The litmus test for the Covid report from MPs is how the government reacts to it

Please send your letters to letters@independent.co.uk

Care homes need support from government (Getty Images)

The real finding of the joint committee report, Coronavirus: lessons learned to date, should be that, as far as social care is concerned, it would appear no lessons have been learned at all.

When Covid-19 hit, the care of people in their own homes and in care and nursing homes was already on the brink after a generation of neglect. Social care paid a terrible price.

The sector remains in a deep financial and staffing crisis. The government maybe believes that it solved the social care crisis by announcing some extra National Insurance funded money. But that extra funding will first go to the NHS, with social care not receiving much for some time.

The report calls for urgent social care reform and better funding now – what the rest of us have been demanding for a generation. The litmus test for this first report will be whether the government reacts to it and carries out the root and branch reform of social care that has been needed for many, many years but ignored by government after government.

Mike Padgham

Chair, Independent Care Group

The Covid report: now we know why Boris Johnson’s out of the country on holiday!

Richard Mason

Leeds

Brutalist musings

Angela Barnes’s article defending brutalist buildings is missing rather a lot of granularity.

Concrete was often chosen simply because it was perceived as cheap and it was often lacking in the detail that we often love in our buildings and other objects because it was too expensive to add any of that ornamentation. In the UK we brutalised the beton brut by ignoring good design and then anything approaching maintenance. The reason most people hate brutal concrete is because we like beauty, and while beauty is in the eye of the beholder, it usually takes effort. And investment of capital.

Those concrete buildings were cheap and prove the adage “buy cheap, buy twice”. They were often buildings devoid of good functionality (eg car parks too small for cars and with poor layout making searching for spaces highly inefficient).

The biggest problem with many British structures is the lack of maintenance – we seem to think that structures never need cleaning and turn things that could be pleasant into something ugly and dirty. Our public infrastructure is often the worst example – bridges and buildings never cleaned (Wembley footbridge from the station, and New Street in Birmingham).

Good landscaping and public realm design is also important – trees, lawns, and shrubs soften and decorate the urban scene and bring health benefits in wellbeing and air quality as well as shading and seasonal variety. Many of the brutalist buildings ignored all these things in their aim for simplicity and cheapness. It wasn’t clever and was crude and ignorant.

Science and engineering have improved dramatically in the past 40 years and we can now design and build much better buildings because of it (although very few of them are houses or flats). We should celebrate buildings that are adaptable, user-friendly, and healthy.

Most buildings should not be made of concrete and those that are not good buildings or structures should be gone. They are a burden on both the eye and the wallet.

Michael Mann

Shrewsbury

Money – so they say

There is something crucial missing from Jack Mosse’s analysis of money. Money is not a thing it is a promise and promises are intangible. To be valuable the promise must be made by a creditworthy party with the liquidity to pay when the promise is called upon. The role of a government is to ensure those making the promises are creditworthy and have the required liquidity. Governments failed in 2008 by allowing banks to lend against inflated house prices. They narrowly avoided a financial meltdown from depositors overwhelming the liquidity of banks by demanding immediate repayment.

The key issue is are the two crucial mechanisms now in place. Are banks adequately supervised to ensure the loans they make are not secured by inflated values and can the government act swiftly to stop depositors rushing to cash out their deposits. House prices in the UK are ridiculously high compared with the cost of building them.

I am not optimistic the UK government has done its job.

Jon Hawksley

France

Beatles break-up

Oh Paul McCartney, throw your departed band mate under the bus, and some 50 years later, and with John unable to respond.

Why didn't you, Ringo and George continue? – you said the band was your life. It seems likely that there are more reasons than you have stated; sometimes it is what we do not say that is more telling than what we do say.

This is petty; shame on you.

Bill Reid

Ottawa