Adverts are unacceptable

Two full-page adverts (March 5) asking if I "find it acceptable" - presumably to fraudulently claim unemployment benefit. What I do find unacceptable is asking people to live on £55 a week. The instance closest to me is of someone rewarded for 37 years of continuous ill-paid work by being made redundant a year ago. He was offered no comparable work by the Jobcentre and no new skills training for almost a year. He gained one interview from his own attempts, but was, for an unknown reason, considered not suitable. On £55 a week he is excluded from most of what we would call normal social activity.

A glance at MPs' interests would reveal many with a multiplicity of incomes. I imagine most people would find that less acceptable than trying to stay afloat by earning when you can. Some may set out to live by fraud. Others just suffer injustice. It has been for him a degrading, dehumanising experience. Unacceptable.
Philip Lodge
Liverpool

• You carry two full-page advertisements that are of interest to the unemployed. This is rare, as usually the goods you advertise are beyond their means. Unfortunately, the two pages are part of a continued demonisation of the unemployed as scroungers.

Meanwhile, there is an article in Office Hours encouraging, or at least accepting, workers fiddling their expense claims. Let's be clear, it is either wrong to fiddle the system or it is not. One of the reasons suggested for fiddling expensesis that workers feel they are not paid enough. In prosperous 21st-century Britain, I have met few unemployed people who are delirious that in April their benefits rise from £52.20 to £53.05 a week.

I agree that all cheating of the system is wrong, but society is judged on how it treats its weakest. By way of comparison, I know of a local landlord who charges tenants £5 a week more than they receive in housing benefit. He never asks for this extra rent to be paid until it has built up to a sum they cannot afford. Then, at his convenience, he can evict them for non-payment whenever he desires. Now that does deserve a national campaign.
Cllr Peter Jenks
Southampton

• Oh sure, the DSS will protest that they are aiming at those who defraud the system. What they won't mention is the number of claimants who are themselves defrauded by the system: claimants who are deprived of their rightful dues by officersencouraged to avoid mentioning benefits that might be available; claimants driven to distraction by DSS employees who have had little or no training; claimants who don't get their housing benefits because computer systems don't work.

When the DSS acts fairly to everybody who walks through their doors; when the DSS gets a computer system where each department talks to each other; when files don't go missing on a regular basis; then they will have a right to talk about benefit fraud. The real fraud is the amount of money that must have been spent on this unsavoury propaganda.
Andrew Dunkley
London

• Having seen the ads, I had a look at the website. It's chilling stuff. There will be plenty of scope for every bigot under the sun to indulge in a little malicious reporting. I cannot help drawing comparisons with countries where citizens were, or are, encouraged in similar activities. Why not take this idea to its logical conclusion and encourage schoolchildren to report their parents?
Ian Nicol
Weymouth, Dorset
iannicol@talk21.com