Taxing idea

how the NHS should be funded.

The old adage of “anything that is free will be abused” applies to the NHS, which is being abused by its customers, its staff, and its management.

We could follow the French system, where 20 per cent of the funding comes from those who use their Health Service.

There are the usual safeguards for pregnant women, the old, the young and the longterm sick.

In France, 17 per cent of the population visits the doctor every month, in the UK the figure is 37 per cent .

If there was a charge of £10 for anyone going into A&E without an ambulance or a doctor’s line, the queues would vanish.

This, again, will not happen as it is too radical a step for our politicians, who want to retain their seats at the next election.

JAMES MACINTYRE Clarendon Road, Linlithgow We should not merely “reform” or “overhaul” business rates. Such a tax, along with Employers’ National Insurance and Corporation Tax, should be abolished.

The UK is supposedly a welleducated mature democracy. As individuals, we should pay for the policies we vote for from our own pockets, not partly via business milchcows which have no votes.

Adopting “no taxation without representation” could result in these levies being reduced and abolished over, say, a five-year transition (but genuine economic services benefiting firms would, of course, remain chargeable).

The total sums involved nationally would be added by law to wage and salary rates, state pensions, and certain welfare benefits, based on annual or regional scales; and we would then pay the necessary increased taxes as individuals ourselves. Obviously the details would be more complicated than can be covered here, but that should be the objective.

Moreover, an army of private and public sector bureaucrats would then be released from shuffling around the national wealth (inevitably, both inefficiently and inequitably) into more productive wealth-creating employment.

JOHN H BIRKETT Horseleys Park, St Andrews