SIR – Mr [George] Osborne typed in ‘welfare’ to his political sat nav and delivered a speech defending his reforms and describing his vision.

However, there were a few conspicuous items missing.

He presented the Welfare Bill as if it mainly related to people who are unemployed, as if by turning that around it will be honey for tea.

He didn’t mention retirement pension once, which costs the country 10 times more than we pay the unemployed.

No Government wants to issue itself its own P45 by messing with the pivotal pensioner vote.

Wealthy retired folk can keep their heating payment while the working age poor and their children stay cold and their uprating is protected inrrespective of whether they have one, two, or three pensions, sackcloth or silk.

Nor did he mention that we squander millions of pounds every single day on the European Union.

He talked about housing benefit as if there was a national scale crisis of people costing thousands of pounds per week to idle about in mansions.

He didn’t mention the fact that decades of selling off and under-investment in social housing is responsible both for the scandalous waiting list numbering millions and the huge housing benefit bill of billions which his reforms will not address.

Indeed it is likely to rise with the present and predicted increase in house prices which always drives up rents.

The poor have not caused the economic crisis and making more people poorer and demoralising the nation will not return this country to the past industrial glories or any level of meaningful improvement.

Unlike in the post-war era, and terrifying evidence of Britain’s diminished place is that practically everything one buys is made somewhere else and it is too late now to reclaim that ‘workshop of the world’ status. Yet we need to become a major player more than ever now the population is so huge and living longer.

Bigger than the rush to reform should be every effort to inject consumer confidence, and enable borrowing for business, rather than micromanaging decline by casting the most vulnerable adrift and adding to their misery by making them scapegoats.

ANDREW BROWN

Worcester