Today’s front pages all offer different stories. It was old news yesterday, but AD still manages to squeeze out another front-page lead on the power struggle developing for the Labour leadership: “Where are all the Labour women?” asks its headline, reporting a call for the party’s women to join the leadership contest.

However, it’s the smaller front-page headline that grabs the attention: “Patients filmed without permission in VUmc”, it says, referring to Amsterdam’s VU University Medical Centre hospital.

Smile: you’re on camera!
We’re told that 35 hidden fly-on-the-wall cameras recorded everything that went on at the hospital’s accident and emergency department for a fortnight at the beginning of this month. The footage was destined for a new reality television programme.

The cameras were installed by the Eyeworks production company with the hospital’s permission - but were used without the permission of the people recorded.

Patients told doctors their most intimate stories, blissfully unaware that Eyeworks staff were watching and listening in. Only afterwards were patients asked if they wanted to participate in the show. It appears some weren’t informed at all that they had been filmed.

The hospital says it regrets what happened but argues it behaved properly in the majority of cases: “All the footage of people who didn’t want to participate has been destroyed”. AD quotes a medical law expert interviewed on last night’s Nieuwsuur television programme: “This is without doubt a breach of medical confidentiality”. What a surprise.

Mortgage relief down, rents up
“Top economists call for housing market shake-up”, is de Volkskrant’s headline today. It reports the deafening chorus of “almost all those with knowledge of or interest in the housing market” calling for the government to radically reduce the tax relief on mortgage interest payments. Conveyance tax should be scrapped, they go on to say, and subsidised public housing rents raised.

The problem with the Netherlands’ generous tax breaks on mortgage payments is that they encourage home owners to keep loans as high as possible for as long as possible. The resulting debt - 600 billion euros according to the paper - threatens the country’s economic stability and is risky for home owners themselves. The government loses revenue into the bargain.

Even though the touted reform will not actually produce government savings for a decade, an economist tells de Volkskrant that the economy still stands to benefit in the short term. “The present uncertainty in the housing market lowers consumer confidence and so slows down economic growth,” he explains.

Today’s Trouw puts a different spin on the story, picking up on government plans to penalise people on high incomes who stay in subsidised low-rent accommodation. Housing associations and local councils will be able to slap an extra 5 percent on the rentals paid by families with incomes of over 42,000 euros a year.

The increase comes on top of a recent across-the-board hike in public housing rents. Ministers hope the latest legislation, which still has to go through parliament, will help to break the stagnation in the housing sector and get the market moving again.

Debt pictured in graphs
Moving away from housing, but staying with money – or the lack of it, nrc.next shamelessly indulges its penchant for diagrams in a piece about mounting Dutch debt. “We’re 10,112,000,000 euros in debt”, screams the headline – accompanied by no less four highly colourful graphs illustrating the point.

“Last year, the Dutch borrowed more, were deeper in debt and got their credit cards out more,” nrc.next tells us. And this while countries, banks and other institutions are being told to reduce the amounts they owe.

We’ve apparently been taking out personal loans and upping our credit limits in order to spoil ourselves with holidays, televisions, cars and the like. The paper says it’s the first time Dutch consumer debt has topped the 10-billion-euro mark. It reminds us that, when records were started in 1970, it was reckoned the traditionally thrifty Dutch owed the equivalent of just 24 million euros.

Organisations involved in helping people manage their debt are sounding the alarm. Globally, private debt – owed by households, banks and companies - has been falling since it hit record heights in 2008. The question, nrc.next says, is whether we’ll continue to buck this more cautious trend through 2012.

Social media death
Finally, the front page of De Telegraaf reminds us that carnival celebrations in the predominantly Roman Catholic south of the Netherlands finished on Tuesday. Yesterday, Catholics celebrated Ash Wednesday which marks the beginning of the fasting month of Lent leading up to Easter.

The paper says the traditional fasting of yesteryear - for example children saying no to sweets while their parents keep wine bottles corked – is giving way to a new trend in abstinence. Young members of the faithful are turning off their Twitter or Facebook pages to indulge in “social-media fasting”.

De Telegraaf thinks one Twitterer summed up the magnitude of this new kind of sacrifice when they called it a “temporary self-imposed social media death”. Some of us have never been alive.