Another excellent edition of Mature Times.

In your editorial, ‘A lesson from history’ you referred to the track record of the General Teaching Council (GTC).

The failure of the GTC just provides another example of what is wrong in Britain today.

It is emphatically not Britain that is broken. It is the public sector that is broken.

Choose a problem. Then find/identify the taxpayer-funded bodies (and it is usually the plural – ‘bodies’) that are supposed/paid to prevent it happening or deal with that problem. Look at how unsuccessful they are. Measure the failures.

Government makes the rules, so no excuse there.

So why does it happen over and over again?

One factor is that appalling bad and incompetent public servants are not sacked and never allowed to work in the public sector again.

Take just one example.

Most if not all, of the bankers who caused the crisis in banking have left the banking industry.

On the other hand, many of the MPs (former ministers) who presided over the crisis in government finances are still drawing their taxpayer-funded MPs’ salaries and expenses.

Unless and until the people who are responsible for the administration and delivery of public services are held personally accountable and suffer personal sanctions for incompetence and non-delivery, then repeated failures such as those reported daily in the media will continue unabated and we will not get even vaguely adequate public services.

As politicians (and others) these days seem to prefer to attack the man rather than debate the issue I would prefer to remain anonymous should you decide to publish this letter.