REGARDING your report 'Stop court threat in benefits delay' (LET, Nov 4). The report refers to the backlog by Capita of 18,400 items of benefits of one sort or another in July 2003 being reduced in October to just 4,600. And just how fed up Blackburn councillors are with this sorry mess.

Why? Was it not these very same councillors who saw fit to release themselves from a very important responsibility by passing the buck, as it were, to Capita to manage this service -- if one can call it such?

They were forewarned in your pages by Councillor Don Rishton. I have criticised Coun Rishton on several occasions in the past -- not this time around though, for he predicted that there would be tears sooner rather than later some time ago.

What a shambolic council we have in our borough.

P NEWTON, Ashworth Close, Blackburn.