide a pleasing nuttiness which almost makes up for the lack of marzipan. Sadly, however, neither I nor my specially-recruited gluten-intolerant tester could warm to the slightly grainy texture, even after two slices. A missed opportunity.
★★

National Trust for Tescos

1.1kg, £12
I can’t help objecting to a branded cake, even if the National Trust’s oak-leaf motif is a very tasteful sort of a logo – and especially when the cake in question contains no alcohol whatsoever. Moist but a bit dull, to claim that it’s “inspired by a National Trust recipe” is to bring that organisation’s fine collection of tearooms into disrepute. Make a donation instead and buy something else.
★