Letter: Dependency culture

Sir: I was dismayed to see a paragraph about the Clay Cross councillors' refusal to increase council house rents in the early 1970s included in your article "Sorry history of corruption in local government" (20 December).

Those councillors were not corrupt. They stood by their principles at great personal cost. Their behaviour may have been Canute-like in the face of the tide of history then, but they deserve honour, not opprobrium. Some of us think they were right.

Keeping social housing rents down to levels which can be paid by families with only one earner in the lower income groups without means-tested housing benefit is the best, probably the only, way of tackling the dependency culture.

Councillor TUFFY TURNER

Mid Suffolk District Council

Battisford,

Suffolk