COULD someone please tell me where Peter Luff has been for the past few years?

After reading the article on the front page (Evening News, Tuesday, April 13), I was shocked to learn the he had no knowledge of the loophole that allows staff to be recruited from overseas.

I must draw to Mr Luff's attention to a report in The Guardian as far back as May 2001. An excerpt reads:

"Hospitals are putting at risk the care and safety of patients by failing to ensure routine checks on temporary nurses who now cover one in 10 shifts daily within the NHS, as reported by the audit commission, with the most shocking and large-scale forms of exploitation seen in recent times in Britain.

"Hundreds of vulnerable overseas nurses are being trapped in what unions and royal colleges denounce as a 'modern form of slavery'. The desperately underpaid and overworked nurses are lured to Britain by private recruitment agencies and nursing homes, who then stop them from leaving by confiscating their passports and work permits and threatening them with deportation at full costs.

"Nurses, from the Philippines, Africa and India, are recruited with false promises, forced to sign illegal contracts as soon as they arrive in Britain and made to live in cramped, sub-standard accommodation.

"Unison's Karen Jennings said the trouble is that any employer can apply for a work permit for foreign nurses, without any checks or safeguards."

This is recruitment without any background checks.

Tell me - why can't we employ our own trained nurses that are on our doorstep?

MARTIN ROBERTS,

BNP Worcestershire.