The price of red tape

John Gee (Letters, THES , October 3) is right that no financial benefit follows from membership of the Institute for Learning and Teaching in Higher Education, but that is not the fault of the ILTHE or wholly of the government, which provided £500 million for the "staff-pay supplement". Institutions asked that this be called the "human-resource supplement", and much of this has been squandered on bureaucracy and Higher Education Funding Council for England schemes.

Incidentally, this makes the current pay offer more insulting - the lower figure of 3 per cent in the second year is apparently in part to compensate institutions for the costs of "pay modernisation". Was £500 million not enough to cover it?

Niall MacKay
York