Turbulent time for passengers

REGARDING your recent letters re the demise of Sheffield Airport and Peel Holdings Involvement.

Teesside Airport was a thriving airport owned and run with the support of six local councils and used by close to a million passengers a year.

Since Peel Holdings got involved, they increased the car parking and landing charges, they changed the name to Tees Durham Valley and imposed a £6 charge on each passenger using the airport, resulting in passenger numbers falling to only 160,000 a year.

Now Thomson Holidays has pulled out of all next year’s holiday flights from Teesside, citing they have been forced to do this by Peel. Doncaster/Sheffield residents, you have been warned.

Pension pot luck

From: John Fisher, Menwith Hill, Harrogate.

THE Government’s concern about pensions would be credible if small returns on pension investment were a problem throughout Europe.

If the same amount of money invested in pensions in this country were invested in pension funds in Germany, Norway and some other Scandinavian countries, the returns would be 50 per cent higher than in this country. Is it not time that instead of criticising Europe we looked at what they do better than we do? Had this been done many years ago, some of our pensioners would have been more able to pay the increasing energy costs.

Identity crisis

From: Barry Foster, High Stakesby, Whitby.

PERHAPS if Yvette Cooper and her party had supported the banning of burkas in this country, we could take her attack on the Home Secretary a little more seriously (Yorkshire Post, November 5).

After all, we could all don a burka and commit a crime and never be found out.