IN?REPLY to Mr Freshwater's letter (Review, Jan 14, 2011), decrying the coalition's attempt to sort out the mess that 13 years of Labour has left us in, I would like to remind him that year upon year my community charge increased until it had doubled along with a load of other taxes.

Then we find out that public bodies who we believed were working on our behalf, such as the upper echelons of local government, the NHS trusts, the BBC, to name but a few, have been paying themselves between £100,000 and £200,000 a year in wages.

To then add insult to injury we find out that our glorious Labour leaders decide that a large proportion of the welfare budget should not go to the poor or unemployed themselves but to well paid bureaucrats to think up endless streams of training initiatives that hardly ever resulted in jobs for the unemployed. The only people to do well out of unemployment are those who administer the funds.

Funny I never saw any of these jobs advertised down the Jobcentre. Poverty could and should have been eradicated with that amount of money Mr Freshwater. You talk about cleaners in hospitals on poor wages working for private firms. Labour and the heads of the NHS trusts had 13 years to rectify that state of affairs, but as usual once in power, the poor and unemployed were forgotten about. While the people you expect me and other employed in the private sector to feel sympathy for lived on the fat of the land and spent my taxes on their comfortable jobs and fat pensions and wages they threaten those struggling to pay their community charges with prison. And they call the Tories the party of the rich!

I suppose you've conveniently forgotten about Mr Blair with his millions and John Prescott accepting a peerage! I for one, think that in the interests of the UK as a whole, and of restoring trust between the private and public sectors that those in the public domain who earn more than say, £35,000 a year should have their wages scrutinised by a government appointed committee and if they fail to convince they are worth that amount they will have to accept a wage cut or redundancy. That would be fair would it not Mr Freshwater? Especially now the tap of the taxpayer money feeding the trough of the greedy is about to be turned off.

One thing I can't quite get my head around is the fact that you call yourself the director of a charity and then proceed to call volunteers, people who spend their spare time with collecting tins or the Salvation Army maybe; mugs, for doing it for free because others are paid to do it. That's not a very charitable thing to say about good caring people is it?

Unfortunately I expect very little will change because of vested interests of all persuasions but it would be nice to think that they will change one day.

– M. Pearson, Littledean Hill Road, Cinderford.