LAST year you printed a letter of mine bemoaning the poor performance of British management. Recent financial fiascoes have done little to change my opinion.

It is clear that government and local government depart-ments such as health and education continue to have great difficulty in making clear, concise decisions.

Despite very large salaries these institutions continue to spend extraordinary amounts of money on consultants to avoid having to make any decisions themselves.

I can only repeat what I wrote last year: management who employ consultants would be much better off speaking to their own staff who will have a much better working knowledge and expertise of that depart-ment than any consultant. This last year the management of the country's financial institutions have shown themselves to be remarkably inept, except when it comes to lining their own pockets. One banking policy that continues to flummox me is Repossession.

I fail to see who benefits from a repossession, at time when 100% mortgages are commonplace. A good guess would be that a bank loses about £30,000 every time they repossess a house. In the present housing market it takes months if not years to sell a house and the properties are always sold for well below the market value.

The forecast for 2009 is 79,000 repossessions – by my reckoning that will mean a loss to the banks of at least £2 billion.

Repossessions should be made illegal. Short-tterm rental agreements could be put into place, interest-only payments, deferred payments. It makes no sense to throw people out of their homes and out of the property market.

The biggest contributor to the economic situation is fear, and losing your home is the biggest fear. People have to lose this fear and start spending again.

Ken Holden, Gunzgen, Switzerland