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While the intent behind the new social mobility report card (Could do better? Report card to test social mobility, 31 March) is good, there are many reasons to believe that measuring and reporting metrics of social mobility will be a meaningless task. Complete measures of social mobility, such as looking at the link between parental and children's incomes or parents' and children's education, take a lifetime to evaluate. By the time we can see if the government has made a policy mistake, a generation can be lost. The coalition acknowledges this by suggesting it will look at many other more immediate measures, like birth weight and GCSE results. However, these simply measure the consequences of poverty; babies from low-income families tend to have low birth weights and lower educational attainment than their richer peers. Where inequality is high mobility always remains low, so the best way for a government to focus on social mobility is to stay focused on income equality and ending child poverty.
Imran Hussain
• There are times when exchanges in the Commons reach a new level of unreality. Chris Grayling, the minister for employment, answering an amendment to the welfare reform bill, said on 31 March that £67 a week "is the building block that we intend to use for the universal credit". Therefore, if the amounts to be added for children or the disabled are not to be reduced by debts, the £67 will have to pay the rent remaining unpaid by a capped housing benefit; the childcare unpaid for when the allowance does not cover 100% of the cost; the council tax remaining unpaid by a level of council tax benefit set below 100%; a £50 charge for an application to use the child support service; and the £2.6bn, excluding fraud, to be enforced by the government as a result of errors in the delivery of welfare by officials and claimants, which also excludes an amount from errors by officials unrecorded at HMRC – thus obliterating the very small building block, which reduces in value every year and is described in the bill's explanatory notes as an amount to cover basic needs.
Rev Paul Nicolson
Chairman, Zacchaeus 2000 Trust
• How appropriate that John Harris's article (Puerile and proud of it, 1 April) should be published on the day when the extension of adolescence is enshrined in UK law. By restricting housing benefits for single people under 35 to the cost of a room in a shared house from 1 April, those quintessential child-men David Cameron and George Osborne have ensured you don't have to be rich to go on living like a teenager for half of your life.
Andrew Connell
Cardiff
