Health chief’s key role leading hospitals out of difficult times

IT seems to me that in so many organisations – local authorities, NHS, the police, banks and commercial organisations to name but a few – top people have manoeuvred themselves into a position which allows them to determine their own remuneration.

So we see six-figure salaries, million pound bonuses, golden hellos and golden goodbyes (the latter so often as not for catastrophic failure). There is a complete lack of control of these abuses.

A similar lack of control is the failure of government to devise tax legislation which ensures that all, and major companies especially, pay their fair share of tax.

These are the two great financial wrongs which have been allowed to develop in recent years, with governments being unwilling or unable to put them to rights. Will the next election allow the voters to have a say on either?

From: Nigel F Boddy, Fife Road, Darlington,.

THE Government has tried quite sensibly to limit the amount people can claim on state benefits (Yorkshire Post, September 10).

That must be right. It cannot be fair to ask the taxpayer to pay huge sums in housing benefit for central London prestigious city centre properties to unemployed people who then can never afford to take a job and come 
off benefits as long as they live there.

Why then are we paying vast sums in public sector pensions? Can we have an identical cap on the payouts to top civil servants, local government workers, the BBC and the currently nationalised banks please?

Parliament can pass whatever law it likes and certainly has the power to overturn the expensive ludicrous retirement packages given out recently in local government, the Civil Service, 
the BBC and the state-owned banks.

Some of these people are taking public sector pensions in their early fifties.

While one might justify that for firemen and policemen it is not fair to do that in general, when the rest of us are having our state retirement pension deferred until we are 69 or 70. Is this what we pay tax and National Insurance for?

From: Don Burslam, Elm Road, Dewsbury Moor, Dewsbury.

THE Government is always going on about saving money so why don’t they start with the cost of our politics? I noted the other day that the French Assembly managed with 570 deputies and as France is much larger than the UK, you do wonder why we need 650 MPs.

Both countries have a bicameral system, i.e. an upper and a lower house and membership of our House of Lords is in the high hundreds and rising.

No wonder it is so popular when they get no less than £300 a day just for turning up.

This represents an annual income of £109,000 and the recipients are mostly well-heeled anyway.

To allow such a self-serving system to persist is an insult to all the long-term unemployed.

The day this gravy train grinds to a halt will be the day politicians regain some credibility in the world.

From: AW Clarke, Wold Croft, Sutton on Derwent, York.

WATCHING the proceedings of the Public Accounts Committee hearings regarding the debacle which has recently occurred 
at the BBC, I could not help 
noticing the sleek and glossy appearance of those appearing from the BBC hierarchy.

It struck me forcibly how beautifully booted and suited they were in contrast to the hot, sweaty and exhausted appearance of Jeremy Bowen 
in Syria and previously that of Orla Guerin when she has reported from various hot-spots in the Middle East.

Does it occur to other BBC licence payers how very 
cosy life is at the top for 
the senior executives of 
the BBC?

While others risk their lives 
to bring us the news, they 
pay themselves vast salaries 
for sitting in their offices 
working out ways of 
further increasing their remuneration.