SIR – I share Brian Holmans’s negative view of companies like Starbucks using creative accounting to limit any UK taxes they pay (Letters, May 1), but the real fault lies with successive governments, of all parties, in developing a tax system of such monumental complexity that loopholes are inevitable. And legal loopholes will always be exploited by the unprincipled, not just the rich.

But government is also to blame for giving the principle of tax-avoidance a gloss of respectability by making entry-level avoidance available to all with the provision of tax-free savings schemes. Think of it like theft: if you tell children that stealing a Mars bar from the local shop is okay, then what’s to stop them thinking that stealing a car is also okay? It’s the same principle, just a difference of scale.

By encouraging normal folk like us to invest in ISAs, the Government is simply giving the okay to tax-avoidance – how far up the scale you then take it depends only on your own wealth.

Until the Government simplifies the whole tax system and gives out consistent messages of principles, then widescale tax-avoidance will continue unabated, including any of Mr Holman’s apparent holding of ISAs.

Graham Hoyle, Kirkbourne Grove, Baildon