Sir - Julian Le Vay (Letters, August 3) counts the many ways in which the Environment Agency has been dragging its feet over flood defences when homes, livelihoods and lives are at risk, and rightly adds that the chairperson and the chief executive are not, in any real way, accountable to those who pay their salaries.

He omits to mention the further scandal that they have just awarded themselves huge bonuses as recompense for their abysmal failures.

Christopher Gray (Why are they no longer dredging?, August 10) reminds us of the terribly professional approach of these people.

The EA's director of water management, Dr Geoff Mance, said in 2003: "It is not possible to reduce flooding just by dredging the rivers", and the EA seems to regard this as a valid reason for no longer dredging waterways.

The analogy in my own profession would be to say: "I can't guarantee the quality of a translation simply by ensuring correct terminology, since it might still be faulty for other reasons such as defective syntax, wrong register and even incorrect spelling. So, let's not worry our poor little heads about getting the terminology right."

Or an architect might say: "Never mind secure foundations, the building might still be useless due to my failure to provide any windows, so foundations don't really matter."

For the EA's benefit, let's spell it out: even if dredging reduces flooding by ten per cent only, that is still a good thing.

Do we really need to tell them such basic facts of life? Apparently so.

And these are the people 'defending' us against floods . . . You couldn't make it up, really you couldn't.

John Kinory, Steeple Aston