Letter: Green taxation

Sir: If green taxes have questionable credentials (article, 29 December) it is because they have at best been misused in the UK so far. The major green tax in this country - the levy on motor fuel - has nothing to do with green taxation at all. It is merely a source of government revenue, with none of the resources raised being targeted at mitigating the effects of motoring on the planet.

Truly hypothecated green taxation offers a method by which government can fully enforce the principle that "the polluter pays" and in the process give a boost to energy-saving and waste-minimising industries.

MARK ELTRINGHAM

Egglescliffe, Teesside

Benefit cuts

Sir: Proposals - albeit by civil servants who may or may not be thinking the unthinkable - to cut industrial injury payments, abolish such benefits for existing claimants and pass industrial injury benefit schemes over to private sector administrators appear a recipe for disaster rather than revival in our economy ("Blunkett's disquiet", 22 December).

The Health and Safety Executive's economists estimated in the 1990s that up to the equivalent of one year's total economic growth in the UK was lost each year because of poor health and safety in the workplace.

Prevention is always better than cure. A major way to contribute to national prosperity and job creation would be to cut the appalling UK toll of death and disease in the workplace: far more effective than cutting the benefits of those injured and made ill by their work.

Professor ANDREW WATTERSON

Director

Centre for Occupational and Environmental Health

De Montfort University

Leicester

Funds for the Dome

Sir: Mick Fickling's letter (30 December) gives the impression that the Millennium Experience is being funded from tax revenues. This is simply not the case.

In fact, the Experience is not receiving any money from the