GREG Beaman, in his letter last week, is right to draw our attention to the complete waste of £2.5m taxpayers money that is the North West Regional Assembly better known as one of John Prescott's private clubs.

I wonder if any of the local authorities have now paid their membership subs to this august body, since as late as September 30 none of them had. That being the case, was the meeting therefore legally constituted ?

However, £2.5m is pennies by comparison with some of the other monies that flow in and out of the bottomless pit known as the European union. While the UK pays in billions, it also receives billions in return by way of grants such as the European Social Fund and the European Regional Develop-ment Fund, among others. These in turn fund hundreds of thousands of jobs in the UK.

Although the routing of these monies is circuitous, it has without a doubt become one of the largest job creation projects ever conceived and one has to ask what would happen if the UK was to withdraw from the Union. The succinct answer is the loss of hundreds of thousands of jobs.

Politicians from all sides of the political divide should, therefore, ponder whether it is better to stay in and receive this grant money which funds jobs and so contributes to the Treasury by way of income taxes or to withdraw, the result of which would simply be a drain on The Treasury by way of paying out benefits.

There are obviously some complicated sums to do here, and, I'm not convinced that any politician has sat down and weighed the options. Perhaps Greg Beaman would care to enlighten us?

Roger Marsh, Morecambe.