SIR – Your article on pensioner poverty (T&A, April 15) rightly draws attention to the appalling scale of poverty among pensioners.

Why should people who have worked hard all their lives be living in poverty, while others receive obscene levels of pay, share options and pension deals?

Why should pensioners have their pension upgraded by a measure of inflation, the CPI, which bears no relation to the rising costs of what older people have to spend their money on?

Why should the Government’s new idea of a basic guaranteed pension for all be set below the official poverty line, and why should it only apply to future pensioners?

Pensioners and existing workers need to join together to campaign for a real reform of the system.

And I would like to add, in response to D S Boyes’s letter (T&A, April 19), which states the anti-cuts match in London descended into violence, that this is just plain wrong.

The media may have preferred to concentrate on a small group which broke a few windows, but as one of the 500,000-plus young and old participants in the march, I can assure him the main march was angry but peaceful.

Paul Russell, Secretary, Yorkshire and Humber Pensioners Convention, Kirkgate, Shipley