Home truths about plan

NICK Boles MP and his friends in the Communities Department do not seem to understand the planning system (Yorkshire Post, October 15).

Mr Boles is worried “about the danger of making rural communities into museum pieces where they are not so much protected as embalmed”. However, this is exactly what his own policies have achieved.

An example is the Ryedale Plan, where vested rural interests have imposed a 90 per cent quota of all new housing development onto five small market towns, which do not have the necessary infrastructure to accommodate this increase.

Ryedale district comprises 550 square miles, and only about one third of it is National Park or an area of Outstanding Natural Beauty. So one would have thought there was room for many more houses in the country areas.

Not working

From: DS Boyes, Rodley Lane, Leeds.

IF anyone had doubts about what Labour aka the “Welfare” Party stands for, the Channel 5 programme On Benefits & Proud confirmed our worst fears.

It was astonishing, even after seeing beyond the obvious “hype” factor for entertainment purposes, the attitude of many claimants, with their overwhelming sense of “entitlement” and their musing about what level of wages might tempt them back to work at some indeterminate point in the future, in every case clearly unattainable by the often obese, covered in tattoos, with neither qualifications nor work experience. The only thing missing was a reference to food banks, presumably only because it wasn’t the BBC.

Counting cost

From: Coun Colin Challen, Labour councillor for Castle Ward, Scarborough Borough Council.

GORDON Lawrence writes a robust defence of the Government’s economic policies (Yorkshire Post, October 17), but revealingly he says “the coalition has managed to reduce the deficit by a third but the National Debt has ballooned and is still growing at an alarming rate”.