A FEW years ago, friends of myself and my partner would comment pleasantly on the fact I looked after babies at Bright Start Nursery while she looked after the terminally ill at The Martlets Hospice.

When the Government bailed out the banks with our money in 2008, I worried for the future but can still hardly believe what has happened.

Last year it tried to close my nursery, but thankfully our big campaign, often covered in The Argus, forced a U-turn.

Now, while my partner can no longer work at The Martlets, we are watching another vital and excellent service threatened.

In both cases we are told there isn’t the money.

But I was handed a leaflet about protests outside Jubilee Library last Saturday, asking for the company which invested in the new building to receive no more from taxpayers now its original investment has been recouped [as part of a PFI agreement].

The further £50 million Brighton and Hove City Council is expected to give Norwich Union/Aviva Insurance is equivalent to the council’s projected cuts over the next few years. Perhaps the council’s “where shall we cut?” initiative on its website should include this option.

The £3 million a year the council pays for this now paid-for library would be enough to keep the Martlets open.

I think the solution to the cuts isn’t really that difficult.

Instead of asking the newborn and terminally ill to pay, it just needs a bit of imagination to find the money we already have.

Dave Jones, Springfield Road, Brighton

David Cameron and Nick Clegg come across as decent, caring family men, which makes it even harder to understand why the Martlets hospice, where I work as a volunteer, is having to close its day hospice because it cannot raise the £190,000 it will cost to run it for the next 12 months.

This means that each week 60 patients will have to forgo their weekly visit to a hospital where they meet other people in the same boat as them, spending a day being distracted from what they are facing and giving their carers much-needed respite.

Hospices receive no direct funding. However, the British Government was, up until recently, spending something in the region of £24 million every week bombing Libya to keep its citizens safe.

Yet somehow, as a country, we cannot find £190,000 to fund the wellbeing of our own tax-paying citizens in their time of need.

Angela Moore, address supplied