YP Letters: Don't blame motorists for air pollution in Leeds and other Yorkshire cities

SO Leeds City Council is to spend £13m in a bid to reduce air pollution, supposedly caused entirely by road transport.

Talk about a sledgehammer to crack a nut! Major sources of air pollution are industrial processes, agriculture, power generation, home heating, cooking and the currently fashionable domestic wood burners. Many measures can be taken to reduce pollution from road vehicles, including improving traffic flows at junctions, building new roads to increase capacity and smooth flow, and stopping the reductions in road space and removing speed humps.

There is little chance of the latter happening in Leeds as the council is still putting these things in place – in obstinate denial of the negative impact.

Nowhere is there any mention of financial penalties against the railways and their outdated polluting diesel trains. Nor is there any mention of any efforts to combat all the other forms of air pollution. Just the same old tried and tested methods of clobbering the motorist.

I cannot think of a better way to destroy this city’s economy.

Who owns my photos?

From: Fiona Lemmon, Clifton, Maltby, Rotherham.

IT would appear that throughout the near seven decades of my life I have been grossly mistaken in my understanding that the job of estate agents is to sell properties.

I placed my ‘unique and characterful’ bungalow (estate agents’ words, not mine, but I do agree) on the market in March with an estate agency in Rotherham. I paid for professional photographs – big mistake. Warning to others –don’t do it! The agency had my property on their books for eight weeks before I changed to the same agency’s Doncaster office. They ended up jointly marketing the property which was not the arrangement I agreed. Ten weeks later I took my business out of their hands, thus relinquishing the photography fee.

The small print says that ownership rests with the agents which puzzles me as I commissioned and paid for the photographs. I would appreciate comments from other readers of The Yorkshire Post.

Social issues and robots

From: Neil Richardson, Kirkheaton.

YOUR call (The Yorkshire Post, October 10) for a skills revolution to ensure a ‘robot ready’ generation of school leavers and adults doesn’t refer to the social audits in the same issue.

Columnist Laura Drysdale described the blight of mental health problems and a country-wide need for support, while the irrepressible Bernard Ingham wrote of the nation’s appetite for histrionics rather than serious communication. We apparently have the attention span of a gnat.

Tweaking the curriculum via more emphasis on skills seems unlikely to resolve this muddle: the new initiative will sink among the heavy burden of ‘how-to skills’ already found in maths, English, science, IT and business studies. A supplementary direction – given the world seems remarkably complex – would be to drastically summarise such complexity and a learner’s potential role as he/she struggles (very briefly, tempus fugit) to make sense of that world.

Strictly share all the blame

From: Brian H Sheridan, Lodge Moor, Sheffield.

CHRISTA Ackroyd is relatively lenient to Katya Jones, who is married, yet mercilessly excoriates Seann Walsh, who is not, for their reported indiscretion (The Yorkshire Post, October 10). Could this be inverted sexism? Aficionados of Strictly Come Dancing know that it takes two to tango.

From: Hilary Andrews, Nursery Lane, Leeds.

WHAT’S all the fuss about Seann Walsh sharing a kiss after a few drinks with his dance partner? Please let his dancing, and not his morals, decide his fate, although it was naive of him not to realise the media would follow every move of those in this competition.

Broken model

From: Dave Hansell, Ralph Ellis Drive, Stocksbridge, Sheffield.

THE water privatisation model is irretrievably broken and no amount of further regulation 
will solve the structural problems.

A process, inherent in the model, which inefficiently drives up industry costs through a complex myriad of claims management transactions between multiple contractors playing pass the parcel to avoid regulatory fines.

House woes

From: Arthur Quarmby, Mill Moor Road, Meltham.

IS it any wonder that young people cannot afford to buy houses? They have all been off at university, and have had no opportunity to earn money. Did nobody anticipate that consequence?

Train teams

From: Henry Cobden, Ilkley.

WHEN will Northern realise that each train requires a driver, and a guard, and that it should be on them to work, as a team, to decide who opens the doors? Simple really.

High ideals

From: Thomas Reed, Harrogate.

I HOPE Kate Hardcastle’s piece on the future of the high street (The Yorkshire Post, October 11) is required reading for every MP and council here. I look forward to their responses.