I WOULD like to thank Mrs B Howarth for her letter complementing my previous letter concerning the council tax.

Her one criticism, however, is misplaced, as I did not advocate building more houses to increase revenue, but merely observed the fact that more houses were continually being built. This is, of course, an inevitable consequence of Britain's ever increasing population.

I also think her annoyance at the practice of relating increases to inflation is a little misplaced. Inflation is not "as long as a piece of string" as she puts it, but is a precise measure of how fast costs are increasing.

An increase of five per cent above inflation, therefore, means the real value of that increase is five per cent. Retired people, whose income increases in line with inflation, thus receive no increase in real value at all.

This is why I advocate tying the council tax to inflation. Otherwise the slice of pie in her pie chart of expenditure which is devoted to the council tax will, for those who are retired, or whose wages only increase very slightly in excess of inflation, get ever larger, leaving less and less each year for other essentials. People's real income, therefore, and their standard of living, will gradually fall year by year unless the rate of increase in this tax is curbed.

David Haworth

Upper Mead

Egerton, Bolton