Letters: Olympics

You report that rooms needed by dignitaries, officials, media and sponsors for the Olympics have been greatly overestimated and this has resulted in an enormous rise in the price of accommodation (30 January).

I detect a commonality with all that is wrong in corporate Britain at the moment. The bosses reserve the cream for themselves and their cronies, the price is picked up by the consumer or taxpayer and the workers, in this instance the athletes, are nowhere when it comes to apportioning the rewards.

Derek Brundish

Horsham, West Sussex

I do not share your grief for the hotel industry's fate this summer. The massive price hikes are down to hoteliers' opportunistic greed and not the alleged block overbooking by Locog.

There is no justification for charging the 150 per cent more than last year – I doubt the poorly paid staff will be getting any more. Charging more than twice as much for 80 per cent occupancy will easily bring in more than 90 per cent would at the original price.

Mike Margetts

Rugby

Can someone tell me what the Olympics will do for us here in South Lakes? Despite the Minister for Sport announcing billions to promote public participation in sport, two of our pools have closed recently and our main leisure centre in Kendal is suffering massive grant cuts this year from both the district and county councils.

In Olympic year we will therefore have less access to sports facilities than ever before. In addition the county council is reviewing the budget for schools' access to swimming lessons, meaning that children whose parents are unable to afford private swimming lessons would be at greater risk of drowning.

Perhaps the Minister or Sport would like to grant us a small portion of that billion pound investment to keep what we've got already – never mind promote anything new.

Karen Lloyd

Kendal, Cumbria

Might not an acceptable solution to the uproar over bank executives' bonuses be that the bonuses are paid to the Olympic Games site management body, thus enabling them to refuse the £7m to be paid by Dow Chemicals for the Olympic stadium "curtain"? This would lift a cloud hanging over the London Games, the public's anger would be assuaged and the bank executives' faces saved from public humiliation.

Richard Hampton

Staplehurst, Kent

Big city mayors should be just the start

Steve Richards, in his article on elected mayors (26 January), is absolutely right when he says that this represents a major redistribution of power; it is "localism" in action. It's a welcome start but goes nowhere near far enough.

If elected mayors are the way forward for a dozen of our leading cities then what is the case for not extending them to our smaller cities and provincial towns? Our cities can be engines for growth, but many of our urban areas, such as the one I represent, are too far away from one to benefit. We need dynamic local leadership with power, authority and a clear popular mandate in all our towns and cities.

Local government has seen its powers and responsibilities progressively reduced for the past 30 years, and, as Steve Richards correctly points out, few people can name their local leader.

Councils already have power to instigate a local referendum to decide whether or not an elected mayor should be introduced in their area. Sadly many local politicians see the move to elected mayors as a threat to the cosy situation whereby two parties exchange power every few years, so will not risk a referendum; voters can initiate one but the threshold is too high and few people can devote time to such a campaign.

All parties seem too cautious; first advocating mayors then stepping back. I believe that once a few more are in place it will open the floodgates and trigger demands from elsewhere.Far better, and much quicker, would be for the Government to spread the benefits and extend their policy throughout the country.

Martin Vickers MP

(Cleethorpes, C)

House of Commons

After reading "Exposed: taxman's 'illegal' war against Britain's small businesses" (13 January), I thought you might be interested to know that they are pursuing a parallel policy on personal tax. While many big earners still route pay offshore with impunity, HMRC has decided it would rather concentrate on parish clerks.

My wife has been our parish clerk for 10 years on an honorarium of £750 a year, which she declares on her tax form each year. It gets taxed at her marginal rate so the government gets extra money with no increase in paperwork.

HMRC decreed that even the smallest parish councils, with no full-time employees, would have to either have to spend hours struggling with PAYE regulations or else pay a commercial payroll service at a time when there is pressure to reduce all public spending. I would guess that many small charities are faced with the same new burden.

It is difficult to see how the kind of people who volunteer to be parish clerks get to the top of the list of high-risk tax avoiders when decisions are made about allocating scarce compliance resources.

It now costs the village more than double to replace my wife after she decided that the job left too little time for family and other activities.

John Kennett

South Warnborough, Hampshire

Enough banker bonus bashing

While we're glad to see Stephen Hester bow to public pressure over his £1m share bonus, I think it is time to take a break from banker bonus bashing. As joint CEO of one of the UK's most successful privately owned financial services IT consultancies, I can assure you neither board nor senior partners will be taking any increased pay or bonuses this year.

We could: we were more profitable again in 2011 than 2010 – but our profits will either be going to grow the business by 25 per cent this year, or will go direct to our 250 staff, or, to the tune of about £20,000, to our work with disadvantaged London teenagers.

It's time to put RBS in proportion and focus on the exports and increased employment that originate from owner-managed firms throughout the UK.

Jeremy Ward

Excelian Ltd, London EC1

I bank with RBS and it seems to me that Stephen Hester is doing a really good job in salvaging the wreck. Presumably he accepted the task on a contract which included bonus payments agreed with the shareholders. Yet our chorus of political leaders out-chirped each other in demanding that he should give them up.

Might we therefore hope that in due course these brave political leader chaps will demand similar concessions from the second-rate Premier League footballers who would barely spit on the pitch for the meagre amount Hester has given up?

Phil Keeley

Woodstock, Oxfordshire

If you were a senior professional person being paid a handsome salary wouldn't a tip, even a very large one, be a bit demeaning?

Susan Alexander

Frampton Cotterell, Gloucestershire

Euro row: leave the Nazis out of it

Mary Ann Seighart's analysis of the eurozone's development and present difficulties was excellent (30 January) but I am appalled that she should seek to bolster her arguments by reviving memories of the atrocities the Nazis carried out in Greece.

As a serviceman from 1940 to 1946 I can well remember that to hate Germany came as naturally as breathing to virtually the whole population of Britain. But Ms Seighart would not have to go back too far back into history to find acts of aggression against other peoples that many European nations, including ourselves, have good reason to be ashamed of.

But surely no nation in history has more comprehensively exorcised its past and atoned for its vast baggage of sins than modern Germany. Of course, cultural differences between northern European nations and southern are varied and numerous, but perhaps the only fault we could find with Germans in recent years was their propensity to bag the loungers on Spanish beaches.

JOHN SCASE

Andover, Hampshire

Old people in 'mansions'

Judith Steiner (letter,: 24 January) ask whether it is fair to impose a "mansion tax" that would force elderly people out of their homes when, because of vagaries in the property market, they find themselves living in a house worth more than £2m.

I would have thought it possible to release equity in such a property sufficient to allow any elderly person to see out their days in their family home. This does not look to me any more unfair than the position of the council tenant down the road who may have similarly cared for and raised a family for the past 40 years, and paid rent all of that time, and does not expect any windfall profit.

John Turner

London N1

Footballers in the closet

With the news that there have only been two "out" gay footballers in the world, the late Justin Fashanu and the Swedish footballer Anton Hysén (who plays for Utsiktens BK in Gothenburg), surely it would be a good idea for FIFA to "twin" with another international organisation with a similar antediluvian record on attitudes to sexuality.

Might I suggest the Catholic Church is a natural fit? With its stone-age views on sex, women and gays it could, perhaps, consider some kind of sponsorship of national football teams worldwide.

Henry Page

Newhaven, East Sussex

Go with the flow

Professor Babinsky is right about the physics of flight (Steve Connor, 25 January), but almost 50 years out of date. Steve Kline of Stanford University showed the same thing in a brilliant short movie produced for engineering students in the 1960s, entitled Flow Visualization, that I remember using for many years at the University of Southampton.

Chris Morfey

(Emeritus Professor of Engineering, University of Southampton)

Leicester

Sound advice

Noisy cinemas (letter, 24 January) are ubiquitous. I recently saw what I remembered from previous screenings as Jean Vigo's lyrical and peaceful 1934 L'Atalante. I was at the popcornless National Film Theatre, but even there, in an environment dedicated to the art of the cinema, my trusty homemade cotton-wool earplugs were needed to reduce the aural assault to a manageable level.

Sue Prickett

London WC1

Next stage

Professor David Head states (letter, 30 January) that dramatisations of other people's stories (novels in modern parlance) are not "real" plays and do not give the public an authentic theatrical experience. That's told that old fraud Shakespeare then.

Jan Cook

South Nutfield, Surrey

Obvious step

"Bad news for fashionistas: high heels do ruin the way you walk" (28 January). I suppose that must be why men don't wear them.

Kate Francis

Bristol