WHILE the efforts to purchase one-bedroom flats to get round the bedroom tax are commendable, is it not missing the point that the regulations actually fail to define a bedroom ("£16m bid to help tenants escape new bedroom tax", The Herald, March 29)?

Rumours have suggested a minimum 70sq ft (a 7ft by 10ft room which Parker Morris Standards required as minimum) but when does a store room count as a bedroom?

I note that Frank Field MP has called on landlords to "brick up the doors to spare bedrooms and, where appropriate, knock down the walls" so that the properties can safely fit the tenants. When does a small boxroom cease to be a bedroom and become a walk-in wardrobe?

To count as a habitable room under Domestic Building Standards, a bedroom has to have ventilation (either natural ventilation of at least 1/30th floor area, used to be 1/20th, or mechanical or trickle ventilation) and have illumination (a window) of at least 1/15th of the floor area (used to be 1/10th).

So minor works affecting the window area or ventilation would technically make such a room non-habitable and unable to formally be counted as a habitable bedroom. So is it not more cost-effective for responsible social landlords to develop a cheap minor works programme to help affected tenants? Perhaps linked to a campaign for better minimum housing quality standards?

Ironically this reflects the historic window tax (introduced in 1696, repealed in 1851) which caused householders to brick-up their less important window spaces to avoid or reduce the tax. Hopefully we won't have to wait 155 years before the bedroom tax is kicked out.

Dave Sutton, Architect,

Douglas Gate, Cambuslang.

There is great anger – and rightly so – at the proposed and soon to be implemented welfare cuts but there should be little surprise.

Tories are not much interested in the poor and never have been: there is little evidence that Peel, Disraeli, Baldwin, Churchill, Heath or Thatcher were greatly exercised about poverty or the needs of the poor – a class whose poverty they to a large extent created, and who benefited from the substantial wealth their poverty-waged efforts produced.

They will protest that they do care but the reality is that they do not and the gulfs in our society grow wider, deeper and more reprehensible. The fact that in our country we need to have food banks and other charitable handouts stands to our shame and is nothing of which Iain Duncan Smith should be proud.

Rev David A Keddie,

21 Ilay Road, Bearsden.

Anne Johnstone appeals to the people to stand up for social justice as they did against the war in Iraq ("Now is the time for us all to stand up for social justice", The Herald, March 27). She appeals to politicians to listen to them "instead of talking at them endlessly about Scotland's constitutional future".

The Coalition is determined to impose all these welfare cutbacks, and the UK Labour Party will retain them if it wins the next Westminster election. When a million people marched on the streets against the Iraq war, Westminster ignored them.

Does Anne Johnstone have any suggestion for a way to obtain "social justice" which doesn't involve changing Scotland's constitutional future?

Mary McCabe,

25 Circus Drive, Glasgow.