• As long ago as 1840, when rapid expansion forced government at least to consider some degree of regulation of buildings, Thomas Cubitt gave evidence to the select committee on the health of towns. He warned that, without rules and regulations, builders would put up houses crammed into smaller and smaller spaces. “I am afraid a house would become like a slave ship, with the decks too close for the people to stand upright.”

Polly Toynbee was right to insist on the need for regulation (They call it useless red tape, but without it people die, 20 June). And they couldn’t, in 1840, even imagine 24 storeys high.
Enid Gauldie
Invergowrie, Perthshire

• Steven Poole provides an excellent account of the right’s professed hatred of regulation and red tape, but this ideological hostility only seems to apply to big business and the private sector.

By contrast, the last three decades have seen the public sector crushed under regulatory burdens and tied up in red tape, often in a bizarre attempt at making schools, hospitals, the police, social services and universities more efficient, business-like and accountable. Talk to most doctors, nurses, police officers, probation officers, social workers and university lecturers, and one of their biggest complaints will be the relentless increase in bureaucracy imposed by Conservative (and New Labour) governments since the 1980s.

Instead of focusing on their core activities and providing a good professional service, many frontline public sector workers are compelled to devote much of their time and energy to countless strategies, statutory frameworks, regulations, codes of practice, quality assurance procedures, government targets, action plans, form-filling, box-ticking, monitoring exercises, and preparations for the next external inspection.