The unedifying spectacle of a Conservative Government penalising enterprise and aspiration

SIR – Under this Government, there has been an attack on wealth and aspiration, compounded by the increase in corporation tax. Today’s Conservatives are further to the Left than Tony Blair’s Labour.

High earners are being targeted, specifically those on between £100,000 and £125,140. These people already lose their personal allowance on a tapered basis, giving a marginal rate of 60 per cent on earnings in that bracket. Now anyone making over £100,000 will not get the new childcare benefit. The Institute for Fiscal Studies suggests that a parent earning just over £100,000 would need another £35,000 to maintain a similar rate of take-home pay to someone earning just under £100,000.

This is not Conservatism. A true Conservative government would lower taxes on families to help them afford childcare.

Andrew Holgate Wilmslow, Cheshire

SIR – The best way to help people with the cost of living is to make work pay, while ensuring that those who are unable to work are protected.

A true Conservative government would reduce personal taxes, thereby increasing the amount individuals take home and letting them choose how they spend it. Endless new schemes to increase benefits and allowances just add implementation costs.

Roger Cousins Beaconsfield, Buckinghamshire

SIR – Labour would reverse Jeremy Hunt’s abolition of the limit on pension savings, except for NHS doctors and consultants. Clearly it believes that public-sector employees are allowed to be well-off in retirement, but privatesector employees (who create the wealth and pay the taxes to provide the hugely inflated public-sector pensions) are not worthy. It beggars belief. Christine Brown Richmond, Surrey

SIR – Mr Hunt’s reforms encourage people who have up to £1.07 million (quite a lot of money) in their pensions to put more money into funds, which invest to a substantial extent abroad.

Meanwhile, the corporation tax rise encourages successful businesses to move abroad (where those pension funds invest). How does that benefit Britain and its young, who need work in dynamic, profitable businesses?

Sir James Pickthorn Bt London SW6

SIR – Miriam Cates MP (“The Treasury is nationalising childhood”, Comment, March 16) is right that parents should have a genuine choice over how to care for their very young children – though she does seem to suggest that mothers staying at home to look after their child until they are two or three would be best.

The extension of free hours to under-threes would reduce childcare costs for young parents, giving them the choice to return to work.

Ms Cates argues that parents do not stay at home because of money, and current childcare subsidies have not been an incentive for them to work. She cannot also argue that the Budget proposals will pressurise parents to put their children in childcare.

Childcare subsidies are voluntary. They do not disincentivise or take away from stay-at-home parents, although stay-at-home parents do deserve extra support. To provide this, the Government should not subsidise childcare less, but enhance statutory maternity and paternity pay and the transferable tax allowance, and allow parents to frontload child benefit.

Ryan Shorthouse Chief Executive, Bright Blue London EC4

SIR – Mel Brice (Letters, March 16) wants “phones, tablets and the like” banned from Parliament. In the mid-1950s I attended a parliamentary meeting as an expert witness. Many of the members present were writing or reading letters. Times have changed, but the attitudes of MPS have not.

Charles Mccartan Reigate, Surrey