for the third week running local politicians throw statistics in the air to convince us public services are either better or worse.

I, like many others I suspect, don't trust the politicians, I trust my own judgement and experience. I don't know whether local schools are doing as well as GCSE pass rates and OFSTED inspections suggest.

I do know a lot of young people now go to university and study irrelevant subjects. They then try to match a job with such qualifications instead of what ought to be the other way around. So much for quotas.

Surely the best measurement of education is as it has always been are employers satisfied with the raw material available to them when they seek to hire? I somehow doubt it.

The NHS is something of which I have plenty of experience as a would- be user. Recently health minister John Hutton appeared on lunchtime radio to announce that in his experience "everyone he met told him how good their local NHS provision was, pity it wasn't the same nationally".

His logic told him that by natural expansion of that argument the whole of the NHS nationally must therefore be good.

Well, he hasn't been to ask me what I think of local NHS provision. Can you find an NHS dentist? Hen's teeth are more plentiful. Seek an appointment with an NHS audiologist? Learn to lip read because the 12 months a relative in Calne had to wait would make one word perfect in that time.

I am currently waiting for an operation on an arthritic shoulder. I am half way through the eight months I have been quoted. Not bad perhaps.

But I did choose to have an ultrasound scan carried out privately (saved six months) and then I saw a shoulder specialist privately (saved six to nine months).

Based on the John Hutton logic I would still be waiting to have the scan and any treatment would be mid-2005.

So John Reid says by 2008 nobody will wait more than 16 weeks from their first GP appointment to having an operation if that is deemed necessary.

So under Tory proposals Blair says people who can afford to pay towards treatment will be subsidising the poor who cannot pay. We must be one of the most overtaxed nations and who is subsidising the NHS now and often having to get additional private treatment because provision is woeful? I'm not sure if the answer is more cash for education or the NHS.

It seems it has had plenty thrown at it recently and possibly even more had Blair not chosen to fight a war in Iraq.

B Minter

Market Lavington