Letter: Taxes I would willingly pay

Sir: I am horribly busy at the moment, but I would otherwise like to start a movement in favour of higher taxes on the well paid, of whom I am one. In short, I will gladly pay up if at least part of the proceeds could be used:

1. To deal with people sleeping in cardboard boxes all over central London and in this institute's doorways. How many of these people genuinely need help? I would willingly pay for someone with the time to find out and

the resources to do something about it;

2. To help young people, for whom discretionary grants are now rarely available, who have struggled with all manner of difficulties to qualify for further education and have no money to pay the fees or, once over that hurdle, feed themselves properly during their course of study;

3. To persuade - and this might prove difficult - government departments and other official bodies to reduce the glossiness of the documents with which they shower people such as me, and to improve their quality. This would increase the prospects of those documents being read before joining others in the wastepaper basket, of which I have recently had to acquire an outsize version.

Yours faithfully,

PETER NEWSAM

Director

Institute of Education

University of London

London, WC1

4 January