YOUR columnist John Blunt (LET, April 7) made some quite extraordinary comments about the County Council's Welfare Rights Service and its customers and I feel I owe it to the many thousands of Lancashire residents who have used the service since it was established in 1987 to defend them from John Blunt's insulting remarks.

Most of the customers of the Welfare Rights Service are elderly and disabled people, trying to secure their entitlements in the face of complicated legislation.

We also assist large numbers of low-paid workers and their families, including one-parent families and those who are unemployed. Their entitlements to benefits arise because of their unwelcome financial circumstances and John Blunt should consider himself fortunate if neither himself nor his family are subject to these situations.

Many of these benefit entitlements, of course, are directly related to National Insurance contributions made by individuals, and the purpose of the National Insurance Scheme is to provide help in the face of misfortune.

We could all wish that the Social Security system was simple and straightforward and that, for example, elderly people would have no problems claiming their pensions. Unfortunately, this is not the real world and a great many Lancashire residents would have been a lot poorer and experienced greater hardship had the Welfare Rights Service not been there when they needed it. Currently, some 60,000 cases and inquiries a year are dealt with and we help with between two and three thousand appeal tribunals annually, with very high success rates. Even DSS offices refer people to the service for advice and advocacy.

As a result of this very successful service, Lancashire has the highest proportion of pensioners receiving attendance allowance of all 33 county councils and it is second only to Durham for the proportion of pensioners receiving income support.

Apart from the differences this makes to the quality of life of these OAPs, all Lancashire residents have benefited from the extra government grants which the county council receives based upon these figures. Additionally, the service's lobbying role played an important part in persuading the Government to transform the Winter Fuel Payments Scheme - which will give £100 to every Lancashire pensioner next winter.

All this contributes to more than £2 billion of domestic household income in Lancashire and this makes a major contribution to spending power in the local economy.

Finally, the facts relating to Pendle Council are that they are now seeking to terminate an agreement with the county council which they initiated in 1989, and which provides for additional services to be delivered in the Pendle area, over and above what is provided in other parts of the county. They are perfectly entitled to do this, with 12 months' notice, but the inevitable and necessary consequence is that the current service provided in Pendle will have to be reduced and this will upset many people in the Pendle area.

There are, therefore, important matters to be resolved between the county council and Pendle Council and it is less than helpful to your readers for the facts to be distorted as they were.

County Councillor FRANK McKENNA, Deputy leader and chairman of the Welfare Rights and Social Inclusion Sub-Committee, Lancashire County Council, County Hall, Preston.

Converted for the new archive on 14 July 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.