WE were overjoyed at the front page headline, ‘council finds cash to save vital services’ (Echo, January 13). Good - those people should never have had their welfare in question, anyway.

But Cllr Peter Charon says: “The final £1.1m had been found from reserves, to complement the £3m that had already been found.”

So, had the recession not been in play, would the council not have ‘found’ this £3m, and the £1.1m ‘in reserves’?

It seems as if there is some very shoddy book-keeping going on if such vast sums can somehow become ‘lost’ in the first place. But public money seems to be like that, doesn’t it?

It’s not ‘real’ money, it’s just figures on a balance sheet for council’s to have meetings about and play Monopoly with.

And we must tremble at the thought that potentially, there may well have been untold £billions which has been ‘lost’ in the past, and presumably, never found?

ALAN BURRIDGE, Blandford Road, Upton