A golden solution to tackling poverty in Britain | Letter

Alan Ereira suggests using the increase in value of Britain's gold reserves to boost welfare payments to its poorest people

We are told that the country is so poor that we have to keep the two-child benefit cap and take the winter fuel allowance away from pensioners who are not on certain benefits (Winter fuel: 780,000 UK pensioners entitled to payment will lose it, 14September).

Those just over the cutoff point will lose out although they are desperately hard up. This imposes the burden of our debt on the frailest, keeps child and pensioner poverty high, and has a knock-on effect in reducing our capacity to grow the economy.