In the UK, 772,000 second home owners are therefore eligible for an additional £309 million and some 61,000 who own three properties are eligible, staggeringly, for a rebate of £1,200, costing an extra £24m! Since it is impossible for anyone to live in more than one place at a time, that is roughly £330m that would be more appropriately disbursed to those struggling to heat or eat, instead of the Government rebate giving money to those who are neither living locally nor heating their houses and have no need of the grant in the first place.

For example, according to the latest figures the official number of second homes in Scotland is slightly below 24,000. Many of these are concentrated in rural areas, raising property prices beyond the reach of local people and adding to the housing crisis in places like Skye and Tiree, where almost half of the homes are empty for most of the year.

With second homeowners entitled to twice the energy rebate, it is a clear sign of how the Government values the interests of landlords and those with multiple homes over tenants and low-income earners, further contributing to the depopulation of rural and island communities.

Should Chancellor of the Exchequer Rishi Sunak be feted for giving multiple home owners more than one £400 payment? (Picture: Ian Forsyth/Getty Images)

D W Lowden, Aberdeen

Help for heads?

I was very interested to read the Scotsman's article on loneliness (“From the grassroots to government, we can help fix loneliness”, 17 June). This widespread problem, which cuts across all social demarcations, is completely underestimated. Unfortunately, there's no magical expiry date for mental health issues, which can affect sufferers many years after the original events which triggered them have gone.

As someone who has suffered emotional problems for decades, I can state that the Covid lockdown rules made it especially difficult for me to cope, as I was living on my own, and lost physical contact with family, work colleagues or friends.

Lack of human contact and a one-hour daily limit to outdoor activities took their toll on my emotional wellbeing. Most of the NHS services I was referred to for support were of little use. I was shuffled endlessly from one support service to another, many of which were little more than box-ticking exercises.

It was only thanks to two wonderful organisations, The Good Morning Service and Glasgow's Golden Generation, that I managed to cope. If not for these fabulous organisations' long-term support, I wouldn't be here now. Unfortunately, these charities' methods are not being used by government bodies, as initial assistance for those suffering from emotional issues would go a long way towards combating long-term mental health problems.

Just recently, the head of the Royal College of Psychiatrists was quoted saying that the recent cost of living crisis “poses a threat of pandemic proportions' to the nation's mental health”.

Unless more is done to tackle mental health issues now, many vulnerable people will suffer unnecessarily. It's high time our government established a long-term mental health care package, instead of its patchwork quilt of temporary measures, which are nothing more than an ill-considered quick-fix, not a solution.

Stephen McCarthy, Glasgow

Green vs greed?

In the latest example of their inexplicable planning decisions, Midlothian councillors have voted to allow a huge Aldi store with car park to be built in an area of wild grassland opposite the Ikea store at Straiton, outside Edinburgh. According to the report of their meeting, though this land is a big piece of what used to be valued as the Green Belt, the councillors gave planning permission on the basis that they do not consider the area to have any “landscape value” and that it is not really “countryside”. Most people consider countryside to be a place where lots of plants and trees grow and which is a haven for wildlife, like this patch of land, but this does not seem to be the view of councillors. In recent times they have allowed so many housing and retail developments to obliterate fields and woodlands around Midlothian that perhaps they have forgotten what countryside actually looks like. It is hard to see what can justify a new superstore here, when Straiton already has a Sainsbury’s, an Asda, an M&S Food store, a Lidl and a B&M store.

Do councillors think that we in Midlothian are all greedy shopaholics who want to spend every day in stores and care nothing about nature and the environment, or preserving the Green Belt, which is disappearing before our eyes? For those of us who do care, is there any way of reversing these calamitous decisions?

Julia H Scott & Tom Johnstone, Roslin, Midlothian

The cost-of-living support package: What it means for you

Quair as folk

“Nobody speaks like that,” say critics of traditional Scots usage. “A corrupt form of English,” they say of existing dialects. These attitudes are commonplace, but seem to have become more politicised of late, perhaps because advancement of the Scots tongue is perceived to be linked to that of independence. I suspect there would be a real stooshie if the Scottish Government advocated the aims of the old poetry anthology, Poets’ Quair; a text studied in Scottish schools throughout the 1950s and 1960s.The editors of were David Rintoul and James B Skinner, English masters at Daniel Stewart’s College (now Stewart’s Melville College). In their introductory remarks, they say the anthology is in keeping with recommendations of the Advisory Council on Education in Scotland, “that at every stage of the secondary school there should be provision for the study of appropriate examples of Scottish literature” and that “senior pupils should be at least as familiar with Dunbar and Henryson as they are with Chaucer”. Along with the best of English poetry, Poets’ Quair, contains no less than 17 Scottish poets, from the medieval makars up to William Soutar and Hugh MacDiarmid.In today’s political context, l suspect official recommendations that Scots idiom/usage be present “at every stage of the secondary school” would be bitterly opposed. This is probably why the Scottish Government drags its feet on the matter. Politics aside, however, it is certainly the case that an anthology like Rintoul and Skinner’s would put any unionist critics of the Scots tongue in a difficult position; for it seems impossible to accept a literary regard for Scots and, at the same time, to have derogatory attitudes towards its everyday use.I quite often pass, on Edinburgh’s Canongate, the statue of Robert Fergusson, a man who wrote in a Scots still familiar to us, and who has been celebrated as Edinburgh’s greatest poet. You would think, on that account, the study of his poetry should be encouraged more in Edinburgh schools, at least as an option of some kind. Given that Fergusson disliked the Union while writing in the Guid Scots Tongue, would there necessarily be any nationalist mischief in such a proposal? I prefer to think not, since it follows the purely literary, hence apolitical, approach of David Rintoul and James B Skinner.

Alastair McLeish, Edinburgh

No angels, but...

Conservative Struan Stevenson writes of the "inevitable downfall" of those evil Iranian upstarts he has been predicting will come any day now since 1979 (Perspective, 22 June).The Iranian regime may be no angels – just ask Amnesty International – but never forget, it replaced the Shah's brutal dictatorship installed by two CIA-orchestrated coups in 1953 after successive democratically elected Iranian leaders proposed nationalising the nation's oil industry as ordinary Iranians grumbled at seeing little of the supposed "prosperity" it was supposed to bring.By 1975 any remaining pretence of democracy was abolished, one party rule de facto installed, and the remotest dissent brutally punished. The people of Iran revolted of their own free will against it with good reason.The sad irony of the West's favourite villain was it swapped one dictatorship fronted by a pantomime baddie for another. Iran's unpaid Supreme Leader defers the running of the nation in practice to its President – and the west has form for soft soaping brutal warmongers when it suits, talking about "Iranians we can do business with".If Iran is a monster, it is one we created in our own image. The Iranian people deserve better, on both counts.

Mark Boyle, Johnstone, Renfrewshire

Bailed out

The dexterity with which Leah Gunn Barrett manipulates information and statistics never fails to amaze me (Letters 21 June). Who would have thought that nasty old Westminster had been diddling Scotland out of such vast sums of money for so many years? I wonder if she could help a slightly numerically challenged 80-year-old Classics graduate with a question that has been bothering me, and many other people, for some time now. Namely, if Scotland had been independent in March 2020, how could we have survived the pandemic without the countless billions of pounds poured into the Scottish economy by the UK Treasury?

She must calculate the amount an independent government would have had to pay to borrow this sum internationally in terms of interest and debt repayment, bearing in mind that the said government would already have been facing the ten years of post-independence austerity forecast by the SNP's own financial think tank. Finally, what size of tax rises and cuts to public services would be needed to cover these costs?

D Mason, Penicuik, Midlothian

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Readers' Letters: £400 homes payment favours rich over poor

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