I still find it astonishing that having listened to his residents’ priorities, Councillor Barry Kendler willingly remains part of a Labour administration that is cutting or has previously cut all those priorities.

Cllr Kendler tries to paint the picture of a Conservative-led Government that is somehow ‘out 
to get’ Harrow and the poor.

In reality, our coalition government is taking some tough decisions to sort out the nation’s finances after the financial incontinence of the Blair-Brown years.

Seemingly unaware of the irony, Labour’s Cllr Adam Swersky has now highlighted the challenges faced by low-paid workers (“High price of low pay”, Your Views, September 4) just as Labour proposes to recreate the chief executive role to support its part-time, two-day a week leader.

At more than £180,000 per year, the chief executive was the borough’s highest paid public sector job — until we abolished it to save taxpayers’ money and protect frontline services like street-cleaning.

Bringing back this unnecessary position — on £40,000 more than the Prime Minister and equivalent to some 11 full-time salaries at the London living wage — is quite simply the last thing an administration that claims to care about low pay should be doing.

Labour also talks about a “cost of living crisis” but its own decisions are making things worse.

Recently slammed by the child poverty action group for creating the country’s harshest council tax benefit scheme, which hits many of our poorer and disabled residents the hardest, Harrow Labour is now planning to make the scheme even harsher.

And that’s despite Harrow Borough Council underspending by £25million over the past two years.

Sadly, both Labour councillors felt the need to attack Conservatives personally in their letters, but perhaps their anger would be better directed at their own group and leader with whom they clearly have some significant policy disagreements to sort out.

Cllr Barry Macleod-Cullinane

Deputy leader of the Conservative group and finance spokesman

Harrow Borough Council