I REFER to your front page article in last week's Times (March 22) relating to MP Geoffrey Cox's meeting with NHS professionals.

I have been involved in consulting with local people about the NHS bill in the street, in Tavistock, for about a year now.

The feeling against the privatisation of the NHS is so strong that one person a minute was signing our petition and this has all been passed to Geoffrey Cox, along with endless emails and letters.

The final straw comes with the news that the process of privatisation of children's services, including those of the most vulnerable, is now well underway in Devon, despite the fact that the bill has only just been passed. Virgin Care are among the many contenders and none of them have the necessary expertise.

Geoffrey Cox says that the NHS is 'unsustainable' and a 'ticking time-bomb' in its present form.

As a thrifty pensioner, I have a suggestion as to how to balance the housekeeping.

The money saved from scrapping Trident would be £1.86-billion per year until 2062, according to a recently published report by Professor Keith Hartley, commissioned by the British and American Security Information Council and jointly chaired by former Defence Secretaries Malcolm Rifkind and Lord Browne together with Menzies Campbell.

Richard Branson and Co can now be told to go home to play with their planes and balloons and the NHS can remain in public ownership. Sorted!

Jackie Eady

Glanville Road,

Tavistock

REFERENCE the front page article relating to the new Health Bill and the meeting of GPs and health care professionals with the MP Geoffrey Cox: according to your article Mr Cox states that everyone was going to have to get used to 'using the NHS more sparingly'. That remark just about sums up the type of Tory MPs we have, I am sad to say, running the country and we just sit back and let them get away with it.

Mr Cox should try repeating that remark to a patient fighting cancer, heart disease or any other life-threating illness, or perhaps if you have a condition that causes you a lot of pain 24/7, miss a month of pain relief. Would that be sparingly enough for him?

Surely this cannot be the same MP that I wrote to last year to ask him to vote against the disability reforms the Government were intent on pushing through, so that more time could be allowed for the reforms to be properly reviewed? His reply was that he thought it to be a waste of time to vote. I received two replies to my request, exactly the same and sent separately. Is that what he means by sparingly?

I am definitely not a Labour supporter, however, I would ask readers to think very long and hard before they vote for the Conservatives or Liberal Democrats at the next election and just hope we get a government that is able to reverse some of the changes this so called government have brought in.

D Valerio

Sherrell Park

Bere Alston