Generous? Town halls have seen savage cuts

■ Andrea complains about ‘footballers setting the budget’ after the government backed Man Utd and England star Marcus Rashford’s campaign to extend free school meals into the holidays (MetroTalk, Tue).

She then speaks glibly of the ‘generous budgets’ given by Whitehall to local authorities, whose job she says it is to feed these kids. Those I know in local government would tell rather of decades of penny-pinching and continuous cuts to funding.

In any case, I would much sooner that someone of real generosity and compassion made decisions about the future of our poorest rather than the privileged, well-heeled knownothings in their Westminster bubble. Gordon, Croydon

■ Funding from the government to local authorities was actually slashed by 38 per cent from 2010 to 2018. So Andrea is wrong. Neil Dance, Birmingham