OVER the past few days I have heard more bad reports on the TV and in the papers about the lady in Bristol who may have taken her own life because she was being hounded by charities calling and mailing her, because at some stage she had not one, but 27 direct debits coming out of her bank account for various amounts to various charities.

The charities to me are not charities anymore, in the real sense of the word, because if a charity employs a call centre to make their calls to get people to sign up for a direct debit and then have to pay the call centre for that service, where is the direct debit money going to?

Is it going to the charity or the call centre?

If through this scheme a charity uses a call centre to drum up money, gets a £2 direct debit signed up and say, for arguments sake, £1 goes to the charity and £1 goes to the call centre, this in my view is not a charity but a business — and the charity is the employer.

There are 23,000,000 homes in the UK; in an average month this poor lady and every home across the UK had some 90 pieces of charity information pushed through the door, give or take a few million. This comes to 2,070,000,000.

Who pays for all these letters?

For arguments sake, say it costs £1 for each piece to be printed, put in an envelope with the address added, it all takes time and someone must be paid to do it. Add the postage (because you can bet the Post Office do not do it for free); this is costing the charities £2.7 bn.

I support charities and have been asked to set up a direct debit with a couple of them but because of what happens to this information the answer is always in the negative. To think these letters go out monthly, that’s a lot of charity cash going out to catch a £2 direct debit.

JOHN L CROOK Haydon Wick Swindon