Town that is no longer county’s poor relation

I READ with interest the letters from Peter Hyde on a vast range of subjects including some about the police, as we are both retirees from the North Yorkshire force.

I was therefore sad to learn in his letter (Yorkshire Post, September 24) that he had suffered a fall and injured himself in his now home town of Driffield.

In his letter, he states that Driffield appears to be the “poor relation” of the East Riding. Having been born in the old East Riding in Norton, I thought 
back to childhood, when we Nortonians were then the poor relation of the Riding, being stuck at the far end of the county.

We were always the last to get a new school or library. The police vehicle radios didn’t work properly, presumably because of the contour of the Wolds between us and Beverley. Fire and ambulance cover was provided by the North Riding from adjoining Malton. Even our railway station had Malton on it, despite us being the bigger town of the two.

No such problems these days. Norton is in North Yorkshire which gives it equality with the rest of the county. No isolated cases of potholes there. The potholes in this county stretch from Scarborough to Settle, and from Selby to Stokesley. The street lights in the Harrogate and Scarborough districts go off at the flick of a switch at midnight. Our county councillor for highways, Gareth Dadd, is extending this to the whole county. He says this will save hundreds of thousands of pounds. No doubt he will find some way to waste this money, like the doomed, harebrained scheme of his when he was going to part-pedestrianise Station Parade in Harrogate. A scheme hardly anyone wanted.

As the saying goes: “There’s nowt beats spending someone else’s money.”