After spending five years in government displaying only a faint interest in investing in ordinary people, David Cameron has suddenly demonstrated his caring side with prison reform.

By ‘investment’, I mean building for the future by borrowing if necessary, cash at the right rate of interest and using it to improve the environment by making savings larger than the borrowing costs to pay off the loans.

‘Savings’ means reducing costs which might otherwise be incurred through poor roads or poor health for example.

What is putting cash into the items above if it isn’t investment?

How else would we have acquired the NHS, utilities and railways for instance?

Whilst I support anything which reduces recidivism and helps to make positive changes to convicts’ lives which are blighted not only by the mistakes they have made but exacerbated by their negative spells in prison, there seems to be an irony in the situation. The Prime Minister aims to invest in our penal system which is manifestly unfit for purpose . But, for some time he has been showing this benevolent side of his nature to other elements of our society; the excessively rich he rewards with ‘sweeties’ of various descriptions and the increasing number of corporations which are allowed to avoid their moral, if not legal requirement, to pay their taxes.

I’m not sure that letting firms off paying tax on some £23 trillion in the Caymans quite fits the term ‘investment’ since it is our money they are ‘stealing’ but it seems that criminals and tax avoiders have something in common which entitles them to be helped somewhat while workers who struggle on zero-hours contracts and those who cannot both feed their families and pay their rent, are now viewed metaphorically in comparison, as worthless good-for-nothings.

To illustrate this, George Osborne runs the economy with the sensitivity of a sledgehammer. With interest rates lower than they have ever been, he ignores the fact that roads don't repair themselves, sick and poor citizens can't heal themselves and borrowing is cheap. The only hope may rest in their being reclassified by Iain Duncan Smith as either criminals or tax avoiders and get treated nicely like them.

Mike Joslin

Garfield Avenue

Dorchester