Letters: For all the political wrangling, the Rwanda Bill will not achieve its aim

SIR – Whether you agree with it or not, the fact is that the Rwanda Bill, having finally cleared Parliament (telegraph.co.uk, April 23), can work as a deterrent only if sufficient numbers of illegal migrants are deported within days of arriving in the United Kingdom.

That will never happen. Instead, we will simply see more taxpayers’ money being wasted.

Christine Tomblin
Nottingham

SIR – The Rwanda Bill is a Conservative red herring. Targeting the relatively tiny number of Channel migrants ignores the truth: that British people are more tired of legal immigration in vastly higher numbers than they are of the illegal boat crossings.

More importantly, Britons are tired of dissonant immigration that undermines social cohesion. Some people come and settle; others come and benefit while rejecting, demanding and even threatening.

The British are still people who would welcome real refugees with open arms, but they are exhausted after having seen their goodwill abused. The Rwanda policy is a fig leaf designed to cover up decades of failure by the people we elected to do better.

Victor Launert
Matlock Bath, Derbyshire

SIR – Many people have been frustrated by delays to proceedings in the courts. They must be aghast at the Prime Minister’s announcement that court time and resources will be made available to process Rwanda deportations.

Talk about getting priorities wrong.

Peter Robinson
Guildford, Surrey

SIR – The Rwanda Bill is the cruellest and most heartless piece of legislation enacted by this tone-deaf, lacklustre Government. The migrants are only looking for a better life, and put themselves at great risk – while spending all their savings – to get here. As has been highlighted before, Britain needs migrants to survive. Give these poor people a chance.

Yes, there will be those who are undesirable and should be returned to the countries from which they came, no matter what ECHR says – but if Britain does not process all migrants quickly, how will it know who they are? I am ashamed to live in a country that treats fellow humans like this.

Duncan Rayner
Sunningdale, Berkshire

SIR – Yesterday morning the BBC not only witnessed but also filmed the French police standing by on a beach near Calais and taking no action while refugees boarded and set sail for Britain on a small boat. How does this reflect on the sincerity of the French government’s promises to help stop the boats, or the value we are getting from our payments for this service?

Sally Gordon
Emsworth, Hampshire

Punishing pensioners

SIR – David Platts (Letters, April 23) suggests scrapping the state pension for higher earners and investing the money saved in public services.

He seems unaware that it is a contributory benefit (those receiving it have paid sufficient National Insurance contributions) and taxable for pensioners who have saved to make provision for their old age.

It’s hard to see why those who have done this should lose a benefit for which they have paid simply because they have not been profligate.

Andrew Wauchope
London SE11

SIR – Public-sector employees receive employer contributions of up to 28 per cent of salary to their uncapped CPI-linked pensions. Think of the investment that could be made in public services if this was reduced to the 8-10 per cent that private-sector employees receive.

Most other countries manage to deliver a much higher state pension at an earlier age than in the UK, so the question we should be asking is: why does a low state pension seem unsustainable here?

Brian Barbour
Berwick-upon-Tweed, Northumberland

SIR – I am tempted to remind Dr René Tayar (Letters, April 23) that in the 1970s interest rates were not mortgage rates; that the historic average mortgage interest in the UK is approximately 5.5 per cent; and that the conditions he describes were of relatively short duration. However, I believe I can do better.

Taking a 100 per cent, 30-year mortgage at 11 per cent interest against the average house price of £20,897 in January 1981 required a monthly repayment of £199. Set against the average weekly wage of £129, this was equivalent to 35 per cent of gross income.

Taking a 100 per cent, 30-year mortgage at 5.5 per cent interest against the average house price of £299,000 today requires a monthly repayment of £1,698. Set against the average weekly wage of £672, this is equivalent to 59 per cent of gross income.

Every generation experiences its financial pressures. It does no good to set one against the other.

Adam Herrick
Sawston, Cambridgeshire

Water industry neglect

SIR – As the mother of a water engineer, I have enormous respect for the work that goes into providing clean drinking water.

We throw so much down the sink – cleaning fluids and greasy liquids – with little concern for how all that mess is dealt with.

In the recent past, too much thought seems to have been given to the wishes of shareholders and not enough to the needs of the water industry itself (“Thames Water plans to raise bills by 45pc to stop collapse”, report, April 23).

Margaret Durrant
Sonning Common, Oxfordshire

Mopping the Oval

SIR – I, too, shall never forget the Oval Test of 1968 (Letters, April 23), which began a day after my 11th birthday. Little did I imagine that, five days later, I’d be handed a broom by the groundsman, Ted Warn, to help mop up the ground after a thunderstorm.

The rest is history, though there is one person on the field missing from that famous photograph of the end of the game – the namesake of Marjorie Fagg (Letters, April 19), the square-leg umpire, Arthur Fagg.

Rhidian Llewellyn
London SW14

A kinder end

SIR – Assisted dying for my wife would have saved her agitation and distress (report, April 18), despite her having morphine and anaesthetic relaxant injections in the hours before she slipped away. My daughter and I were with her and were also obviously affected.

She had a malignant pancreatic carcinoma with secondary cancers – notably complete bowel obstruction in her lower back – which were untreatable. She had previously told her family and her hospital consultant together that she wanted to go as “quickly as possible”, since her condition was terminal. In this situation, surely assisted dying would have been a better option.

Stephen Johnson
Woodbridge, Suffolk

Top of the potholes

SIR – If there were an award for the pothole capital of the United Kingdom (report, telegraph.co.uk, April 23) – both in terms of quantity and severity – there’s no doubt that the otherwise beautiful city of Chichester would be a leading contender.

Bruce Chalmers
Goring-by-Sea, West Sussex

Lack of lavatories

SIR – Judith Woods (Comment, April 23) is right about the shortage of public lavatories.

Billions of pounds were spent building the excellent Elizabeth Line, yet there are no lavatories on the trains, nor any at the Bond Street or Tottenham Court Road stations. I would advise never to leave a theatre in a rush late at night without visiting the facilities there first.

Richard Kellaway
Cookham Dean, Berkshire

SIR – There are no public lavatories in Spain, hence the law that people can use the facilities in any bar, hotel or restaurant – though it is polite to ask first. Perhaps we should do the same.

David Sisson
Huddersfield, West Yorkshire

SIR – Judith Woods says the lack of public lavatories has a detrimental effect on the elderly. However, I would like to point out that Seaford has five dotted around the town and the seafront. In fact, thanks to Michael Gove’s levelling up programme, the town has been granted funds to update the seafront lavatories and add a café.

Patricia de la Nougerede
Seaford, East Sussex

How airlines adapted to no-show passengers

SIR – Many airlines overbook (Business, April 18) to maximise revenue, and have sophisticated “yield-control” departments balancing overbooking profiles on a daily flight-by-flight basis.

In my 35 years in the airline business, I was always surprised by the main cause of overbooking – namely the number of no-show passengers. Some are prevented from flying for logistical reasons such as heavy traffic, but quite a few will have made multiple bookings using flexible tickets: I book on the 1430, 1530 and 1630, so that, if the meeting runs late, I can still make it home and claim a refund on the unused tickets. Never mind the empty seat on the earlier flight.

Cheap, non-refundable tickets will have reduced the problem, but no doubt it still goes on when there is an hourly service to a European destination, and even 12 flights a day to New York.

James Passmore
Wappenham, Northamptonshire

The BBC has a distorted view of impartiality 

SIR – John Simpson’s defence of the BBC’s coverage of the Gaza conflict (Comment, April 22), far from dispelling concerns, reinforces them.

He acknowledges that it was a “mistake” when Nick Robinson said last week that Israel “murders tens of thousands of innocent Palestinians”, but contends it did not breach the BBC’s statutory duty of impartiality, relying on two arguments.
First, he says that, if Mr Robinson “had used the same words about Hamas, I don’t suppose anyone would have raised an eyebrow”. But this is to be remarkably indifferent to the truth. By any definition, “murder” connotes deliberate or intentional killing. It is well attested that, on October 7, Hamas deliberately killed Israeli civilians, some of its men openly boasting about this. By contrast, the civilian deaths in Gaza are the unintended consequence of Israel targeting Hamas; it makes no more sense to speak of their having been “murdered” than to speak of the thousands of civilians killed collaterally as a result of the Allied liberation of Normandy in 1944 as having been murdered by the British, American and Canadian troops.

Secondly, Mr Simpson says that “many British people – a majority according to polls” – hold the view that Israel is murdering (ie deliberately killing) thousands of innocent civilians. But that is irrelevant; it does not make the claim true. It was never true that the Earth is flat, even when a majority of people believed it to be.

Impartial, objective news reporting depends on telling the truth, not repeating or amplifying popular misconceptions. It is extremely disturbing if senior BBC insiders no longer seem to think that matters.

Michael Grenfell
London NW11

Letters to the Editor

We accept letters by email and post. Please include name, address, work and home telephone numbers.  
ADDRESS: 111 Buckingham Palace Road, London, SW1W 0DT   
EMAIL: dtletters@telegraph.co.uk   
FOLLOW: Telegraph Letters on Twitter @LettersDesk 
NEWSLETTER: sign up to receive Letters to the Editor her