DEAR EDITOR - Your report, New Nurses Spark Row, served to remind us, if we needed it, of the lack of coherent policy of this Labour Government in planning for the labour needs of our country.

Despite huge numbers of students in higher education (or because of it?) the NHS "cannot attract British nurses" as the UNISON spokeswoman rightly deplored, and instead nurses are being recruited from India, where they are probably needed far more than here in the UK. As usual it is the easy short-term solution instead of solving the problem.

We are not in fact short of nurses, nor for that matter, teachers. The problem is that too many do not stay within the professions for many years or do not return later. Whatever the reasons for this - poor pay, bad management, public disrespect or whatever - it is the task of the administration (in both senses) to put matters right.

The present Government has been in office for over seven years without having made any progress in this issue. Nor will they, so long as the answer is always seen to be more and more recruitment from overseas.

It would be interesting to hear from former nurses (or teachers and doctors) as to why they either left, or did not return to the same work.

The final quotation in the article from the director of nursing that "there just aren't enough people for jobs" is a myth put out by the Government in support of their pro-immigration policies. There are some 60 million people in the UK and 50 million in England. How many more do we need? The problem is a complete lack in planning which was elevated to a principle 40 years ago in the Robbins report on higher education. It is time for a radical change in direction from the laisse-faire system that has caused alternate surpluses and shortages at random for so long.

There is another endemic problem that we have in the employment sphere of life, which may well be worse in the UK than in some comparable countries. This is the low valuation placed on engineers, technicians, nurses and others who actually do the main job, compared with the managers and accountants whose task should be to support them. Despite various Government-commissioned reports, little progress has been made and we now have more administrators than nurses in the hospital service - no doubt to cope with the endless re-organisations.

Shortage of people? More likely a surplus of paperwork, meetings and petty regulation.

John Coleman, Chairman UK Independence Party, Brueton Avenue,

Bromsgrove.